I’m really excited about the opportunity to help take myprosperity to a whole new level.

I’m thrilled to be writing this blog as the newly appointed CEO of myprosperity. Following a 5-year spell at Xero, and having spent the last 12 months in the startup wilderness, this appointment feels like a very natural endpoint to the journey that I’ve been on.

The traditional way of landing a new appointment is that you first find a company you like or you get approached or headhunted for a position with a particular company. You go through an interview process, get offered the job, and after joining you gradually get to know the company, the people and the product. It was the exact opposite with me and myprosperity. I was a customer of myprosperity for about 12 months and so became very familiar with the product even before I met the founder (Peter McCarthy) and got to know the company and the people.

It was mid-way through 2016, and during a morning coffee at my favourite local café, I stumbled across a small online article with a profile piece on Peter and the myprosperity business. With interest, I readthe progress that he and the team were making. And the story presented some pretty compelling points …they had secured Michael Happell (ex-Chairman of PwC) as a Director on the Board; had one of the former senior developers at CarSales (Stephen Jackel) as CTO spend over 4-years building the product; and the fact that they were now signing up an accountant every business day. That was enough for me to make an approach to learn more. I dropped Peter a note out of the blue suggesting that we should meet.  Here is a transcript of that email I sent him back on 22nd July, 2016 …

Hi Peter,

I was reading an article about you guys this morning and it prompted me to get in touch. 

As you may be aware I was recently running Xero in Australia (past 5 years) and left at the beginning of this year. My financial planner introduced me to the myprosperity product about 12 months ago and I subsequently transitioned over to it from Xero Cashbook. I’ve only recently ramped up my use of the tool to manage all my financial affairs and have been really impressed with the platform.

I thought there might be an opportunity to catch up with you and understand what your plans are for the business as it seems you have a great opportunity in the market. 

If you are free for a coffee sometime I’d be keen to have a chat.

About 10 minutes after hitting “send” I received an enthusiastic phone call from Peter … and I guess you could say the rest is history. We did indeed catch up for that coffee chat and about 2 weeks later I started in an advisory capacity. This was perhaps the best due diligence I could have done on the business and the team, and when I later introduced Craig Winkler to the opportunity things really gathered momentum. And so here I am.

I’m really excited about the opportunity to help take myprosperity to a whole new level. Beyond my own positive personal experience with the product, some of you would know that I was actively involved in the wealth advised space whilst at Xero. Xero had a good product back in the day with Xero Personal. It had a small but devoted following in the Australian market, but by mid-2013 it became clear that with a growing list of feature gaps it really wasn’t going to get significant market traction, so we shut it down. I then had another crack at the wealth advised space with Xero Cashbook and we achieved moderate success in promoting it as a budget management tool via financial advisors to their clients. Once again, we were confronted with product gaps and a mountain of requests for different feeds and reports. With the small business market booming Xero simply did not have the resources or will to deliver on those requests and so we ended up backing away from it and focusing on the core product.

So, in my mind, this area was clearly a big market opportunity that seemed to be without a comprehensive offering to address it. That is, until I was introduced to myprosperity. The beauty and uniqueness of myprosperity is that it looks at the entire financial picture of an individual or household, not just one component of it, as is the case with other products in this category. It helps to streamline the collection of a client’s financial information so advisors have it at their fingertips and can use this as a basis to provide informed financial advice or come tax time. 92% of Australian adults are concerned about their financial well-being and as many as 4.3 million Australians intend to conduct a financial activity without the help of an adviser in the next two years. A technology solution to help bring households and their advisors together to solve this problem is inevitable and it is my belief that myprosperity can be that solution.

Empowering households to better manage finances whilst amplifying the value of the accounting and advisor industry has great purpose and follows a similar model that Xero proved was the right pathway to success. So here I go again 🙂