The Operator 3 - Jiun Yi Tan shares her journey building TrueLayer from hypergrowth through 'wartime mode' towards profitability.
Director of Strategic Projects shares her journey building TrueLayer from Series B to E, navigating the end of cheap capital, and driving towards profitability through operational discipline.
The Journey
TrueLayer is one of Europe’s leading Pay by Bank networks, powering payments infrastructure for companies like Revolut, Just Eat Takeaway, and Ryanair. Founded in London in 2016, TrueLayer has raised over $320M across multiple funding rounds and processes billions in payments.
The company’s growth trajectory, however, hasn’t always been linear. When the macro environment shifted in 2022, TrueLayer needed to cut costs - a story familiar to many operators navigating the shift from growth at all costs to capital efficiency.
For this conversation, I had a chance to speak with Jiun Yi Tan. She joined TrueLayer as a founding sales hire in 2018 and transitioned to Chief of Staff to the CEO during the company’s most challenging period. Today, as Director of Strategic Projects, Jiun Yi continues to tackle TrueLayer’s most complex initiatives.
Jiun Yi shares her account of being a Strategic Operator who has been through the ups and downs of building a resilient business.
Leveraging industry experience to land a job at TrueLayer
Jiun Yi’s journey to join TrueLayer in its early days was based on industry experience and curiosity: at Accenture, her team consulted clients on open banking and had nearly launched their own [open banking] startup with a proprietary open banking product. She followed TrueLayer as the most mature solution in the market and, when they opened a commercial role, took the leap.
As one of the first salespeople on the team, Jiun Yi helped lay the foundation for TrueLayer’s early commercial success:
“One of the biggest moments was signing our Revolut partnership. They were our first European launch partner, and I was really lucky that the team let me work on that deal. Revolut is one of our most successful clients that legitimizes everything we do today. We learned so much from partnering with them.”
Jiun Yi gained invaluable operational and commercial experience building out TrueLayer’s sales playbook. Crucially, however, when the company opened their first Chief of Staff to CEO role, her selection was rooted in deep organizational context, existing trusted relationships, and her established reputation. This foundation made her the ideal internal candidate to empower the CEO, enable the leadership team, and drive organizational scale, a mandate that would soon be tested by a critical market situation.
Becoming Chief of Staff during a market shift
In early 2022, Jiun Yi transitioned into the Chief of Staff role. TrueLayer was scaling rapidly across countries, and during the pandemic the team size had increased considerably. VCs invested generously in hot verticals such as open banking (let’s not talk about crypto or NFTs…) and expected rapid scale, all while caring less about the bottom line.
When the macro environment shifted and the ZIRP era came to an end, TrueLayer needed to shift gears quickly, as Jiun Yi recalls:
“One of the first things I worked on was to operationalize the shift from company focus on payments, volumes and numbers of clients to revenue. We needed to do this in a capital efficient manner, which was brand new at that time. Before then (Series B-C), it was about who can hire or build the fastest, so it gave us a little bit of a whiplash. This context shaped my role for the next two and a half years.”
Borrowing the famous analogy from Ben Horowitz, it was wartime mode, which required Jiun Yi and the rest of the leadership team to take decisive steps:
“We had to deliver revenue and reduce our burn rate. We had hard targets we needed to hit, and unfortunately had to navigate our first ever reduction in force (RIF) in 2022. The culture definitely shifted, and people felt alienated.”
Jiun Yi worked closely with the executive team to navigate the RIF, committing significant effort to ensure the process was handled with dignity and respect. The team prioritized radical transparency and meticulous communications planning to manage the challenging and delicate cultural shift.
Beyond headcount, the company had to make strategic cuts such as shutting down their Australian entity, and deprioritizing stablecoins and alternative payment projects:
“When you need to rationalize investments and fix your burn rate [fast], some things just can’t be worked on anymore.”
While drastic at the moment, those steps ensured that TrueLayer could focus on its core business while navigating a true market shift.
Rebuilding trust and scaling the Operating System
After adjusting the strategy and team to the new reality of financial prudence, Jiun Yi and the leadership team worked hard to rebuild trust, which required radical transparency:
“We hosted lots of live Q&As where we didn’t prepare the exec team or anything. We just put them on stage and made sure that everyone could ask questions and get answers. As an organization, we’ve always been super transparent about revenue or payment volume, but we also ensured to use the same strategic narrative based on data so that there would be no surprises. I think we’ve managed to build back that trust over the following years.”
With TrueLayer’s strategy and focus fundamentally changing, Jiun Yi was poised to upgrade the company’s operating system to the new environment:
“Whatever we did pre-Series C was good for that period of time, but suddenly the game and the rules had changed. So, we asked ourselves: what is the new Operating System? How do we design our decision-making process? How do we engage the leadership team and give them context to help them be more effective? How do we cascade strategy to the rest of the organization?”
Jiun Yi tackled a key challenge for many ‘Chiefs’ - how information flows inside of a quickly scaling organization, how teams stay aligned and focus on what matters, and how leaders can take clear, informed decisions. She introduced, then refined, several key mechanisms:
Company-wide alignment: Monthly all-hands meetings became the drumbeat of strategic communication, with quarterly deep-dives going into more detail.
“We always repeat the metrics that are driving the business, the ones we care about most. Everyone knows what everyone’s working on from an operational perspective, but you [also] want to hear what the leaders are really thinking.”
Clear goal-setting:
“We’ve always done annual goal-setting, but I helped introduce and formalize company OKRs as part of goal-setting for measurability. Since it was the first year that revenue became the most important metric for us - we’d moved from caring about transaction volumes to revenue - it was all about elevating that focus, and we wanted the all-hands to refer to that more consistently.”
Decision-making clarity: Jiun Yi wanted to ensure leadership followed a clear process in taking decisions. Borrowing from the ‘Amazon memo’, she implemented a three-pager decision process:
“Before that paper is done, no meetings are booked. We didn’t want people to just show up to meetings and share their thoughts. We needed to categorize the kind of feedback required from the exec team for review, and sign-off.”
The strategies Jiun Yi introduced such as OKRs are a key tool of the trade for any Chief as we learned in a previous episode. In the case of TrueLayer, it helped the team stay focused while navigating increased competitiveness.
Scaling the Chief of Staff Function
As the company grew, so did the complexity that Jiun Yi and the leadership had to navigate. Fortunately, TrueLayer ensured that each of their executives would benefit from increased leverage through a dedicated Chief of Staff:
“The CEO, CTO, CCO, and CFO, each one of the execs had their own Chief of Staff. Three of us were internal moves and promotions, and our CFO’s Chief of Staff was hired into the role.”
This structure worked remarkably well:
“It’s really hard to be a one-woman band and try to roll things out across the entire company. I was the conduit between what was decided at the exec level, and my partners in crime ensured their orgs were aligned with the same context.”
Jiun Yi was able to operate in a core group among fellow Chiefs that shared an equally intimate perspective on the business. Through monthly catch-ups and a shared slack channel, they ensured all decisions and communications were aligned well.
The Transition: From Chief of Staff to Director of Strategic Projects
After two and a half years as Chief of Staff, Jiun Yi had tackled several strategic challenges and had trained her muscle to identify and solve some of the company’s most complex challenges. Together with the CEO and COO, she co-created a new role and transitioned to Director of Strategic Projects. Asked for the difference between both roles, she shares a clear distinction:
“The Chief of Staff role was all about the operating system, helping your exec and leadership team to thrive. It’s about managing the entire company, so things are aligned.
The Strategic Projects role is more about setting the strategy and creating the structure for different initiatives at various parts of the growth stage. I identify gaps in the business and set the vision to maximize the probability of successfully delivering this year and next year’s initiatives with the cross-functional team that we have. It’s a lot more embedded within the business.”
The shift came after important feedback from her CEO:
“One of the best pieces of feedback I ever got was that I’m like an unstoppable pit bull when I’m interested in something, plus it converges with a certain level of complexity. When I have ownership, that’s when I get excited about things.”
In her new role, Jiun Yi tackles initiatives that don’t fit neatly into existing org structures, like navigating new UK Authorized Push Payment regulations requiring payment platforms to reimburse 50% of consumer fraud losses, or developing TrueLayer’s AI strategy while balancing her CEO’s enthusiasm with operational reality.
“Our CEO is an AI evangelist - he would AI-ify the entire company today if he could. My job is to be a little more balanced. Based on where TrueLayer is right now, I know what our data is like, what our processes are like, and that maturity levels across departments are different.”
TrueLayer at an Inflection Point
The operational excellence that Jiun Yi and the exec team built during the challenging 2022 period has positioned the company for its next chapter. Through clear strategic decisions and trade-offs, TrueLayer has emerged stronger and reached an inflection point.
In October, TrueLayer announced its first acquisition (subject to regulatory approval) to expand into the Nordics and strengthen its market position as the leading Pay by Bank provider in Europe.
The shift from wartime mode to strategic growth demonstrates what disciplined Operators can achieve: build resilience, weather market shifts, and emerge stronger for the next phase of growth.
Advice for Strategic Operators
Reflecting on her seven-year journey at TrueLayer, Jiun Yi offers first-hand advice for fellow Operators considering following the Chief of Staff path:
Recognize the risk:
“It’s quite a high-risk role because you give so much of yourself and your time, and you get really dedicated to somebody else’s or the company’s success. The first thing is to make sure you’re genuinely obsessed with the opportunity and what you’ll learn.”
Do your due diligence:
“If it’s not an internal move, you need to understand: what is your principal like? What are they good at? What are they not? Because what they’re not good at is what you’ll be working on. You want to make sure that aligns.”
Network authentically:
“Networking really is the best way. Founders are quite time-poor, and they want to work with people who have the same passion for the space. If you are naturally interested, you’ll spot the opportunity. My TrueLayer role didn’t pop up on AngelList. I was looking for it because I knew of the company.”
Stay energized:
“The main guiding principle I have, and maybe why I’ve managed to stay in a high-growth, high-scale company for this long, is because I’ve always sought the elements that energize me. It’s so important to know what you’re good at and what actually energizes you, because when you don’t have that alignment, it’s a recipe for burnout.”
In terms of resources, Jiun Yi recommends joining the Chief of Staff Network to network and learn from peers, and reading Molly Graham’s blogs for lessons on scaling high growth organizations.
Thank You
Thanks for reading this issue of The Operator.
TrueLayer’s journey from hot open banking contender to hyper-growth company scaling and correction to operational efficiency offers incredibly valuable lessons to fellow Operators.
I appreciate Jiun Yi’s candor in sharing her wartime stories, cultural shifts, and personal evolution, which have made this conversation super compelling. Thank you, Jiun Yi, for joining.
See you soon,
Jan
This was so good! Lots of fascinating insights, thank you both for doing this!