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World first bank migration: Move Bank on Constantinople.

August 10, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Move Bank has become the first bank in the world to shift its entire operation, technology, product, operations and compliance, onto Constantinople’s platform. Dexter Cousins sits down with Move Bank CEO Mike Currie and Constantinople co-CEOs Macgregor Duncan and Di Challenor to unpack a migration that cut cost to income by around 30 percent and what it signals for every customer owned bank in Australia.

About the guests

Mike Currie, CEO, Move Bank

Mike Currie has led Move Bank, the Brisbane based customer owned bank founded in 1968 as Railways Credit Union, since March 2023, following senior roles at QBANK, Heritage Bank and Commonwealth Bank. Under his leadership brokers now drive more than half of Move Bank’s mortgage flow and over a third of its loan book is written outside Queensland.

Di Challenor, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Constantinople

Di Challenor co-founded Constantinople after running Global Transaction Services and Payments at Westpac, with earlier leadership roles at JPMorgan and Citibank across Asia Pacific. She was named one of the most influential women in payments in 2017 and has served on the boards of NPP, Zip and Superhero.

Macgregor Duncan, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Constantinople

Macgregor Duncan co-founded Constantinople in 2022 after serving as Chief Development Officer at Westpac, where he helped launch its digital bank. His earlier career spans Goldman Sachs, private equity in New York.

What we discuss

  • How Move Bank moved its entire bank, not just its core, onto Constantinople in an 18 month build.
  • Why Macgregor Duncan calls this a genuine world first transformation.
  • What synthetic scale means and how it offers an alternative to endless bank mergers.
  • How the migration cut Move Bank’s cost to income by around 30 percent.
  • Why Mike Currie ignored the core banking is a CEO killer warning and carried the downside risk himself.
  • How culture, and a basketball video rather than a PowerPoint deck, convinced Move Bank’s board.
  • What agentic AI and autonomous banking mean for the next decade of financial services.
  • Why Constantinople now has five banks live and expects ten by year end, with inbound interest from the US, UK and Europe.
  • What Mike Currie tells other bank CEOs weighing a technology transformation.

This show is brought to you by Tier One People, where we work with founders like Mac and Di to find the 1% who redefine what’s possible. If you’re scaling your leadership team, start at tieronepeople.com.

Links from this episode.

Constantinople on Fintech Chatter.

More on customer-owned banking.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter: the conversations fintech leaders actually listen to, presented by Tier One People, executive search for fintech.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders to talk about their secrets to success. I’m your host, Dexter Cousins, and in today’s show I’ve got three very special guests. I’m joined by friends of the show Constantinople, and they’ve also brought along one of their customers, Mike Currie, CEO of Move Bank. Welcome, everybody, and thanks for joining me today. Mike, it’s your debut, so welcome. I promise I won’t bite. For listeners and watchers who might not know Move Bank, could you tell us a little more about the business and your role as CEO?

Mike Currie
Certainly, Dexter. Move Bank started life in 1968. We’re a Queensland-based customer-owned bank, formerly known as Railways Credit Union. It was started in 1968 by Queensland Rail employees for their families, and has grown to 25,000 customers strong, with assets of $1.2 billion. We rebranded to Move Bank about ten or 12 years ago, and now have a national presence, banking everyone who needs our good service.

Dexter Cousins
Di, talk me through how the partnership between Constantinople and Move Bank came about.

Di Challenor
For us, meeting a bank like Move, who really had a purpose — who they wanted to be, and serving their members and customers over the long term — was what we were looking for. We’re looking for long-term partnerships, and we really want to enable our bank clients to grow and meet the evolving needs of customers in this market. Mike and the team came forward with a real view of partnership: we want to create an amazing member experience. And we ticked the boxes to be able to do that.

Dexter Cousins
Mac, last time you were on the show, we talked about Constantinople being the operating system for a bank. I’ve got to be honest, I walked away thinking, I’m not entirely sure what that means. Then I met with Mike last night, heard about what you’re doing with Move Bank, and everything made sense. Can you talk through, with this real example, how Move has helped bring the Constantinople vision to life?

Macgregor Duncan
What we’re looking to do at Constantinople is run all of the undifferentiated or commoditised aspects of a bank, and execute them at the direction of the bank itself. That covers all technology and infrastructure, all product, all operations, all compliance and regulatory reporting. It’s a very broad scope. The mission of our company is to manage all of that well, using software and AI predominantly, for a fraction of what it would ordinarily cost a bank to run — and in doing so, free up the bank to focus on what differentiates it in market, whether that’s its purpose, its customers or its community. That was the vision we had when we started.

Mike and Move Bank were the first bank to partner with us to shift its entire business across onto Constantinople. Not just a part of its business, but the entire bank. And I think we’re now right on the precipice of demonstrating the most complete transformation of a bank anywhere in the world, in so short a time.

Dexter Cousins
The import of what you’ve just said there, Mac, is why I wanted you on the show. A lot of people outside the industry wouldn’t see it, but to me this is a significant moment in time. I do have a question for you, though, Mike. Given the horror stories we’ve seen around technology implementations in banking over the last 20 or 30 years, are you crazy, or the most courageous bank CEO I’ve ever met?

Mike Currie
Maybe the most clueless and naive.

I’ve long been a subscriber to the CEO-killer rule: don’t get involved in core banking transformation projects, because inevitably the CEO never ends up working there. This was different, in that we didn’t set out looking for a core banking replacement. As Mac said, Constantinople’s proposition is unique, and it was unique back when I started talking to them. We had the same strategy gap all the smaller customer-owned banks have: we’re looking for sustainable growth to some level of viability and scale. In our view, just changing out your core banking platform doesn’t necessarily deliver that. In a lot of cases it turns out badly, and even if you get there, you’ve still got a long road ahead.

I’d known of Constantinople through other avenues I was involved in before I worked at Move Bank, and was aware of what Constantinople had been able to do with Great Southern Bank. Then it was just fate, really. Di happened to ping me on LinkedIn one day — and luckily for Di, it must have been the one day in a two-year block when I actually looked at that stuff. I got back to Di, and I reckon a couple of weeks later we were down here in workshops. Ultimately I managed to bring the chairman of the board down with us.

As I told the story last night, the model, as Mac described it, isn’t a thin banking platform. This is the platform we’ll be running the whole bank on. But it’s even bigger than that, because we’re entering into a partnership with Mac and Di and all their people here. I always had confidence in the unique nature of the proposition and the technology — as Mac said, it’s tier one technology that a small bank can get hold of. But the biggest thing we needed to be comfortable with was that it could be delivered, and the people. As of two weeks from now, we’re basically Mac and Di’s partners and vice versa, and we’ll be relying on Mac and Di’s people to help us run the bank. So the cultural element and the quality of the people is probably just as important as the tech.

Dexter Cousins
Mike, there’s a reputational challenge for fintech. Some of it is of its own doing, and some of it is mistakes made a long time ago, where there were a lot of promises, and the excitement of new technologies that were just starting to become available — the move to cloud, and AI as well — produced a lot of promises that never lived up to expectations. When Di was last on the show, one of the things that really resonated with me was that they’d been in those shoes before. How much did that give you confidence?

Mike Currie
It’s a really good point, Dexter. Mac and Di, as the founders and co-CEOs, are very credible people as well as being good, decent people, and they’ve got very impressive careers behind them. One of the attractions is that they’ve been bankers, so they understand that side of the fence as well as being able to provide the tech. That became a very easy conversation right at the start. It wasn’t as though Mac and Di had to prove themselves to us, or prove they could do what they were saying they’d do. We knew they’d delivered similar capability into a big bank previously. So I had a high level of confidence in both the individuals and what they were proposing. It’s probably counterintuitive, but that was a very easy first hurdle to get over.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things that also strikes me about this space is that a lot of the people making promises are in the US or the UK, with a delivery team in India. I remember when I first walked into this office, two and a half or three years ago, I was blown away by the energy. The place was full — particularly in 2023, that was something you didn’t see a lot of. How much did having a domestic team — people you can meet, the people actually building the solution — play into helping you make the call?

Mike Currie
It’s a really good point. At the second meeting we had here, I brought the chairman of the board down. We were in the boardroom, and Di, Mac and the team had gone to a lot of trouble with a big PowerPoint presentation and all that sort of stuff, which I just wasn’t really interested in — but we were polite. The good thing they did was roll a lot of their staff through the meeting, and they were all very impressive, young, enthusiastic, polite people.

But I reckon the moment we were sold was when one of the young fellas here, who was vertically challenged, plugged his phone into the screen and showed us a video of them all out playing basketball before work. This fellow was known as Chihuahua, because he used to get around at their ankles. He’s there with all the big, tall, good-looking blokes, running rings around them and strutting around like he’s Michael Jordan. My chairman and I still talk about that to this day. It was as good a proof point as you get of the culture in the place.

From that time on, Di and Mac have been very open in allowing us access to anyone in the business. As time went on, the quality of the individuals and the collective culture became clear, and that only built the trust and the confidence that we could do what we were going to do.

Dexter Cousins
The more time I’ve spent in the customer-owned banking space — we had Michelle Bagnall from Bank First on the show a few episodes ago, and the headline of that podcast was “the original peer-to-peer lender”, because of how the bank started — the more it’s struck me that the origins of fintech and the origins of a lot of community banks are bound by the same entrepreneurial spirit and challenger mindset. Maybe it hasn’t been getting the headlines, and it’s not the glitz and glamour associated with fintech, but the spirit and the cultures seem fairly compatible. What’s been your sense there, Mike — first, how your cultures have aligned, and second, now you’re working with Constantinople and the platform, what does that freedom help you do to really become a challenger brand in a very competitive space?

Mike Currie
It’s probably not something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. From the day I started, I’ve really believed in our company, our people, our purpose and what we’re trying to do. It’s not about being critical of the tools we have to do what we do — the team do an absolutely awesome job with what we have. In my eyes, the CEO’s role is to try to make people’s lives better, both for our customers and the people who work there.

As I say, we weren’t looking at this as: I need to go out and find some technology that all of a sudden makes us the Commonwealth Bank. But I do firmly believe we can be one of, if not the best, customer-owned bank in Australia. When we started talking with Mac and Di and looking at what they offer, it was very clear that Constantinople was one of the pieces of the puzzle to help us get where we want to be. I was also very excited by what they were doing. It was then, and still is, unique in what Mac and Di are offering, and the opportunity for us to be an early adopter — the first adopter — was fantastic. One of the exciting bits is getting the opportunity to grow with Constantinople. We’ll always be the first full bank that’s gone onto the platform.

This has been a true partnership. It’s never been a customer–supplier relationship. We haven’t set out to have kumbaya meetings and hold hands and chant, but my whole team have become very close to Di and Mac’s team, and that carries you a long way when things get tough. It comes down to culture. It’s not the three of us doing the doing. It’s all of these people out here.

Dexter Cousins
Mac, Di — how do you both feel about the go-live?

Di Challenor
Super excited. It’s a go-live, but for our company, everyone is super excited about seeing Move in the market and being successful. Our app designer is saying, the app I’ve been working on is on the App Store. Our payments team are so excited that cards are in the hands of customers. Our lending team is thrilled with what we’ve been able to achieve on our lending capabilities. And the AI we’ve incorporated into how we run the platform will show up more and more over time. For us it’s just an exciting moment. This is what makes your company. It’s tremendous.

Mike Currie
The day I came down — you guys hadn’t told the staff we were setting the go-live date — I stood up in front of all the staff and said, “Right, good news, we’re on.” I saw some of your engineers there, and it would bring a tear to a glass eye. I’m not prone to crying, but it does make you emotional, seeing what it meant to all those people. Again, it shows the culture is in the right place to get us where we need to get to.

Dexter Cousins
I’m curious, Mac and Di: this is now year three of documenting the journey of Constantinople on the podcast. Where do you feel you are on that journey, and what does this moment with Move mean for you?

Macgregor Duncan
As you’ve said, generational companies take decades to build. Revolut is into its second decade. Even companies we think of as really defining, like Tesla or SpaceX, are getting close to three decades old, and we still think of them as right at the vanguard of innovation. You don’t just wave a magic wand and build infrastructure that can run mission-critical activities. It takes a long, long time. So for Di and me, right from the outset, we had a clear vision, but we knew this would take a long time. What you set yourself up for is chipping away and meeting milestones.

I think Mike would agree: Move is small, but from a product-breadth perspective it looks like any universal bank. It’s not super different from a NAB or a Westpac in terms of product complexity. To shift the entire bank across to us — not just tech and product, but operations and compliance, everything — and to bring cost to income down by probably 30%, is incredible and genuinely a world first. It’s the biggest milestone for us.

Dexter Cousins
That’s what really struck me about what you were all saying last night: this is a significant moment for what it means for all these other banks.

Macgregor Duncan
I think that’s right. Specifically on migration, you have to have done one to realise that the number of customers being moved isn’t the relevant factor. It’s the breadth and complexity of what’s being moved across. Once you’ve got that, scaling customer numbers is not the limiting factor.

What’s important is that Move will be operating on a platform that’s probably better than most tier one banks globally. That’s not necessarily a reflection on tier one banks, who spend an awful lot of money because they’re managing a lot of complexity themselves. But when you build from scratch, you’re able to put in place a platform that’s both modern and really effective. That was always our initial motivation: that we could level the playing field and give smaller banks access to tier one bank capability — access to what we call synthetic scale.

You sometimes hear in the industry that unless you’ve got a million customers, or $30 or $40 billion of assets, you’re subscale and you don’t have a right to exist as a bank, so everyone’s strategy is to find a merger partner — merge, merge, merge. What we’re saying is: no, there’s an alternative path. We can offer synthetic scale through a platform. You don’t have to merge the underlying corporate entities or the licence; you can get the benefits of running off a common platform.

Dexter Cousins
We’ve seen the challenges when you do merge, too. It brings a whole stack of other problems — integration, bringing two cultures together, systems, tech. It’s not working out as well as people might hope. And you’ve been an M&A guy, Mac. You know the synergies on the financial model and what happens after the transaction are two very different things. I think that’s a super important point that isn’t out in market, in the press or the media — how you’re actually tackling this problem of scale.

Di Challenor
I completely agree. That’s what we’re unlocking here: the ability to get synthetic scale. Over the next couple of months you’ll see more of us talking about that and bringing it to life for people to consider. As you said, a merger definitely gives you a level of scale, but does it give you the cost efficiencies you also need? Those cost efficiencies don’t come just from a technology change. They come from an operating model change, which also needs to be considered when people are thinking about a merger — the breadth of what they could be doing, and how to do it differently and more efficiently.

Dexter Cousins
I used to say Australian fintech was punching way above its weight, and without a doubt it was. The last few years have been really difficult; it’s been hard for anybody to innovate because of the lack of capital. I remember the first time you were on the show, we were celebrating a record seed round, and I walked away saying the only way you’ll ever raise money here is if you’re tackling a massively complex problem — that’s your moat — and second, if it’s global. We’ve just come from the World Credit Union Conference here in Sydney. I was amazed at the global representation there, probably more than the Australian representation. What sense were you getting of the appetite for a Constantinople solution going global?

Macgregor Duncan
A lot of inbound interest from the US, the UK and Europe. One of the things we can say about the Australian market is that it’s a really good test bed for innovative capabilities and business models. You’ve got a sophisticated, highly digitally literate customer base and a sophisticated, credible regulator. Australia has a natural advantage in innovating in the fintech space. Hopefully later this year we’ll be announcing market entry into a range of offshore markets.

Di Challenor
The good thing is we’re addressing a global problem. Banking is pretty homogeneous across the world. People see that the traditional way of transforming a bank, and the time it took, means there needs to be a different option, and the platform approach we offer, and the comprehensive nature of the capability, resonates. We’re really excited about what we saw this week and the conversations we had. And more importantly, as Mac said, watch this space over the next six months.

Macgregor Duncan
I’d say the most important thing to solve in banking is getting cost out. Most banks around the world, even large banks, operate at around 50% cost to income. There’s a huge amount of inefficiency in the way we manage banking globally. Finding a way to get dramatic cost efficiencies, and to pass them on to customers, is really critical, and that’s a big part of the innovation we’re trying to drive.

We sometimes use an analogy with our team: SpaceX. SpaceX’s rockets operate much like rockets did 50 years ago. The physics and the chemistry haven’t really changed. What SpaceX has done, incredibly, is reduce the cost of sending rockets up by 70, 80, 90%. That’s a dramatic innovation within the space, even though the rocket itself is doing the same thing. In banking, the Medici were running banking in much the same way banking gets done today. You take deposits, add a margin, lend it out, assess risk and try to get your money back. Those things haven’t fundamentally changed, but our ability to do them much more cost-effectively will change over time. That’s one big piece.

The second piece is that the direction of travel with AI is pretty clear. It doesn’t take much imagination to look five or ten years out and see that we’ll all manage our finances using agents that interact with the MCPs within a bank. That age of autonomous banking isn’t too far away.

Dexter Cousins
Mike, what does having a technology like this at your disposal now enable you and the team to really focus on?

Mike Currie
The short-term horizon for us is making sure our existing customers are looked after through the transition, because we know they’ll then have a much better experience and the ability to bank in a simpler, faster manner. One of the exciting things is that going to a cloud-native, AI-enabled platform will let us be a bit broader in our thinking about solving customer problems. I can’t give names, because I’d breach an NDA for the second time today.

Dexter Cousins
We can edit it out, so don’t worry.

Mike Currie
We’re in discussions with another fintech about a partnership to help solve a problem they have, which will also be fantastic for a segment of the population. We’re only able to be in that conversation because we’re going to be on the Constantinople platform, and I can only see those opportunities multiplying from here. Yes, it’s about cost to income and all that, but ultimately our role is to look after our customer base and help them thrive and solve their problems. As you said before, we seem to be in a never-ending cost-of-living crisis, and people are looking for ways to do things better and be financially better off. We take that seriously, and this partnership puts us right at the point of being able to help.

Dexter Cousins
Di, what’s your take on where you see things over the next decade?

Di Challenor
I think it’s all around AI. Think back to the early 2000s, when all these websites came out where you could compare where to get a mortgage or a car. With AI, your agents will be making these decisions — determining where you can get better pricing, and where you can get a customer experience that suits what you need. That’s the direction we’re headed, and we’ll look to make those capabilities available to Move to make them more competitive, and then to other clients. Definitely agentic solutions — whether that’s selecting banking products, getting a mortgage or managing your deposits. That’s really where we’re taking things.

Dexter Cousins
Mike, I don’t want you to give away your competitive edge, but we get a lot of bank execs listening to the show. What would be your words of advice to them if they’re looking at a technology upgrade — particularly with that “don’t touch the core, it’s a career killer” urban legend that goes around the space?

Mike Currie
My advice would be to think of it from the strategy and the customer first, and not become a technology shopper, because I’ve seen a lot of my peers get sucked into a never-ending cycle of RFP after RFP where nothing ever gets done. Obviously I’m on the journey I’m on, and I think we’ve made an absolutely fantastic investment in this partnership. I’d say to all my peers: you should be talking to these guys. I’m equally confident that once we’re there and they all see how well it’s going, they’ll be knocking Mac and Di’s doors down.

And, without wanting to sound self-serving, I knew going into this that when these things fail, the board doesn’t get sacked — the CEO gets sacked. I knew I was carrying all the downside risk, with no upside for me. But sometimes you have to do the right thing for your customers and your staff to get going. So I’d say to my peers: you need to start looking at things from that perspective.

Dexter Cousins
Before we direct people to your beautiful new website where they can find out more, what else would you like to add about the conversation with Move?

Di Challenor
I come back to partnership. You can have great technology and great capability, but it’s really about how you come together to deliver it. That’s what’s been so rewarding for us working with Move — not just for Mac and me, but for our whole company. Partnership is a really fundamental part of our company: partnership with our clients, partnership within the company, partnership with the people who support us. It’s so critical to success.

Dexter Cousins
And Mac, as an ex-graphic designer, I’ve got to talk about your website. It’s a work of art. It’s beautiful.

Macgregor Duncan
It is very good.

Dexter Cousins
Where can people find out more?

Macgregor Duncan
cxnpl.com.

Dexter Cousins
It only took you four years.

Macgregor Duncan
We had a philosophy for a long time that things like a website — and frankly marketing and brand — weren’t really our focus. Partly because of what we’d seen with a lot of early-stage companies: four different logos, and a lot of talk about what they’re going to do, and about things like capital raising. We always saw capital raising as just an input. What we wanted to be known for were outputs. The reason the Move migration onto our platform is the biggest moment in our company’s history is that we can finally say we’ve done what we set out to do. When we came on your show three years ago, we said, this is our vision. We haven’t been out there saying it again and again. We wanted to come back and say: we’ve done it.

This really shifts our ability to use proof points. Hopefully the banks we sign in the latter half of this year will be sizable global banks, who have long said to us: that vision is amazing, something like this needs to exist in the industry, but can you actually build it? Come back to me once Mike has risked his career to create a proof point.

As Di said, five banks are now live, and we should end this year with ten. You were in the UK two weeks ago, and people were saying, I can’t believe you have five banks live — you only started four years ago. How did you do that? We’re really excited about this milestone and what we can do for Move.

Di Challenor
We want to be known for doing what we say. We deliver — on a beautiful website, too. But as Mac said, we’ve taken a greenfield bank to market, we have a really exciting embedded proposition we’re powering, and now we have a retail bank. Those are the three main pillars of the strategy we wanted to undertake, and we’ve done it.

Dexter Cousins
As somebody in the industry, I talked about the import of this moment and this episode. To use Mac’s SpaceX analogy, if I were to visualise what this moment means to me, it’s like watching a video of the first SpaceX rocket going up, coming back and landing successfully. It’s really difficult to get that across without hubris, or the usual hype we’ve got going on in fintech, because people outside the industry won’t understand — they’ll go, so what? But the moment is definitely not lost on me.

Macgregor Duncan
Thanks. Banking is one of those things that, from the outside, looks reasonably simple and straightforward. We saw this with a lot of our engineers when they first arrived: they thought, I think we can build all of this really quickly. Banking is much, much more complex than anyone appreciates from the outside. So for us to have delivered what we have within four years, I do think it’s really significant. Hopefully what we can show with Move Bank is that you can fundamentally transform the entire operating model of your bank, put it on a more sustainable footing with better capabilities for your customers, dramatically reduce cost to income, and free up capital to grow your balance sheet. This is a very different way to structure banking, and if we look out a decade, there’s no reason a company like Constantinople can’t be powering a very sizable portion of global banking.

Dexter Cousins
Mike, finally, before we wrap up: a lot of people listening are probably looking for better banking experiences as well. If anybody wants to find out more about Move, where’s the best place to head?

Mike Currie
movebank.com.au. They’ll find all the best offers, the best people behind it — and a beautiful new website.

Dexter Cousins
Everyone, it’s been fantastic to catch up with you. Congratulations on, as I said before, a momentous moment. It’s been special for me that you invited me along to share it with you, and it’s really cool that I get to document the journey you’re on. Thirty years from now: the next SpaceX.

Macgregor Duncan
Exactly. Thank you, really appreciate it.

Dexter Cousins
As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us wherever you listen to or watch podcasts. And if you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. It really does help me get great guests on like Di, Mike and Mac. Until the next episode, keep well.

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