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Nuj Super – Matt McKenzie. From Beancounter to Fintech Founder.

September 8, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In this episode of Fintech Chatter, host Dexter Cousins speaks with Matt McKenzie, CEO and co-founder of Nuj, a Regtech company making serious strides in the Aus$ 4trn Superannuation sector. Nuj’s plug-and-play solution streamlines workflows while ensuring compliance with all current and upcoming regulations.

The platform enables quick integration, with automated workflows, audit trails, and real-time updates.

Nuj raised a $4m seed round in early 2025 and counts Bluechip names like MUFG and AMP as clients.

Find out more – https://www.nujsuper.com/

Key topics covered in the chat:

  • Nudge was founded during COVID-19 in 2020.
  • The superannuation industry has significant legacy challenges.
  • Client acquisition requires proving value in a slow-moving market.
  • Funding strategies can include leveraging early client relationships.
  • Growth in fintech requires patience and resilience.
  • Remote work has become integral to Nudge’s culture.
  • Establishing authentic company values is crucial for team alignment.
  • Hiring should focus on cultural fit and embracing collective wisdom.
  • Networking within the fintech community provides valuable insights.
  • Future growth at Nuj will leverage AI and technological innovations.


Connect with Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-mckenzie/

Links from this episode.

More on super, culture and remote work on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search and recruitment firm that helps high growth fintech ventures hire exceptional people. Today’s guest is Matt McKenzie, the CEO and co-founder of Nuj. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt McKenzie
Thanks for having me, Dexter. Great to be here.

Dexter Cousins
It’s fantastic to have you on. And kind of they always say in life, you never know who you’re going to pass on the way up or the way down. And you and I first connected in 2010, I think it was, when you moved from South Africa. So it’s been incredible to, I guess, one, have you on the show, but two, see the journey that you’ve been on as well. I’m really kind of looking forward to talking through that with our guests and sharing a bit more about Nuj. But before we kind of talk about the past, let’s talk about the present and tell us about Nuj and who you are.

Matt McKenzie
Sure. Yes. So Nuj is a technology enabled data and insights business focused on superannuation is our first sort of frontier and more specifically on regulation. And so we have built a platform to sit in between the trustees and super funds and the regulator to ensure that the information flow from the custodians and administrators is compiled correctly. So the data is complete, correct and correlates before the information is sent off to the regulator. And then we also leave the trustees with a view of what information they’re presenting and what story they’re sharing with the regulator so that they can get ahead of that story.

Dexter Cousins
Like I think most solutions in fintech, despite the kind of PR side, they’re never really that sexy or kind of glamorous but absolutely critical. Do you want to kind of tell us just, I guess, around the issues that businesses have been and superannuation funds have been facing and why you decided that this was going to be the right solution?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah, Dexter, as you said, I came in in 2010 and I’ve been in and around this space for that time. And so you get to see the different angles and the lenses and the issues become more clear to you. And so I think the fundamental piece is that there are so many legacy systems and processes that sit in super and around the super ecosystem that weren’t really architected to harness data: books of account or ways to record or create data, but not to harness what that data is to drive insights. And so for us, from being in the space, it became abundantly clear that creating something that sits in the middle of all of those data sources to draw them in, to sort of transform them into a set of information that you can derive insight, made complete clarity.

Dexter Cousins
We talk a lot about, I guess, kind of time and size of market. What’s really struck me, Matt, is Australian superannuation, we got what, four trillion dollars under management.

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Yet we’ve seen very little innovation, very little kind of push from fintechs or startups really to kind of get a grasp in this space. What was your observation of kind of, I guess, one, why was there nobody fixing this solution, and two, kind of how does a startup kind of get in and start to make some traction?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah, good question. So the innovation I’ve seen in super to date is more on the super funds and creating niche offerings out to the market, which is a tricky beast because there’s inherent costs that sit in super. So to grow a fund, you really need to get yourself to a billion pretty quickly in assets to be of scale to then start your journey. And so a lot have started and not got there. So the innovation has been on the front end of it.

Terms of the back end, yeah, super is a tricky space to enter into. If you speak to any kind of super funds, they always tell you that they’re fast followers and not first starters or sort of innovators. So they wait to see what happens in the space before they move to your solution, given it’s a long-term investment and they don’t need to make rush decisions. And so for us, you’ve really kind of had to push hard to get in, to create a niche, but in the data side, when I came in 2010, as you referenced, there was a data company, I’m not going to reference their name, but for all intents and purposes should have sort of taken and controlled the market, but based on market forces and based on kind of where they landed up, didn’t. And so the space has sort of stayed in an idle state since I’ve started, and so stayed clear as a solution point for me.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Now you’ve had some really impressive wins in terms of clients. Do you want to tell us a little bit of some of the clients that you work with and kind of how that all came about?

Matt McKenzie
Sure. Well, I’ll go to the start. So, Dexter, we were born in COVID 2020. Well, that’s sort of when we formed the company. And it took us about a year to get the first client. As I said, they don’t just let you in with this new offering. You’ve got to kind of really…

Dexter Cousins
That’s not long, 12 months. So, is it, for a superannuation?

Matt McKenzie
Well, the first piece was maybe just a bit of consulting work to our foundational client to prove value. And so first client was a Christmas present. It was over Christmas that we actually had to do the work. So had a kind of a short time frame. And so we all came together to deliver. And then that was the value that we delivered was clear to them and then gave us the opportunity to go into this broad program, the super data transformation reg reporting program, which really set us up to go forward. Yeah, sort of fast forward to today, we’ve got, I think, 33 super funds data flowing through our platform, which is a trillion in assets, via eight separate distinct client arrangements.

Dexter Cousins
Around about 300, 250 superannuation funds in total.

Matt McKenzie
No, they’re less. They’re around 100 super funds now. And so it’s more kind of this, probably through our aggregator arrangement, some of the smaller funds. So there’s quite a bit still out.

Dexter Cousins
So that’s quite a fair market share that you’ve got.

Matt McKenzie
At the scale we are now and the sort of what we’ve started with, yeah. So we have the relationships. MUFG is, we go via administrators. So MUFG and FNZ and SSNC, our admins; trustees at the top, Equity Trustees and Diversa; and then direct to super funds like AMP and Host Plus and Team Super. So…

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant.

Matt McKenzie
So it’s been good, but every journey requires kind of a bit of resilience.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I kind of really just want to dig a little bit deeper on, I guess, kind of path to getting clients, path to getting revenue. So you been a revenue generating business from fairly early on in the piece, in comparison to some other fintechs.

Matt McKenzie
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
What’s been your approach to, I guess, proving the business, growing the business? Have you kind of gone out and raised capital early or have you taken a different approach?

Matt McKenzie
Good question. So we tried not to go early to capital. We tried to kind of bring, I brought a founding team together who all sort of saw the space as an opportunity and worked in kind of a fractional sort of format initially, not sort of committing full-time. I didn’t need all of them full-time, just for us to hit milestones. Brought them a vested sort of kind of equity plan so that they could grow with the business. But the key was to start with consulting and revenues, to bring that in as our first funding, so we could prove concepts, build out a platform with real life problems. And so for the first year or two, we were primarily sort of funded by our client relationships.

Dexter Cousins
Oh, brilliant.

Matt McKenzie
To build up that work together, to build out, to solve their problems and build out our platform. Which then, you do need capital, and the first mob that you go to are the friends, family and foolish. Let’s not call them fools, because, but I mean, to…

Dexter Cousins
Hopeful.

Matt McKenzie
Who see you and they see that you want to make this work, and they’re the first mob, and you bring them in to kind of align, they see that you really trying to create something. So that was the first funders that we kind of got in.

And then as you build out a team and you start getting some considerable revenues, you’re deciding whether are you building this thing to really grow and scale or are you building it just to sort of fund itself. And that’s the inflection point on whether you need further funding or not. And for us, we’re not here to kind of slowly tick along. We want to grow as fast as we can within the parameters of a very slow-moving space. And so, yeah, we took in some funding at the end of last year, which was, yeah, we got a fantastic investor. He’s got a family office and he founded and built an email security business called Mimecast.

Dexter Cousins
Oh, yeah.

Matt McKenzie
In 2000, well, early 2000s all the way to 2025 where it grew to $6 billion in size. And so…

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant.

Matt McKenzie
A massive kind of achievement for them, but so many learnings that they can get from Peter and his team. And so he’s been a fantastic kind of sounding board. Sits on the board and provides a lot of advice. Everyone goes through the same problems and challenges, Dexter. So it’s nice to sort of have someone in the fold that sees it and sees where you’re at, pushes you where they think you need to be pushed, but also supports.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I think, I mean, for me, if I look at, and this isn’t a criticism because I think the Australian kind of venture community is still relatively in its nascency. We’re only decade in really. And I think one of the kind of challenges has just been that lack of actual time in the trenches, but to get to a $6 billion valuation, and we’re seeing that obviously evolve now as the industry progresses, but I mean, to have an investor that not only is kind of backing you, but has that experience and the playbook, I mean, that’s worth more than of investment, I guess.

Matt McKenzie
It’s also the alignment in the patience. I’ve always thought there’s businesses that come in and grow rapidly and hit sort of massive ARRs in the early years, and that’s great, but we’re not that business. We’re a consistent growing business, underpinned by value, and he sees that and is not sitting there for returns now while we are just building the foundations. But yes, we’re growing. It’s just patient investor.

Dexter Cousins
So I guess I wanted to talk to you about the time as well and, I guess, just the challenges of the market, right? Because, yeah, it’s a $4 trillion industry, but you got 200 and odd customers potentially or… Yeah. And then you’ve kind of then got to go, hey, well, how do we expand the product set? Who else could use it? Do we expand internationally? Where would those markets be? What thoughts have you had around, hey, because 15% market share for a four year old business is, I mean, that’s a massive achievement, right?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah, just reflecting on it, it’s sort of, and often when people look at it, they’re like, the size of the market is defined by the number of super funds. Not, we do base on size and complexity of the funds, but that underpins the initial piece, but in what we solve, it’s not just for the super funds. We solve for the administrators, we solve for the custodians, the insurers, the trustees as external trustees. So there’s an ecosystem that sits around this, and this being a single regulator that we’re solving for, and this program is halfway through or not even halfway through its transformation.

So there’s growth in just being in this space, but don’t look at it as just a hundred clients. We look at it as, well, who are all the custodians and administrators, and once you’ve solved for them in the ecosystem along with the underlying super funds, you gain the right to sort of solve more problems for them. So in that regulation there’s two other regulators, the ATO and ASIC. So there’s a broadening of it amongst that.

But I’ve got to be clear, Australian super is just our first frontier. We can’t just sit there and go, we are going to race to the top and just own 100% of that. That’s never going to be the case. As you build a business and start, all the learnings from where we were in 2020 to where we are now and the offering that we have now, there’s adjacencies. There’s similar programs running for life, general and PHI insurance and banking. So you kind of mature across, for all the issues we think the super industry has, when you look offshore, they all look to Australia to see how progressed we are here. And so we’ve already started conversations with offshore jurisdictions in the Commonwealth, the cricket playing nations, to say, hey, this is what we’ve done in Australia, we see your challenges, can we kind of help you on that journey?

I think when I think of TAM, I don’t think of it just in Aussie super. I think Aussie super is our first proving ground as we take it broader and wider.

Dexter Cousins
Cool. Now we kind of touched on this before. I think kind of one of the challenges of an early stage business, particularly in fintech here in Australia, is your customers don’t move anywhere near as fast as you do with the decision making process. How have you navigated that, and kind of how have you been able to keep the lights on whilst doing the R&D stuff and you’re at your expense, you’re trying to fix their problems and they’re kind of causing you more problems?

Matt McKenzie
Dexter, it’s an interesting one, because you start with something and you kind of, your understanding lens of the problem when it first comes out is single point, single client, even though the client had a number of funds, but growing, and getting, solving one and proving value in a smallish industry is as much the way to sell to more, because that message gets out, it helps you. So getting that first, obviously very hard, but once you’ve got it, if your solution is underpinned by value and they appreciate it, you get a broader, right, yeah, we’ll see, we’ve heard what you’ve done with that client, let’s give you a chance. And so that has been how do we use the network and grow kind of from common points that we’ve delivered to.

Not easy, and it’s not something that you can just take that model and take it elsewhere. It’s pure, just grit, determination, keep at it, keep the message strong, passion, driving with passion. But as you kind of grow and evolve and take on more clients, you start understanding the problem set a little different, and that’s how the solution kind of grows.

Dexter Cousins
And what’s also interesting is your background, because when we first connected, I was very much a kind of finance and risk recruiter for financial services, and you came from a finance accounting background, hence how we connected.

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
I don’t think I’ve met many early stage founders who have come from that background. I think maybe one or two, both that had really successful exits, by the way.

Matt McKenzie
That’s great.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, but it’s not, usually you’ve got the product person, the technology person, the sales and marketing person, maybe is the legal kind of investment banking person, but not necessarily the kind of…

Matt McKenzie
Bean counter.

Dexter Cousins
I was going to say bean counter, right, but I was like, you say…

Matt McKenzie
Hide from it. Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What’s kind of been, because obviously the results that you’re getting are really impressive. What do you think has kind of benefited you having that background in being able to get such traction in four years?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah, I think, I mean, the finance piece, Dexter, was for me, it was the entry point into Australia. It was the way that I moved across super and got, when you’re in the finance, you’re not in the business, you’re on the side of the business. You get to see how it all comes together. You don’t necessarily get to contribute to it. And so you build this lens of like, ah, I can see what’s going on here. I can see all the moving pieces. So it helps you with that lens of what you’re trying to kind of, well, what the whole ecosystem looks like.

But for me, I didn’t enjoy being on the side, and I went through, worked at that first job in Russell, which was an investment manager, and then went to become the CFO of a group of companies. At the sort of the top of the finance, even though it’s a relatively small business, but realised I need to be in the business. So before moving from there, I went and got the opportunity to run a cloud-based administration platform, and so really took that sort of leap to change.

And so I think you can’t just be an accountant and go into these things without actually fully immersing and feeling what it’s like to run a business and the challenges with that before you make the move, but I don’t know, it’s just, for me it was always, that was the route that I took when I was growing up, but it didn’t feel true to what I wanted to do. And so making those changes, making a sort of committed effort to move out of being on the side and in the business, which you need to be the product and tech, to then kind of take over and do my own.

Dexter Cousins
And has it impacted your approach to growing the business? And so what I mean by that is, if we look at, there’s kind of the growth at all costs mentality. We hear lots of stories about founders raising a lot of money and first thing they go out and do is kind of get new offices and stuff like that. How is the kind of background helped you in, I guess, kind of getting the business to where it is now?

Matt McKenzie
Ah, sorry, from that point, definitely, there’s a conservative nature to any accountant to kind of know what you’re getting in and what you’re spending, and know a little bit about how you runway and when you are starting a business, you eat what you kill. If you’re not killing, if you’re not winning, you can’t feed the team. And so being acutely aware of what’s in front of us, and so being able to understand flows and being conservative in the way we spent our money was how I started the business.

And to be honest, Dexter, it was a challenge post cap raise to actually make the shift of like, okay, now I’ve got money and I took in money to grow, but I didn’t straight away just, I mean, obviously not go to getting all these plush offices, but investing further into people and whatnot. We sort of had what we had and we tried to continue on. It wasn’t without a few nudges from a couple of close directors and whatnot to say, you’ve taken this money to grow. So it’s good to be measured but we need to move forward. So sort of…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. It’s such a tough balance, right?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah. And you don’t just feel like, okay, I’ve got it, in a slow-moving space. It’s not just like I add three people and I get that much in rev. It’s slowly, slowly. So…

Dexter Cousins
I think that’s one of the challenges as well for anybody who’s kind of moving from a large business, right, that’s making hundreds of millions if not billions in revenue. If you’re an accountant, you can kind of pull a couple of levers and you might be able to find another 10, 20 million somewhere, right? In your business, it’s, as you quite rightly pointed out, you got to eat what you kill. And it’s like, if we ain’t killing anything, we ain’t eating, right? It’s like there’s no levers to pull, right?

Matt McKenzie
I know. And it’s close, Dex. So you go through the cycle and there’s moments where you get very close to it and you…

Dexter Cousins
Become an Uber driver. It’s small. I think that’s kind of just the nature of you, whether it’s a small business, a startup.

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
It’s that nature of, kind of, you just get those moments, and then multiple, where it’s like, if this doesn’t happen, we’re screwed. And sometimes it doesn’t happen and it turns out that you’re not screwed, but it’s like that head game, right, that you’re playing with yourself all the time.

Matt McKenzie
But you’ve got people, when you sort of move through the stages, you start taking on people. And so it’s not just about, I didn’t make this work. It’s like, I’ve got these guys who believe in what we’re doing. We’re doing something valuable. There’s a need for it. So there’s a need and it’s valuable and I’ve got good humans. It’s on me to make sure that we can keep this thing moving forward.

Dexter Cousins
I’ve talked a lot over this last four or five years, in fact, I’d say over the last decade really, about this concept of fractional execs, and certainly I believe the concept works, but I think a lot of ways in which people are framing it doesn’t. And I was really curious that, because you mentioned it earlier in the chat, around you kind of originally engaging people, were they people that were known to you?

Matt McKenzie
Yes. And so what was great about them is they wanted to come on the journey. So it wasn’t like, I am building my own business fractionally. Some were and continue and have been successful in that, right, but some of them, the core, were like, we see what you see, Matt. We can’t come on now because you can’t afford us and we’ve got our lives, but we want to help. And they’ve all stayed involved.

And now that we’ve hit milestones, one of the first guys, a data guy that I got in to sort of set the foundations, he’s come back from a big, very successful technology business to come and join us. And so that’s the thing, you kind of start with the idea, start with the humans, head forward, they help out in bits and pieces, which is valuable, but the value when they come on full-time, it really goes up a notch or two.

Dexter Cousins
I’ve always tried to kind of change the thinking, particularly in startup land and with founders, around hiring, and that you can’t do it like you did in a big corporate where somebody resigns. So you go, right, we got to back fill. Let’s pull out the old job spec. Let’s call some recruiters. Let’s interview some people. And let’s get the process wrapped up in four weeks.

It’s a long-term, you’re trying to build relationships with people. It’s like you’re on a series of dates. You got to test out whether you got the same values, and it is this process of kind of growing that kind of trust with each other, and to the point that then it’s ready to go. You’ve done all the ground work, right? It’s not like you’ve got to do the interview process, you got to worry about, oh, they’re going to work.

Matt McKenzie
Absolutely right. Do you know what, actually reflecting, so born in COVID, with the COVID move back to working from home.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Matt McKenzie
Our model has been to bring in people to do bits and pieces in the early days to say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing. Would you like to come and join?” Yes. Don’t feel like you need to leave, moonlight and contribute and see what it’s like in our team, and if you like it, we’ll go forward. And 90% have just come along with us. So they started, and as we’ve grown, they’re like, “Yes, I want to come. Yes, I want to come at the right time.” And then it’s not an unfamiliar space that they’re coming to.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Matt McKenzie
That’s not a model you can use kind of as you scale out, but in the early stages…

Dexter Cousins
I think you’re absolutely right. I think one of the challenges that I see is that people kind of take this almost like ubiquitous homogeneous recruitment model, right, in view of recruitment, and hey, if they’re not there for 5 years, somehow the hire has failed.

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And it’s not that, right? It’s more like a Hollywood production, and what you’ve talked about is you’re talking to somebody where somebody’s just put a script on the table and gone, “Wow, look at this script. It’s great.” Yeah. And can people get excited and the project, it might be 3 years before they get ready to shoot the movie. So…

Matt McKenzie
That’s a fair description. I mean, and come in and feel what it’s like. Come on, come and join the set and see what’s happening around. You’ll see all of it, and we’ll bring you along, and then when your role is, we’ll determine when your role goes full-time.

Dexter Cousins
One of the other challenges that I think has been very, certainly it’s been kind of one of the number three topics of conversation when I’ve spoken with founders or CEOs, has been kind of people in the office and the challenges of remote workforces. How have you navigated that, and kind of do you see a point where perhaps the business gets too big, it’s going to be too difficult to kind of manage everybody remotely?

Matt McKenzie
Thinking about that. I mean, talked about that, and then Ben Thompson from Employment Hero lives on my street, on the nice side of the railway tracks.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Matt McKenzie
And he’s grown a whole business where they’re all fully remote and it’s a lot bigger. So I look to successful businesses that have stayed remote and know that that’s where we’d like to go, but always thinking about the challenges. And so we are fully remote at the moment. I like to say we have offices all over Australia, which are people’s bedrooms and living rooms or wherever they work. But in every state there is a Nuj person there, which is just the first starting point.

As you grow out, there may be pockets that will need to see each other more and more, and so you probably need to have some sort of more permanent location. The moment, each quarter we all come together, because you need to see each other. You can’t just be 100% remote. So we come together for strategy sessions where we kind of set ourselves up with quarterly goals for the next quarter and align, but get to spend time, because the human component is massive and you can take that away. Three months is a long time in between drinks. Whether it should be tighter or whether there should be a physical location at some stage, I don’t know. I don’t know, but at the moment it’s working and we have…

It’s also, as the team grows and you have sort of a wider array of sort of seniority, more junior staff members joining in, sometimes they need to kind of, in their sort of early part of their career, be close to others as opposed to be online.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Matt McKenzie
All things we’re going to learn.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. It’s, I really like the way in which you’ve framed kind of how you’ve brought people on board, because I think one of the other challenges businesses having where they get this wrong with hiring, I almost think that when they put a job ad up, it’s kind of, I got those images, black and white images of people lining up a mile long in the Great Depression, all kind of wanting a job, and they think this kind of, yeah, they think that’s kind of, there’s still that mentality around, I’m giving this person a job, they should be super grateful, and obviously that’s not the way it is now.

And you have to have this thing of where, hey, look, it’s something that benefit, particularly if you want to get the best talent, right? I’m not saying it has to be on their terms, but you have to meet somewhere in the middle to go, hey, how do we kind of work together in a way in which we’re going to be productive and get the best out of each other.

Matt McKenzie
Completely agree. There’s also a right person for every role. I mean, you can be very skilled in your chosen piece, but you need to mix with the humans that a business has. And I’ve seen it where very skilled people shine in some instances and don’t in others. And so spending time trying to find out whether that person is going to fit in and making them feel comfortable that they’re also coming to join, that this is the right collective group of people that they’re going to shine in, and the opportunity to grow.

Because I’m always a believer of collective wisdom, collective wisdom of a compassionate crowd. So if we’re all working towards the same goal, we’re aligned on that, the outcome is going to be based on our collective contributions. We have our skill sets. We need that round view to be able to create the best solution. It’s not just one person who’s a gun going for it. We need to all work together. And so it’s so much about the team and the individual, in my world.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So this is historical data, Matt, going back. I think 2021 was when we completed the research. But it showed that within fintech startups, those businesses that hired an HR professional…

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Like before they hit 30 people, versus those who kind of hired one after that stage, had a 50% higher staff retention rate than those that hadn’t. Now what we were able to, kind of dig down a bit further on was really around what their kind of values were and culturally kind of how they were aligned to the founders.

Matt McKenzie
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And what we found was that kind of that sub 30 mark, where the HR professional had helped them was really cut through the stuff of, we’ll copy what Canva have done, or we’ll copy what…

Matt McKenzie
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
And with the values, I think what they’d found was that they’d helped to really kind of establish what I would say were authentic values rather than what I’d call aspirational values. How have you gone through that process of setting values for the business, and kind of what was the process that you went through?

Matt McKenzie
No, I mean, I totally understand, first of all, the benefit of having an HR person who sees those sorts of things, 2020, because as a founder you’re just going on what feels right. But it’s critical when setting goals and vision and mission. When you start, you tend to make something quite ethereal, because something that’s going to change the world, and it doesn’t actually connect your staff. You kind of feel, ah, we’re gonna, I mean, something like impact 100 million humans through data, and the people that are working don’t listen to it and go, oh, that makes sense. And so we’ve shaped it. Our first frontier is super, and we’re like, they see and understand super. And so you try and create goals to start off with that align with the super industry, and then everything comes down from that.

So your sort of values are like a subset of, okay, this is who we are as a business. This is our area. What makes us tick? How do we work well together as a team? What are the things that are going to drive us forward? And it has to come from everyone. So we’ve had people facilitate us in that process. We’re about to go through it again, but remote is such a powerful thing these days. People like to have their own space, their own kind of ways of work. And so we cater for that with remote, but we’re all still driving towards those same…

Dexter Cousins
And how have you kind of put, kind of the whole, I guess, concept of remote into the values?

Matt McKenzie
In the way that we interact, the ways of work, because you’ve got to have checkpoints where we can see where we’re at, and you don’t want to get inundated with meetings. So trying to give people ownership of components of, ownership of their little part of the platform. So you break it down into pieces. Say, what resonates with you, what makes sense to you. These are the components. We’re remote. You’re going to run and control that and we’re going to sequence in. And then driving what makes them tick. How do we work together as a collective? As I said, it’s a collective contribution. We don’t want people in there that are going to detract from our outcome. We’ve got very diverse people that sit in there that have to work together.

If we ever have issues, we need an open and engaging environment where we can easily ask each other or bring things up. Feel like I’ve got, still at the level with the size of my team, any issues can come to me and we just hit them on the head. Don’t let them fester, because you can see when people aren’t happy. It’s clear where people aren’t contributing to where they should be. And so you just try and shape the values around how they want to work and how they want to contribute to the success.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of the hiring piece, we talked about some of the approaches that you’ve had. What have been some of the other ways that you’ve kind of look to bring in talent?

Matt McKenzie
Yeah. So the network is, you bring in like key contributors that sort of come in and run areas, and you just want to, that they work, and you kind of want to replicate in the early stages them and their network, because they get to see and experience what it feels like to work at Nuj. So they kind of tend to be the best people to draw in others to come in and join. So the network has been a massive contributor to our business to date.

You do get to a point where that no longer can sort of cover all the areas as you kind of grow and go through the different stages of growth, because there’s also a thing of bringing someone in at a distinct period in time, and that person either needs to grow with the business or they become, sort of their contributions become less, and you need to bring in others to support that. So we’re just at that stage where we’re growing broader than the network, leveraging the LinkedIn and other channels and thinking about how we kind of grow out.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of, I guess, the fintech industry here in Australia, you kind of had much involvement, or have you been just head down, focused on your customers, focused on your clients?

Matt McKenzie
Bit of a mix, Dexter. I draw so much from others that have done it. I’m a big, only know what I know, and so you can learn so much from others. So I tap into CEOs of various size fintechs, lot larger than me, to sort of understand kind of how they went through, and they all go through the same things, and even business people like you, people that have grown businesses within super, not tech businesses, it’s business and you can learn from those people. So I have immersed myself in super probably more than I’ve immersed myself in the tech side of things.

I draw on the sort of experience and wisdom from people that have done it in different areas and you learn from that. But I sort of also the same way, kind of in the super space, you speaking to people who’ve grown businesses or CEOs of large super funds who can tell you the mindset and how people sort of deal with things within their space. Probably been where I focused most of my time as opposed to immerse, but…

Dexter Cousins
Okay. And I guess in terms of the future, what can we expect from Nuj in this next 12 months or so?

Matt McKenzie
Growth. Growth is our focus. Growth.

Dexter Cousins
You got to spend that money.

Matt McKenzie
Got to spend the money and transition, and as I said, you grow founder sales, it gets you to a point, and other components, you’ve got to evolve as a founder to cater for the growing.

Dexter Cousins
That is actually something that, really good point, because we talked about you being an accountant and this has been a founder sales business. It’s pretty remarkable what you’ve achieved so far for a bean counter.

Matt McKenzie
No, I mean, it’s all positions, but yes, from mine, that was, you’re learning about that whole process and understanding, and passion and resilience sells the initial part to it. It’s how you scale functions, and that function needs to grow and scale, and we’re going through that at the moment. Along with other areas of the business, you bring on people to solve things, but as the business grows, how do we grow with it? So I think the key thing for success is evolving and changing and growing.

And so what’s coming up this year, more in the growth side of things. We’ve grown, we’ve tripled, doubled and doubled our revenues after the last 3 years and we plan to double again, and so we’re in here to grow, and we’re also evolving our product set. Obviously, this AI sort of phase is growing significantly. We’re sitting on a very sort of vast and smart and clean data set from our clients in the way that we’ve constructed things, and so we’re diving deep into some problems to solve, leveraging large language models and AI to deliver our first feature at the end of the year. So…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Matt McKenzie
You don’t want to get left behind and it’s definitely where we can drive more value and that’s all we want.

Dexter Cousins
Excellent. We get some amazing talent listening to the show. If they’re interested in careers at Nuj, where’s the best place for them to find out more?

Matt McKenzie
Oh, we’ve got a couple of things going on at the moment in the product and sort of customer success and sales side. Just check on what’s going on on our LinkedIn and reach out. We’ve got a couple of team members focused on this, and so, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Great. And we get industry professionals. I’ve got a lot of compliance and risk folks in my network who I know listen to this show. If they’re interested in the Nuj solution, where can they find out more about that?

Matt McKenzie
Ah, I mean, we’ve obviously got websites, nujsuper.com, and LinkedIn. We have immersed ourselves in the space and we’re sharing kind of a lot of our insights either through our blogs or through our website, or just reach out. We love to get anyone who’s got an idea that they want to share, please.

Dexter Cousins
Great, Matt, it’s been amazing chatting with you. Such a great journey, and just really impressed with what you’ve achieved so far, but also the way that you’ve gone about it as well. Sounds like you really built really solid foundations for the business.

Matt McKenzie
Thank you, Dexter. It’s been great to be on your poddy. Thanks for having me.

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 you can give us a like and hit subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube. If you are coming back, thank you so much for your support, because it really helps me elevate great founders and great Aussie fintechs like Matt, like Nuj. Until the next episode, keep well.

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