Adatree.com.au
Entrepreneurial Journey told by two students
Story written by Will Lawrance
I’d meant to come to Australia for a year or two, max. I got a gig in AMP’s banking division while completing my masters. At the time, money was flooding into bank shares as investors chased the hefty dividends. I could see this gave banks loads of cash, but they had nowhere to put it. I said “hey, what if we create a new account for them to solve this problem?” Back then product development wasn’t really an established field. They said “Great, you can do that. You can spend all your time on it, but you literally have a budget of zero.” So that’s what I did. I wrote the product committee papers, processes, and training for the operations teams to create a working product. I wrote the terms and conditions, the marketing material, and training for brokers so the product could be sold.
That’s how I figured out I liked finding problems and doing something about them.
I like radical innovation that goes from zero to one, not version twenty to twenty-one. I continued building solutions at some of Australia’s most exciting FinTech start-ups, leading the delivery of Tyro’s innovative business loan product and working alongside the founders at Volt building a bank from scratch. I became known as the ‘bank builder’-there’s only been four full new banking licenses granted in Australia since 1982, and I’ve been involved in two of them.
I was happy doing what I was doing, I’d never wanted to start my own company, but when I read the government’s Review into Open Banking, the opportunity was too large to ignore. The possibilities were immense, and there was no solution in the market. I spoke to my co-founder Shane –we’d worked together at both Tyro and Volt –and we decided to take on the challenge of building one. Thus, Adatree was born.
Becoming a Founder & CEO hasn’t been a walk in the park. I’ve had to balance my natural inclination for product development with the day-to-day operational burden of running a business. I’ve had to deal with people looking to take advantage and defy assumptions about my capability based on age and gender. I’ve had to learn not to let the weight of responsibility I feel to my employees and their families erode my own work-life balance.
But the rewards are worth it, and we’re starting to reap them. We’ve signed twenty-five banks, breaking into many that have never partnered with a FinTech before, and we’re only just getting started. Our Consumer Data Right solutions will empower so many use-cases that improve people’s financial wellbeing. Open Banking is the beginning.
Story written by Alice Hibbard
“A few years ago, if you asked me whether or not I would ever start my own company, I would have bet a lot of money against it.I’ve always worked in product development in financial services, I love radical innovation. While I was working for AMP Bank, I discovered a really big gap in the market that I knew how to make business from…they said, “you can work on that, you can spend all your time on it, but you literally have a budget of zero”. After AMP, I went to Tyro, and then laterto Volt. The CEO at Tyro was like, “make me the best business loan in Australia, you have 40% of the resources of all the company”. I was like, okay, it was a very cool brief, I deal well with a lack of structure. At university I hated people in group projects who were like, “Oh, I don’t know exactly what to do”…just figure it out!!! Literally, that’s real life, I thrive off uncertainty. Some guys who were founding Volt Bank, went to the Tyro founders, and said “Hey, can you help us set up a bank?”Theywere like, “no, we’re retired, but you should call Jill because she knows what to do.”So there are four new bank licences in Australia since 1982, and I’ve been involved in building two of those banks.Then this new legislation came out which was about consumers having control of their data, so they can have better choices and consumer outcomes. At this point I still didn’t want to start a company. But I was like, wow, this is super cool, but the technical standards were super super hard. There was no solution in market. My co-founder, Shane, and I were like…we should make a solution. I never planned on being a CEO but Shane was like, “well, I’m a CTO, so you have to do it”. And that was the beginning of Adatree. We’re super, super passionate about what the applications of this technology can mean. Him, and I, as a product developer and a software engineer are just an excellent team. Eventually we will get acquired, then we’ll take a month off, and then we’ll go have beers and figure out what else we should build together. So, yeah, I’m Jill Berry, CEO and co-founder of Adatree.What inspiration would I give to someone who wants to start a company?…well, if they need inspiration, they shouldn’t be doing it.”