Frankie Financial, the fintech solving the largest problem in banking and financial services: legacy systems
Melbourne Stone & Chalk resident Frankie Financial is solving the largest problem in the banking and financial services industry: legacy systems. How? By bringing together all the essential pieces of building a fintech: ID verification, eKYC, AML compliance, fraud prevention and credit tools, all within a single vendor agnostic technology platform.
Today, several companies battle with dozens of siloed software and data providers, none of which talk to each other, causing clunky, disjointed internal processes, poor customer experience and business intelligence.
Sitting down with Simon Costello, Co-Founder and CEO of Frankie Financial explains what they do, “We digitise tasks that were previously performed by human professionals, allowing the business to programmatically enable data-lead decisioning, removing the risk of human error and increasing the efficiency of the operation.”
Simon reflects on the journey that led him to create Frankie Financial, “I had been living abroad for the last 10 years. I started my career in investment banking in the UK and then moved into the startup world around the time when the more well-known neobanks were launching in the UK. I was a beta user for a company called Monzo, even in those early days I could see the banking revolution was about to take place.”
“That was 6 years ago. Following my stint in the UK I moved to Asia to build a financial comparison site in Asia called The CompareAsiaGroup. We had some success and expanded to seven countries, raised $96 US million dollars and was fortunate enough to attract some high-profile investors including Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, The World Bank.”
He continues, “I was managing our largest country, Indonesia, which quickly grew to over 100 people. Following our Series B, I was keen to move back to Australia as I could see what was happening in the UK was going to happen in Australia. And I was very keen to part of the banking revolution.”
Simon found his Co-Founder and CTO, Aaron Chipper, through an introduction via SoftBank. At the time, Aaron was based in Singapore, and had expertise in building payment networks including as CTO of Friendster, the social media platform before Facebook.
“It took a while to convince Aaron but we finally got there and he moved to Melbourne. We quickly worked out that the biggest problem in financial services is legacy systems and we have been busy ever since building a platform that connects these disparate systems.”
Ongoing growth and self-reflection is important for any start up and Simon recently participated in the S&C Mentor program where he met Allen Clennar, former Standard Chartered Bank CEO.
“It’s been really helpful having Allen as a steady hand guiding us through some of the rollercoaster experiences of an early stage venture. Just chatting to someone who has gone through it before and realising that you’re not the only one who has experienced this is really helpful’’
Today, Frankie Financial has connected over 100 vendors and data sources. They’re very close to their vision in creating agnostic technology; a unified system for financial services.
Join the ranks of innovative companies like Frankie, and enquire about becoming a resident at Stone & Chalk in Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide.
To discover how Frankie is providing one integrated platform to offer a complete unified view for compliance, operations, audit and risk, click here.
