About Manu
It All Started When I Interviewed Fintech Legends at Crayon Data
I got the chance to interview some of the biggest names in fintech during my time at Crayon Data.
Tim Kobe. Apple's first designer who worked directly with Steve Jobs.
JP Nicols. Cohost of Breaking Banks, the #1 global fintech podcast.
Ron Shevlin. Author of the Fintech Snark Tank on Forbes and host of the What's Going On in Banking podcast.
They weren't just experts talking about trends. They were visionaries building the future of financial services in North America.
Interview after interview, I kept learning. How fintechs were being built from scratch. How banks partnered with these companies to build things neither could build alone. How technology was completely reshaping financial services.
Those conversations pushed me. They made me want to explore the exciting fintech landscape in North America.
Which is why I moved to Toronto, one of North America’s top financial powerhouses, to build fintech products.
(A quick note: these interviews were originally published in Crayon Data's magazine, Big Data Made Simple. The site is no longer live, but I recovered several interviews through the Web Archive. You'll find them here.)
That journey to Toronto led me into Fortune 500 companies
I found myself working as a Product Manager at TD Bank and Manulife.
I had great mentors. People who had launched successful fintech products for years. They taught me how to think like a product leader. How to make decisions when you don't have perfect information. How to work with compliance teams without slowing down momentum.
But I didn’t stop there. I immersed myself in product management, growth, fintech, and compliance through courses, books, and podcasts.
And here's what made the learning meaningful: I combined everything and applied it directly to real products.
At TD Bank, I built a mobile app for high-net-worth clients from scratch
From discovery to design to compliance reviews to launch.
This experience taught me something critical. User experience metrics matter, but revenue is what counts. Feature adoption, satisfaction, and reliability are valuable because they drive retention. And retention drives revenue.
But making that connection is challenging in regulated environments. It's hard to decide which product improvements work within regulatory constraints and actually move the revenue needle.
That's what I'm obsessed with. Making better product decisions in regulated environments.
Why I'm Building PMExaminer
Everything I learned from those fintech experts. Everything I absorbed from my mentors. Everything I implemented in real products. I turned it all into a decision system.
PMExaminer is a decision system for building fintech products in regulated environments.
Not a framework library. Not a content blog. A system that helps you make better product decisions when compliance and regulations apply.
It shows how compliance, domain knowledge, and product decision-making actually connect inside teams.
P.S.
I'm also passionate about machine learning (ML). Not as much as I love building products—but enough that I packed my bags for Toronto and completed a post-graduate program in big data analytics and ML at Georgian College.
I've written machine learning articles for O'Reilly Media. Moreover, if you're curious, here's my GitHub repo with a few of my ML side projects.
P.P.S.
Toronto is easily one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Here's a nighttime shot of the CN Tower from the Toronto Islands—still one of my favourite views.
