Podcast

1835i CEO Justin Greenstein on corporate venture capital at ANZ.

March 11, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Justin Greenstein leads 1835i, the venture and innovation company that invests on behalf of ANZ. He has been with the business almost since it began inside the bank in 2018, after senior finance roles at ANZ and an investment career in infrastructure.

1835i backs fintechs with a strategic fit for ANZ, from Airwallex to CashRewards and Citoplus. In this episode Justin explains how a founder raises capital from a big four bank, what makes a corporate venture partnership work, and where he would put a $50 million cheque.

From ANZi to 1835i.

ANZ set up ANZi in early 2018 to do three things. It invested growth capital in fintechs that could partner with the bank, it built partnerships with startups that did not need capital, and it ran a lab to incubate new businesses. The lab exposed the gap between bank culture and founder culture. Experienced founders asked how they could move fast inside bank-grade policies and procedures.

In 2021 the team, led by Ron Spector, spun ANZi out of the bank as 1835i. It is a separate company under contract to ANZ, with its own policies and the freedom to hire and move faster. The investment committee that approves every deployment of capital is still made up of ANZ’s most senior executives, including Shayne Elliott, Farhan Faruqui and Maile Carnegie.

One LP and a strategic thesis.

1835i is structured like a venture capital firm with a single limited partner, ANZ. Every investment has to align with ANZ’s strategy, so Justin asks whether a company can help the bank attract new customers, drive loyalty or build new capability. That test reaches beyond today’s problems to what he calls horizon two and horizon three businesses, such as loyalty programs that let renters pay rent on a card and AI agents that hold their own digital wallets.

The biggest lesson came after 2021. Investments made on a loose thesis struggled to build a partnership with the bank. The ones that worked had a business unit that committed funding, named people accountable for integration and measured them on it. 1835i now invests only once that commitment is in place, as it was for Citoplus.

Keeping portfolio companies independent.

1835i invested in CashRewards in 2020, took it private in late 2021 and integrated it into ANZ Plus. CashRewards remains a separate company with its own culture, policies and board, chaired by former Flybuys CEO John Merakovsky. Justin sees that independence as the way to keep a startup’s culture intact inside a bank relationship.

Where the $50 million would go.

Justin’s big idea is automated non-financial risk management. He describes agents that identify an organisation’s key risks, map the controls that mitigate them and test that those controls work, whether the organisation is a bank, a hospital or a not-for-profit. He calls the company that builds it a Virtual CRO, and says it would be a multi-billion dollar business.

Dexter adds that head of compliance and chief risk officer roles have been among the hardest to fill in the last 12 months, because they need commercial judgement and first-principles thinking about risks nobody has mapped yet.

Chapters.

0:00 Introduction
4:24 From ANZ to independence
9:05 Corporate venture capital versus VC
14:27 Horizon two and horizon three
19:22 Success stories and partnerships
24:21 The VC landscape and founders
29:06 Fintech in Australia and globally
34:19 The untapped opportunities
39:00 What’s next for 1835i

Links from this episode.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
How do you raise capital from one of Australia’s big four banks? That’s a question I’ll get answered by today’s guest, Justin Greenstein, the managing director of 1835i. Welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm that works with high-growth fintech ventures, connecting them to exceptional fintech leaders.

In today’s show I’m talking about raising capital from the venture capital arms of Australia’s big four banks. You might recall we recently had Graham Strain from Citoplus on the show, and in this episode we go to the other side of the fence to speak with the corporate venture arm that’s invested in Citoplus.

Before we chat to Justin, if you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us on your podcast player of choice, or if you’re watching on YouTube, hit subscribe. And if you’re in the mood, please leave us a comment and give us a like. It really helps us get great guests like Justin onto the show. Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin Greenstein
Thank you, Dexter. Great to be here, and I’m glad we finally got this in the calendars.

Dexter Cousins
Like all of our guests, I think it’s polite persistence on my part to get everybody on the show, because we’re all super busy. But thanks for joining me, and thanks for inviting me along to ANZ HQ in Sydney. I wanted to have a chat with you today about quite a number of different things. First, 1835i and the structure you have here, and then a little more broadly about the Australian venture capital space and some tips you might have for founders who are thinking about working with a corporate venture capital fund. But first up, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself.

Justin Greenstein
Sure. I’m Justin Greenstein. I head up 1835i, and I’ll talk a little about the history of 1835i and where we’ve come from. In terms of myself, I’ve been in the business almost since its inception, so just over six years now. Prior to that I did a number of roles in finance, both at ANZ and outside of ANZ. Interestingly enough, the last investment role I did was in infrastructure, so it was a very significant move from big real infrastructure assets like toll roads, schools and prisons to early-stage and emerging technology companies. It’s been a great journey from that perspective.

In terms of 1835i, we began as a unit inside ANZ Bank in early 2018. For those of you who know a little about ANZ and its most recent history, since Shayne Elliott took over as CEO, Maile Carnegie joined the bank in 2016 to really start building a digital muscle. She founded a digital division, and part of the capability Maile and Shayne wanted to have in the bank was this ability to partner with tech companies that had global aspirations to do awesome things, but most importantly companies with founders who had a vision and brought a very different culture to the bank.

With that vision in mind, we started a business unit called ANZi, really a business unit in the bank, and ANZi was there to do three things. First of all, it was there to source fintech companies that we thought would be good partners and who needed growth capital. We said, as ANZ Bank, if we can provide some growth capital to these amazing founders, we think we can get some really great symbiotic benefits going. We can bring a great distribution network of customers to these startups, and a lot of really good bank and finance knowledge. Working with the founders, they bring an amazing culture and brilliant tech minds, and together we can bring new capabilities into the bank and we can win, and we can give them access to a great distribution channel and they can win. So that was vertical one.

The second vertical we looked at was partnerships. Sometimes we’re going to be working with these companies and they don’t need capital. If they don’t need capital, we don’t have to invest, but let’s use this capability we’re building within ANZ to work with them, because working with founders and startups requires a very different mindset in how the bank engages and partners with these sorts of companies.

The third vertical we put into place was a lab, which is fundamentally an incubator. There are lots of problems we see as a bank every day, and we believe some of these problems can be solved by new businesses that don’t yet exist. So let us source founders, build a bit of a talent factory, and build some of these startups ourselves. Treat them like a startup, help incubate them within the boundaries of the bank, and then spin them out and put capital into these independent companies with founders.

Over the first three years of ANZi we learned a number of things, and the most important was how difficult that cultural intersection is between banks and founders. That was more so from the lab perspective. On the investing side, I’d say we were really good at putting capital into companies and putting people onto boards, board representatives who really understood startups, how to work with startups, and had that fiduciary understanding of helping the company build and grow in the best interest of all shareholders. And we had a job to do working with the business units in the bank to bring the two together and forge the marriage. So that part was broadly okay.

On the lab front, when we were incubating these ideas, we would reach out to people who had founded businesses before and had a track record. When we said, come and build these with us in the bank, the first thing they said was bureaucracy. How are we going to build a business within a banking environment with bank-grade policies and bank-grade procedures? In order to be successful we need speed, and we need the ability to build within really open guardrails. Guardrails where we’re not going to do anything wrong, but we’re not going to have to tick 150 boxes before we launch a business.

That led the CEO of ANZi at the time, Ron Spector, to come up with the idea of spinning ANZi out of the bank into a separate unit, where we could remove ourselves from the perception of all the bureaucracy and banking guardrails. So in 2021, Ron, myself and a few other people in the team spun ANZi out of the bank and formed 1835i. 1835 represents ANZ, because 1835 was the year we thought ANZ was founded. Shayne reminded us afterwards it was actually 1827, but we decided we didn’t want to rebrand.

We essentially formed an external company that is contracted with ANZ to invest in startups, find startups to partner with, and build new companies. We still do the same three things, but we operate in a separate company outside of ANZ, which gives us much more ability to attract talent, as a result of our policies and procedures, which are akin to those of the bank but not in the bank. So we can do things a whole lot faster.

Having said that, while we remain independent from the bank, our investment committee, the people who ultimately approve any deployment of capital, are still the most senior people in the bank. We still have Shayne Elliott, Farhan Faruqui, Antony Strong, Maile Carnegie, Mark Whelan and Clare Morgan on that committee, which ensures we remain honest and continue to source companies and partners that are strategically important to the bank, and that we believe we can work with.

Dexter Cousins
So how would a CVC, or a model like 1835i, differ from a venture capital fund here in Australia?

Justin Greenstein
In terms of the legal structure, it’s essentially the same. 1835i is a separate management company. We deploy capital, but we have one LP, and our LP is ANZ. So the difference between us and a traditional venture capital firm is that we’ve got one LP, where traditional VC funds have a number of LPs. The reason we’ve got one is that every investment we make, whether it’s in a startup or in a company we’re incubating in our lab, has to have good strategic alignment to ANZ’s overarching strategy.

What that means is we don’t necessarily go and invest in loan companies. We invest in companies that we think provide good adjacent products and services to the bank. We always ask ourselves, if we invest in a company and partner with them, can we help ANZ attract new customers, can we drive loyalty within the bank, and can we drive new capabilities within the bank that will make a remarkable difference to our customers and our bankers?

That means we’re not constrained to what I’d call horizon one investments, which is, hey, there’s a cool tech company that can solve a problem today. We’re also looking at horizon two and horizon three. But when we think about horizon two and horizon three, we always ask ourselves, will it be strategically relevant to the bank, even in a world where banking might look a little different?

Dexter Cousins
It feels like horizon three is almost upon us, in terms of how fast technology seems to be evolving. Could you be a little more descriptive about the kinds of technologies and types of startups you’d see as horizon two and horizon three businesses?

Justin Greenstein
A horizon two business is one we’d say is more of an adjacency to ANZ. The service offering may not be groundbreaking in and of itself, but what it does for ANZ is actually quite groundbreaking and quite different. If we dig into an example, we talk a lot about homeowners and home ecosystems. What we mean by that is fundamentally a mortgage business in ANZ, but we also talk about things like grads. How do we take a grad, who in simple English is a person graduating from education to enter the workforce, and is about to start saving money towards owning a home?

If we think about a grad, what are they likely to do in terms of their living? Maybe they’ll rent a place before they can buy a home and get a mortgage. So then we start thinking about innovation in the rental space. Some of the interesting businesses we’ve started to see in that space are building loyalty with renters. We’ve seen a couple of really interesting propositions, more overseas than here, where startups are partnering with banks to help generate loyalty with that whole renter population.

What that means, for example, is a loyalty credit card that you can now pay your rent on. If you live here, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pay your monthly rent on a credit card. So if you give people some form of card they can make their rental payments on, and get data around those people, you can start building connected commerce around them. Now we know where you live and we kind of know your preferences, and we’ve got a whole lot of people’s data, so within the area where you live we start connecting with merchants.

We know that people spend roughly 80% of their disposable income, after the essentials like rent, medical and education, within five kilometres of where they live. So you can start building connected commerce around where people live. If you live near, let’s say, a Thai restaurant, on a Tuesday evening the Thai restaurant will start offering you discounts because they’ve got low patronage. So you start eating at the Thai restaurant, and they start learning that Justin’s probably got two children and is probably married, because they can see I’m ordering four meals.

Through this ecosystem that’s getting built, you’re getting really rich data, and these companies are taking a really personalised approach to offering renters properties they think they can afford. They’ve got so much data, they know where you live, what your preferences are, maybe which school your kids go to or how old your kids are, that they’re saying, here are four properties in a similar area to where you live, in an area we think is desirable for you, and these are ones we think are affordable for you based on everything we know about you.

That’s adjacent. Nothing there is brand new, but the way these startups are building up data repositories, driving personalisation, and learning about people’s financial position and affordability without payslips and all those additional things is really interesting. That’s what I’d call a horizon two adjacency.

Horizon three, I think we start stepping into the realm of AI, agentic AI, and probably agentic AI crossing over with crypto to some extent. What we’ve seen over the past 12 months is a world where agents are becoming kind of the norm. Most people will know about agentic AI and what agents can do, and every few months we’re seeing advancements there. But what we’re starting to see now, once again more in the US and very nascent, is AI starting to move from automation to autonomous capability to do things.

What I mean by that is you’re starting to see some very early-stage startups build agents that are running auctions, for example. When you’ve got agents running auctions, they need wallets to control who they pay and how they receive money, and really act almost like a human being. So I think this intersection of agents and digital wallets, and bringing all of that together, is what we’re going to see transpiring on a much bigger scale in the next couple of years. But it’s still very early stages.

Dexter Cousins
With the businesses you’ve invested in so far, are there any success stories you can share?

Justin Greenstein
There are a number of success stories, and I think you look at success in a couple of ways. One is financial success. If you look at our portfolio, we’re an investor in Airwallex, for example, and I think everyone watching this will know that Airwallex is one of Australia’s really great success stories. An amazing investment, and an amazing founder and team who’ve done great things.

We also look at strategic success, and what that means is what the company has been able to do with ANZ to drive new customer loyalty and new capability within the bank. If you look at some of what we’ve done, take a company like CashRewards. We invested in CashRewards in 2020, and then we privatised CashRewards in late 2021. CashRewards is now integrated into ANZ Plus, which is ANZ Bank’s new digital capability, and we’re starting to see some good integration between the two companies. With that, not only are we giving ANZ customers access to CashRewards, but we’re actually helping with the financial wellbeing of ANZ customers. There’s a lot of early proposition already in place, but a lot more to come.

Dexter Cousins
That’s a really interesting example, because what typically tends to happen with an acquisition of that nature is the business gets absorbed into the bank, and you lose all of the benefits of having a nimble, small, agile business. How have you managed that transition, where CashRewards is now part of the bank but is still able to keep that agility?

Justin Greenstein
It’s not part of the bank. In the same way that 1835i is not part of the bank legally, neither is CashRewards. We kept CashRewards as a separate company, with its own identity, its own culture, its own processes and its own policies, like 1835i. That means we’ve been able to retain talent within CashRewards, people who were there almost from the outset.

We also keep a separate board at CashRewards. While there’s a level of governance over performance from an 1835i investment committee perspective, CashRewards has its own board, and the chair of the board, for example, is the former CEO of Flybuys, John Merakovsky. John has run Flybuys and understands the loyalty space really well. He’s an independent director who helps that company drive its strategy and make sure they’re staying true to their vision of a loyalty company, but who also has a level of interface with the investment committee, where there’s good dialogue to make sure the company is on a good pathway in and of itself, and that there’s a good pathway to strategic partnership opportunities.

Keeping that independence is really important, and it’s something we deeply believe in. It comes back to culture. We want to keep the culture of ANZ separate from the culture of the startups we’re working with.

Dexter Cousins
The venture capital industry tends to get a lot of criticism. Some of it’s warranted, a lot of it not so. Why do you think, particularly here in Australia, there seems to be this big expectation gap between founders and potential investors?

Justin Greenstein
I’m going to start off by saying that I think we’re a very patient investor. As I said earlier, we are very much there to drive strategic engagement with the bank, but we’re also very aware of our overall mission, which is to help founders get global dominance. We don’t want to stifle the global dominance at the expense of just working with ANZ. We want to be a part of their journey, but not the whole journey.

Dexter Cousins
And it seems like for the last couple of years it’s been global dominance, but get profitable first.

Justin Greenstein
We’ll get there. I’m very much talking about 1835i and the ANZ lenses we put on. When we’ve got director seats on the boards of companies we invest in, we typically put directors on there who are independent. Yes, there are a couple of directors who might be ANZ employees, and they bring domain expertise to the board, but we’ve also got non-ANZ people on boards because they bring expertise and an understanding of the stage of company we’re working with, and the skills to help them grow. So we think a lot about that, and we’re patient from an investment perspective. The benefit we’ve got, frankly, is that we’ve got one LP, and we’re very aligned with that LP on what we’re trying to do.

When you look at the broader industry, the challenge other investors have got that we don’t is they’ve often got multiple LPs, and they’re balancing expectations there, whether it’s liquidity events the LPs are looking for because they’ve been in the fund a long time, or what’s going on in other parts of the world. They’re dealing with a lot of stakeholders they have to manage.

We’ve also had some very interesting economic times. We had a 2021 bubble, with some companies raising money at incredibly high valuations, often based on projections that were probably very unrealistic, and maybe realistic for a very small period of time during Covid, but in a world that wasn’t overly real. Then you move on a couple of years, and companies are running out of money and need to fundraise, and you’re facing down rounds and all those sorts of complexities. You’ve got a very tough job, because you’ve got lots of different stakeholders to think about.

Dexter Cousins
I wanted to ask you about that, actually, if we could dig a little deeper. You gave a really good explanation of the history of 1835i and how you brought these three separate components together in 2021, and literally 12 months later, as you mentioned, the whole landscape had radically changed. How have you evolved since the original thesis around 1835i, and how does the investment thesis now differ from what you first had in mind?

Justin Greenstein
It’s a good question. Fundamentally, our thesis and how we approach our business have broadly stayed the same, but there are a couple of nuances. As I said, we started in 2018. When we got to the end of 2021, we were three years old and had deployed quite a bit of capital. By the end of 2021 we had a portfolio of around 13 companies, plus companies we were incubating in our lab. It’s all fun to go and invest in new companies, but a lot of the really hard work is involved in managing the portfolio.

We’ve got a double job. One is managing the founders and the portfolio companies, and where we’ve got director representatives, they’ve got a big job working with those companies. But we also have to work with the bank and make sure that the strategic theses we invested on remain sound, and that we’re getting momentum both for the bank and for the founding team.

So by the end of 2021 we had a pretty big portfolio, and we also had a shift going on in the broader market. We started to see valuations going down, more pressure on companies, and quite a big trend towards break-even rather than growth at all costs. Where that took us was a world where we felt we had to do two things really well.

The first was to make sure we were there to support the portfolio companies we had invested in. In 2022 you start to see a lot of companies burning a lot of money, and further rounds of capital raising being required down the path. We said we need to make sure we’re doubling down and really supporting the companies, especially the ones working strategically with us.

The second thing we looked at was, now that we’re at the end of Covid, how successful have we been in partnering with those companies? That’s why we exist. We have to bring value back to the bank, and bring value back to the companies through the banking relationships. We realised that’s a really difficult thing to do, and while a number of companies had made good progress working with the bank, a number hadn’t. So at that point we said we’d do two things. One, make sure we’re deploying the appropriate resources in our team to work those partnerships, because that’s our licence to play. And two, learn where we’d maybe not been so successful in driving partnerships.

The biggest learning we made at that point was that where we had done an investment with a very loose thesis, we weren’t getting good momentum on the partnership, versus where we had made investments on a really sound thesis. A sound thesis is: here’s the strategy, but also the business unit is really allocating money towards the business to drive integration, there are people in the business who are accountable for integration, and people have KPIs in the business they’re being measured on to drive it. We need to make sure we’re really doubling down on getting that locked away.

What you start to see there is that there are some companies we’d invested in four years earlier where we might not get to a point where there’s a strong thesis with all that support, so we need to work on that. But going forward, we need to make sure that’s absolutely front and centre of how we invest.

If you look at a recent investment we made late last year in Citoplus, we had done a very solid piece of strategy work with the business. We asked, where is this commercial broker space going, and what do we as an organisation believe? We believe digital technology is where we need to be playing. We thought the founders of Citoplus were really good. They’ve worked in banks, they understand the space they’re working in, they’re great founders, and they had a couple of really good people on their board.

Then we sat with the business unit and said, if this is the strategy we’re putting in place, do you have committed funding to drive the integration? Do you have accountability from a KPI perspective? And so on. We ticked all of that, and we only got approval for that investment from the investment committee once we had that joint commitment. It wasn’t just putting capital in. It was also putting all the business resources in.

So to summarise, post 2021 we want deep conviction on the strategic partnership, and conviction that the business has bought into it. We also want to make sure we’re actively supporting the companies we’ve invested in. When we say actively supporting them, that’s not just driving them to break-even or profitability, which is very important, but also trying to stay true to the vision. How are they going to get global domination, and how are we going to support them with the right amount of capital and the right amount of support?

Dexter Cousins
There’s also a perception with VCs that they’re sitting in an ivory tower going through the LinkedIn inbox, replying intermittently to people who pitch their business. Could you give us the reality of how you go out and actually find opportunities and potential partners for the bank?

Justin Greenstein
We’ve got a few ways of doing it. First of all, we’ve got a local dedicated investments team, made up of people who have worked in the startup and investment ecosystem for a number of years, often multiple years. Those people have a really good network of other investors in the space, and they’re well connected to founders, either because they’ve worked in the university system commercialising startups, or they’ve worked as operators in startups, and so on. So there’s a really good network we’ve formed there.

We’ve got the bank, which is a great source of deal flow. I don’t think anyone would appreciate how many founders go straight to Shayne Elliott and say, I’ve got a startup I think is interesting, and then Shayne will put it into our team. We’ve also got venture partners, one in the US and one in the UK, who are very well connected. For example, our venture partner in the US was one of the early Standard Chartered Ventures people in the US, and has built an incredible network there with both investors and founders, so we get great access to opportunities there. And then there’s just being active in the ecosystem, through Intersekt, through LaunchVic, attending events and having networks there.

So deal flow is no issue. There’s loads of deal flow. Coming back to your question, we have to be super honest about this. We play in a very thin space. As I said, it’s on the fringes of fintech. It’s not always pure financial products, and that takes you into much more constrained territory. Within that, we have to look for companies that can work with ANZ, because working with ANZ you need a level of maturity, and a team of adequate size, because there’ll be some things we need to do to drive partnerships. Adequate size doesn’t mean 200 or 100 people. It can be much smaller, but we need conviction that the team has the muscle to work with the bank. And then we need conviction on the strategic thesis. So there’s generally a pretty thin territory we work within.

We’re honest with people. We get loads of inbound every day, and we’re honest up front. Either it’s, we don’t think we can work with you for these reasons, we might love your vision and think it’s great, and often we’ll pass those people on to other investors in our network if we think it’s relevant. With the people we meet where we think there is an opportunity, we’re upfront about our investment process. We’re a lot quicker than we would be if we were in the bank, but there’s still a process. We still have to have conviction on the strategic thesis and on the company, and we have to build that conviction, but we also have to get them across some of the key stakeholders in the bank.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about the state of fintech here in Australia and globally. First off, how would you summarise where Australia is as a global fintech ecosystem right now?

Justin Greenstein
It’s a good question. If you look at the world, there’s really a small number of places where there are deep ecosystems. There’s the east and west coast of the USA, which are big and vibrant with huge activity. There’s a good sector in the UK, and a good emerging fintech ecosystem happening in France. And there’s a good ecosystem in parts of Asia. We see some really interesting capabilities coming out of Singapore and Hong Kong, and of course there’s some really interesting stuff coming out of India and China, which frankly we just haven’t been able to get across yet. Then there’s Australia. Those are the territories we look at.

Australia punches above its weight, frankly. We get a lot of inbound, specifically from the US, the UK and Australia, and we often see really good businesses coming out of Australia in the fintech space. We saw in the State of Venture report last week that fintech is doing well again. There was around a billion dollars invested last year, which is not small. We’ve also seen some really great companies grow overseas, like Airwallex, which is in our portfolio, but also some others. So I think we punch above our weight.

I think we’ve got some really great talent in the country. You’re getting some very good banking talent coming out of the banks and starting to build their own fintechs, and in the State of Venture report last week we saw some really good funding rounds going into some of the larger fintechs that are emerging here. So I think Australia is doing well and punching above its weight.

I’m going to put an obvious statement out here, but there’s just a different risk appetite here compared to other countries. When we go and meet founders in the US, and granted the pool of capital in the US is just so ginormous that it’s kind of easier to take a risk, it’s absolutely phenomenal. People there have a very different approach to risk-taking. You’ve also got some really great infrastructure, like Y Combinator, which starts to infuse that culture in the really young generation of founders, being an entrepreneur from the day you leave university. I just don’t think we’ve got there yet here, but I think the university system here is starting to get a lot better at getting people to think about founding their own businesses. As an example, we often get involved in [unclear] and their program, and it’s incredible to see how many 19 and 20 year olds are starting to think about a startup being their first job rather than a corporate job. So we’re getting there. We’re just not where some of the overseas countries are yet.

Dexter Cousins
So, the $50 million question, which could become 55 billion. You’ve just set up your own VC and you’ve got a $50 million cheque to invest. Where would you invest it, and what’s the one big bold idea you’d back with $50 million?

Justin Greenstein
$50 million is a very significant number, and I guess it depends whether you’re talking a seed round or late-stage cheques.

Dexter Cousins
Let’s assume it’s earlier stage. Something that’s got you excited, that you think is truly going to change things.

Justin Greenstein
I’m going to put two hats on here. As I said earlier, we’re seeing some incredible horizon three ideas coming up, like the intersection of AI agents and digital wallets, and that convergence between AI and crypto. But I’m also going to say we still invest for a bank, and that’s still very bold and very new. So I’m going to go back to being a strategic investor in a bank. Where would I put that money?

One of the big problems banks face, but much broader than banks, and this is going to sound really boring to people, is managing non-financial risk. If you think about the Royal Commission into banking and all the issues around non-financial risk management, if you read the papers, whether it’s fraud or scams, the failure to detect or manage those non-financial risk incidents early is constantly a point of contention.

What we’re thinking and seeing is that, with the emergence of agents, there’s a world where non-financial risk management can almost become automated. This is relevant for people who aren’t even in banks. If you’re on a not-for-profit board, one of the big things you have to do as a board member is ask whether the risk management of the organisation is intact, and often directors sit there thinking, how do we know? This is all theory to us.

If you can build agents that say, we know what the key risks in your organisation are, whether you’re a bank, a hospital or a not-for-profit, and we understand what controls you’ve got in place to mitigate those risks, and we can test those controls to know they’re working, if you can build agents to do all of that, I think you’ve got a multi-billion dollar business.

This has been a concept people have spoken about for a while, and we’ve seen some companies come up saying, we’re good regtech because we can ingest regulation and tell you where it changes. But then no one can say what risk that regulation actually mitigates, and what controls you put in place to comply with it and mitigate the risk. I think with agents we’re going to get to the point where we can do that. So if anyone’s building that sort of startup today, I’d put $50 million in.

Dexter Cousins
It’s really interesting you should say that, because one of the biggest challenges I’ve had recruitment-wise in the last 12 months is head of compliance and chief risk officer roles. Finding people who have the commercial acumen, but also that first-principles thinking about, right, this doesn’t actually exist, or we’re going into new territory, so what are the potential outcomes, the probabilities of those outcomes, and how do we mitigate against them? It’s really difficult to find people with that mindset and personality set.

Justin Greenstein
The name of this company is Virtual CRO. We’ve spoken a lot about virtual CFOs, and we’ve seen a lot of advancements around automated bookkeeping and accounting. I think virtual risk management with agents is the next big thing.

I remember I was in Silicon Valley in 2019, speaking to companies about this problem, because once again, with my ANZ investor hat on, we talk about regtech and what we think the opportunities are. We were seeing companies doing some interesting things with machine learning, specifically around regulatory ingestion, and you couldn’t get past that into what your risks are, what your controls are, and how you test them. But we’re getting there now. So my $50 million cheque would definitely go into that.

Dexter Cousins
In terms of how you keep yourself abreast of what’s going on, obviously you meet a lot of people, but are there any podcasts you listen to that you’ve found particularly useful?

Justin Greenstein
I listen to a lot of different podcasts, but the truth is, in terms of keeping up, there’s some great literature that hits my inbox every day, and some really interesting tidbits. But the most valuable, to be honest, is our venture partner in the US, who is incredibly connected to that ecosystem. Every two or three days I get a note from him saying, I’ve met this founder, I’ve been to that conference, I’ve seen this capability, and we get connected to the founders. Those relationships and those half-hour sessions I get with those founders are really what bring the insight back. Frankly, when I’m speaking to my investment committee, it’s coming from those meetings. Podcasts are great and reading is great, but there’s nothing like that human touch with people who are actually firing ahead and building these things.

Dexter Cousins
We’re coming to a wrap, Justin. We’ve got some amazing talent listening to this podcast. If they’re interested in careers at 1835i, where’s the best place for them to go?

Justin Greenstein
They can reach out to me directly, and I’ll direct them to the right people. We’re always happy to speak to great talent, and our team is constantly changing, specifically given the lab and what we’re trying to build. And obviously we get a lot of founders listening to this as well. If they’ve got a great idea or a business they’re building, again, reach out. We always want to see new opportunities.

Dexter Cousins
Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s really great to get your insights. Before we wrap up, any big announcements for you this year? What can we expect from 1835i in 2025?

Justin Greenstein
Right at the minute, we made a couple of announcements late last year, and there’s a lot of work underway to bring those strategic propositions to life. There are three really interesting companies in our lab at the moment that we’re hoping to put the next round of capital into within the next few months, and we’ll definitely be launching those on social as they progress. So in the short term, there are three really interesting things happening there, and we’ll always wait and see with the external investment opportunities coming our way.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, make sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, or subscribe on YouTube. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. It really does mean a lot, and it really helps me get great guests like Justin onto the show. Until the next episode, keep well.

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