Peter Jones - Nimo Industries: Breaking Into Mutual Banks.

Peter Jones used to be the CEO he now sells to. It's helped him bootstrap a core banking platform that now holds 20% market share in Australia's mutual banking sector, without a dollar of outside capital.

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Peter Jones co-founded Nimo Industries with Leann Jones after living the core banking problem himself as a mutual bank CEO. Ten years ago, Peter and Leann were sticking Post-it notes to a glass wall in a Melbourne office. Today, Nimo is a platform serving over 20 Australian banks and lenders, entirely bootstrapped. 

The category Nimo competes in has seen huge raises. Mambu has raised $446 million. Thought Machine has raised $706 million. nCino raised $222 million in venture funding before listing on Nasdaq in 2020 at a $2.8 billion valuation. Nimo built a comparable platform on savings, sleepless nights, and two former bank executives' understanding of exactly what their customers would tolerate.

I've known Peter a while, and when we sat down for Fintech Chatter this month, two things stood out more than the product itself.

Most fintechs think you need to break into banks by overselling.

He didn't start in Fintech. Peter spent close to two decades in banking before Nimo, including as CEO of Plenty Credit Union nearly 20 years ago, and in roles at ANZ, NAB and ME Bank. That's the exact profile of customer Nimo is targeting: more than 20 Australian banks and lenders, and counting are customers of the platform.

Core banking change has such a reputation for going wrong that Peter and his team used to have a name for it in their old jobs: "touching core is a CEO killer." Careers end over botched migrations, so most mutual bank CEOs simply don't touch the system, and the fragmented, twenty-year-old stack stays exactly where it is.

Peter told me the advantage isn't the technology he's selling. "I have walked in the shoes, I know how hard it is," he said, and it shows in how Nimo sells: no pre-sale promises it can't keep, because he's watched vendors make exactly that mistake from the buyer's chair.

That experience shows up in the compliance work most new entrants can't stomach. Nimo has built to ISO27001, SOC2 and APRA's CPS 230 and CPS 234 frameworks as a condition of entry, not a differentiator, and Peter is blunt that it's "really, really hard, especially for a new entrant." The pay-off is speed once trust is established: one Nimo client went live within five to six weeks of signing, where Peter says the old model runs to "twelve months or eighteen months."

Another client, South West Slopes, used Nimo to push further into open banking and CDR than most lenders twice its size. "We try to talk about promises made and promises kept," Peter said, and that line summarises the whole sales model.

Bootstrapping against some of the world's biggest Fintechs.

Nimo started out self-funded. Peter and Leann first built on Pega, then spent eighteen months on Salesforce, before realising neither platform let them control enough of the stack to price the product at what a mutual bank could actually afford.

That's when they went 100% serverless on AWS and stopped renting someone else's architecture. It's an Australian specific version of what Mambu, Thought Machine and nCino solved with hundreds of millions in venture funding.

Every fintech conference Peter goes to runs the same cycle: digital ID, open banking, neobanks, BNPL, and now AI, each one arriving with investors keen to see it in the pitch deck whether or not it belongs in the product.

Nimo never had that pressure, because it never had investor money. "We're pretty pragmatic at the core of it," Peter told me of Nimo's approach to AI, at a moment when most of his funded competitors are running the opposite play.

None of that made it easy. "There's been many sleepless nights, there's been many all-nighters," Peter said, and he's clear that staying "totally self-funded" for a decade was a choice made under real strain, not a badge of a honour.

What it bought Nimo is now, for the first time, a seat where it can choose who backs its next phase of growth, rather than needing anyone's money to keep the business alive. Peter told me those conversations are underway. Investor meetings are happening from a position most bootstrapped fintechs never reach.

Nimo on the World Stage.

Ten years after the Post-it notes went up on that WeWork wall, Nimo is a Platinum sponsor at the World Credit Union Conference, the globalised version of COBA. They've attended every year but have evolved significantly from what one client jokes was "a little orange stand in the back corner."

Leann is speaking at the plenary. What's notable is that their presence doesn't come from a term sheet and fresh round of funding. They've earned their standing from spending a decade being the kind of operator, and the kind of business, that couldn't afford to be anything other than exactly what it promised.

Find out more: https://nimoindustries.com/

Dexter Cousins is the founder of Tier One People, Australia's leading executive search firm for fintech. He has completed 200+ executive placements and hosts Fintech Chatter, Australia's longest running fintech podcast with 370+ episodes and 30,000 monthly listeners across 40 countries.