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Peter Jones – Nimo Industries: Breaking Into Mutual Banks.

July 17, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

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.

We are celebrating the World Credit Union Conference coming to Sydney. Dexter Cousins will be bringing you interviews from the show and special announcements.

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.

Links from this episode.

More on mutual banks and core banking on Fintech Chatter.

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 podcast where I talk with industry leaders about their journey and reveal their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, an executive search firm that works exclusively in fintech to find the 1% of talent who redefine what’s possible. For the past decade, we’ve been helping founders like today’s guest hire the leadership talent who turn startups into billion-dollar companies. If you’re looking for that unique talent who can transform your business, then start at tieronepeople.com.

Now onto today’s guest. Peter Jones is co-founder of Nimo Industries, a Melbourne-based fintech who’ve built a lending and core banking platform that serves mutuals, credit unions, and non-bank lenders. It’s been built specifically for the Australian market, but what makes Nimo interesting is Peter has lived the problem himself as an executive mutual banks before starting Nimo. Peter, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Peter Jones
Thank you, Dexter. Very nervous and looking forward to spending the next bit of time with you.

Dexter Cousins
Come on, mate. You’ve met me before. I don’t bite.

Peter Jones
No, yeah, looking forward to having a chat with you and indeed talking through a journey.

Dexter Cousins
It’s really good to have you on. And I know we talked about this, gosh, I think maybe it’s 2 years back, potentially you coming on the show. So, timing of it, I think for me really relevant given that we’re about to go into a really special Collab event in the next couple of weeks. I’ll liken it, on a bit of a smaller scale, but I think still as significant as when Sibos came to Sydney in 2018 and we had, I guess, a fintech ecosystem where it was bank bad one side, fintech good on the other, and there was a lot of tension, and I think that event really brought both parties together.

And I’m getting a really similar vibe about this event and what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem. So, I thought you’d be the perfect person to bring on and really talk about that landscape, what you’ve built with Nimo, how you’re serving that mutual sector, and I guess some of the observations that you’ve got as well. But before we go into all of that, maybe if you give us the pitch on Nimo and what you do.

Peter Jones
So, yeah, as you mentioned, we provide origination and core banking for Australian ADIs, ASX-listed lenders, and private lenders. Platform can be used in a modular sense. So, as we know, some companies have a tech stack that can’t be changed over in whole. So, we can do it in pieces, including things like broker portals, commissions, internet banking, and so on.

So, yeah, so that the platform is really created to be able to solve the large problems and all of the challenges that lenders go through to be able to kind of slowly migrate from their current state, which is kind of hard, quite fragmented, quite disparate systems, to be able to over time and iteratively just be able to kind of move from that fragmented state into a system that and efficient online platform for their staff and their members and their own clients as well.

Dexter Cousins
So, talk me through kind of typically what a technology stack might look like before you go into a client, and then what it might look like afterwards.

Peter Jones
Yes, look, I kind of go back to my days before I worked at places like ANZ and NAB, and ME Bank, as well as a few other mutual banks in that before, and as CEO at Plenty Credit Union at the time, a mutual bank almost 20 years ago or so now. And really what you kind of repeatedly experienced, whether it’s large or small, we had fragmented systems sitting together. If you needed to make a change to one system, you needed to get the change to the other system. You had to coordinate those two vendors. You had to get the data model right. You had to sequence it.

And it was kind of three things. It was really time-consuming. It was really cost inefficient. And yet it was really risky. So, when you kind of look at those three elements together, there’s lots of reasons for lenders to not want to make change. We talk about the CEO killer, touching core is a CEO killer and all those types of things. It was really where we’ve kind of come from, but I think that the work that we’re doing at Nimo especially and other participants in the market is really changing that narrative and making it possible as well, too.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So, one of the things that I find really fascinating, particularly if I look at the mutual sector, that they’ve probably got assets on balance sheet that are probably on par with the annual technology spend, all right, the CBA or something like that. Given that you’ve been a CEO, you’ve worked in those environments, you’ve seen the amount of money that gets spent to compete on technology, what on earth possessed you to go and start up fintech to solve this problem? It’s not like you’ve raised a gazillion dollars to help you do this. So, what was it that made you think, “Hey, we could actually solve this problem?”

Peter Jones
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
And do it from a kind of WeWork and Nimo initially.

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, I think ultimately led a little bit of frustration. So, look at the nexus with Nimo around 2016 or so. Leann, who’s one of our other co-founders, was working at one of the big four banks. We’re putting a deployment of a well-known system into the bank. From Leann’s point of view, there’s the war rooms, there’s the tension, there’s the no one can make a decision, nothing can be done. From my point of view, it was like coming from that regulatory background and operational efficiency and change, like having started up businesses and had to bring technology together. It was like, we actually can do this.

And so then the technology enablers were becoming available in market. I think as we’ve spoken about earlier, Dexter, as well, too. Like you kind of go back to the early teens, the emergence of these enablers. So, for us, we initially started building on a system which is called Pega. Yeah. And I had familiarity of building that with back when I was at Wesfarmers in the insurance space. And so, we started building on that, but we thought, “Well, hang on a minute. Unless you’re really institutional, well, we’re not going to be able to kind of manage that. We don’t kind of control it.” And then we started building on Salesforce for about a year and a half. And it’s like, “Well, hang on a minute. We can’t do that.”

And what we realized at that point of time is to meet the needs of who our ultimate customer is going to be, the mutual banks, enabling technology that kind of rivals what the big banks or even better, we needed to be able to own more of the solution. So, that’s when the enablers came through, our partnership with AWS, we’re able to actually build Nimo up as a 100% serverless system, which made it a cost-effective for us to build, but also cost-effective for our ability to be able to price it effectively to ultimately to our clients.

The mutual banks that you mentioned before, I used to know what our balance sheet and our P&L looked like and how much we used to spend on legacy tech. And I knew that we could do better. And so, that’s basically why, yeah, coming up to 10 years ago, actually we’re in July. Now, 10 years ago is when we actually put some Post-it notes on the back of the big glass wall and said, “Okay, this is what Nimo looks like.” And we’ve got some really funny videos and little snapshots along the way as to me those kind of grown. I think our first iteration was like bank statements and digital ID. All the way from that to what it is today, which is massive.

Dexter Cousins
Obviously, you’ve kind of through that period, which, ironically, last month I had to celebrate the 10 years of starting Tier One People, and I didn’t have Post-it notes. I had a black book that I’ve still got which, go back and read it and think, “Wow, you really didn’t know what you were doing.”

Peter Jones
Yeah. Well, I have a pity, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
But I look kind of over this last 10 years and I think, as you mentioned a couple of things there, digital ID. We had obviously the big open banking push in 2017, neo banks and that noise, BNPL, crypto. Now we’ve got the AI kind of buzzword and kind of hot topic. How have you kept yourself focused on the prize of delivering for customers and not get distracted by the kind of noise where the money, and certainly if you’re looking for investment, you kind of get pushed towards, “Hey, put that in your pitch deck, and we’ll give you some money.”

Peter Jones
Yeah, and now look, it is a really good question and the current era of AI is the perfect example for it. You’re right. The conferences that we go to, whether it’s Intersekt or to the banking financial services conferences, there’s always the theme and so we talk about it in the email. So from within the platform itself, like, yeah, it’s AI native. We’ve won awards for AI. There’s a whole range of value-adding AI there, not kind of the gimmicky AI.

But we’re pretty pragmatic at the core of it. So when we talk about AI, it’s not just the delivery of the functionality. We’re actually kind of at the moment even helping with AI governance for our lenders as well, too. And so we’ve just got a piece at the moment where we’re creating some new functionality. We’re actually drafting up a policy that our lenders… so when you look at especially a mid-size to smaller ADI or mutual bank and guy is a lot of them are not going to have the internal IT bandwidth because they’re already running their systems, like they’re running the bank, they’ve got to run the bank and change the bank, but they’re really busy running the bank.

And so we feel like we can help them by saying, okay, these are the things that we’re fully immersed in this and these are the things that we’re thinking about, we can provide this to you as a structure. Sure, you can modify and change it, but it’s a starting point to kind of work with. So part of our book is kind of called AI enterprise and comes along with a AI policy, and this is how the data stored, how the data is processed, what models it uses and how you can control that. So whether it’s APRA or whether it’s your risk committee or whether it’s any internal management means that we’re kind of helping not just with delivery of the function but also delivery with the thinking behind it, because I think everyone gets excited about functionality.

But it’s really when we, it’s the infosec, it’s the risk and the regulatory posture, and I think that’s a really important part of when you’re dealing with banks, especially in Australia. One of the most heavily regulated environments in the world, it’s not just the functionality, it’s also what sits behind that as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, there’s, I guess, a number of challenges certainly that I see where I’m talking to a CEO of a mutual or I’m talking to country manager, sales director of a technology business that’s serving them, is the regulatory part, and that there’s kind of specter hanging over: if we get this wrong, I kind of could go to jail, definitely will lose my job. You’ve got this next part of price and budget, which mutuals particularly see this from US firms. They look at the mutual sector in the US and think it’s the same here in Oz, and the money’s nowhere near the levels that it is.

And then the third part, I think, is the kind of talent piece as well, right? Like the capability of who you’ve actually got in the business. Some mutuals have, I think, done a really good job of kind of improving the bench strength of talent, whereas others they could have people who’ve been with the business for 30 years. Now we’re talking about how you’re going to use AI. How have you seen, on that kind of spectrum of those three kind of challenges, have been the ones that probably caused the most sleepless nights for the CEO?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, I think when we talk about the different personalities of different mutuals, cuz a lot of times the mutuals get all bundled up into a few different categories, big ones, little ones, and so on. But you do actually have some mutuals who have got the intent to be quite innovative, and we would say one of our smaller to mid-sized mutuals is getting some really great acclaim for the use of open banking and CDR. So, a place called South West Slopes, who’s out in Young in New South Wales, is doing an amazing job around using that. So, for example, that kind of intent to be able to do things is really great.

Another example is there’s a place for mutual bank which is a couple of hours north of Sydney. They actually made a decision to use a platform and then went live within about five or six weeks afterwards, just by being agile and adopting and just having a really positive sense, but actually understanding what they were doing.

Dexter Cousins
Really, wow.

Peter Jones
There was nothing irresponsible. There was nothing loose about the process they went through. They were just very clean in what they needed to do and the ability to do it. And then we, yeah, we’ll work sometimes with some other lenders who want some great capability and they’re happy to work with us, which is, yeah, they’re really happy to work with us as to how that might look and how that can deliver for them. And then they’ll ask us the questions around, “Okay, our risk community needs to be satisfied around the issue of I’ve got…” The intent is for Map to be able to provide comfort around that. And so we’ll kind of work with them to deliver that.

Again, just calling out a few different places, are the Capricornian up in Rockhampton as well, too. Like they’re actually really super innovating and they’re happy to know if that call, the flexibility within a framework or the ability within a framework to make sure that we can explore the boundaries to… I think it’ll be a bit of an earlier point is in fintech and the old narrative of build fast, fail quickly. Yes, kind of that doesn’t fly.

The consequences are too great. So it’s almost like we need to have a safety net there where we’re kind of building out capability, but we’re doing it in a very safe and predictable way that satisfies it. And companies like Capricornian Bank now, they’re a really good example of being able to… and Dale, who’s their CEO, is really forward-thinking around the sort of functionality as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, and if I look back at that, we talked about that kind of 10-year period just before we had the RADI license, and there this push to let’s have new banks, let’s have new banks. And at the time I think we had some like 120 ADIs out that it was, okay, we’ve already got competition in banking. Shouldn’t the question be how do we make these banks more competitive? What is it that you’re seeing from these mutuals that, it’s not just about innovation, but how are they actually serving their customers? And how is, as a platform like Nimo, actually helping them grow and compete with a larger bank?

Peter Jones
And yeah, look, some great examples. Well, we’ve got one of our mutuals who they made themselves or not, but pretty much most of our mutuals who use Nimo made themselves a national business, but one in particular, they got 30% growth and they’re getting their products noticed on Sunrise. They’re not in New South Wales, but they’re getting business from around the country. They’ve really been able to get leverage technology to be able to open up their market.

And it’s funny cuz one of the things I always say, it was so hard to get a RADI, and we actually, yeah, contacted some companies through the journey of getting a RADI, cuz from previously being in that space, it’s like, guys, you’re raising a lot of deposits, but you got to make money out of… The whole purpose of the bank is to, you got to protect those deposits, but you got to invest those deposits to give a return to those depositors, and they just weren’t doing the lending piece.

For us to be able to open up that lending piece, but also to… I think one thing that’s not very well known about Nimo, like things like term deposits and that, are also done through the system as well. So, if you manage both sides of balance sheet, so not only does it open up lending in new markets as well, too, it also opens up that deposit growth through normal deposits and term deposits for ADIs, Australia-wide as well, too. So, if you factor that point as well, you don’t need to be big or small to provide great capability to market. You just need to have the right partners and operating the right ecosystem.

So, one of the things that we’re really… you talk about the World Credit Union Conference, which is coming up. The old COBA this year has been rebranded for the global one. Is one of the leading things that we’re going to that around is around that ecosystem, because you can either have a fragmented disparate ecosystem, which is really hard, really hard to keep up with the market, hard to keep up with what your member and customer expectation is. Cuz your members are not just looking at what other banks might be doing. They’re actually looking at the other market. What’s the experience when I go to here, and it’s really easy to do something digitally, and I’m not feeling that with you at the moment.

Yeah. So, part of the problem that we’re looking to solve for all of our lenders is helping them not get distracted with the things that they don’t need to get distracted with. Let us take the lifting on that, cuz we can do it for one, do it for many. But we’re going to try to work with you to give you options of capability that are relevant to your target market or to existing membership bases as well, too. Just making that relevance there and giving you… you shouldn’t have a less experience by working with a mutual bank than what you do with a big four. So.

Dexter Cousins
How much of an advantage has it been, your background, when you’ve been pitching to customers?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, to be honest, it has been an advantage, cuz like I have walked in the shoes. I know how hard it is. You’ve got a core banking system which may present some challenges, and you can be quite sympathetic and empathetic to that, but also to work through solutions on how that might work, and being able to talk through the language. And I think that that’s culturally something that we have through the Nimo team. We can be excited about functionality and features, but you’ve got to be able to land it in a way which is safe and comfortable for the lender. So I think that that has definitely helped, but also as well, too, I think that there’s the notion of being able to work across the broader part of our team so that we can kind of spread that empathy across to our client base as well.

Dexter Cousins
And I guess from a tips, advice, things that you’ve noticed that are some of the forbidden things to do when you’re dealing with a mutual or you’re approaching them as a fintech founder? Any things that you’ve kind of seen that have really made people run the opposite way?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look at it, and it kind of flows in from the last question. I think that one of the things that we have that’s been fortunate for us is we actually, we respect and we acknowledge the regulatory environment in which they operate under as well, too. So things like, like in for… and even for a lot of new fintechs that come to market, they I frustrated. They’ve got this great functionality, but they just can’t get work with an ADI to get it. So for us, accepting things like ISO 27002, CPS 230, 234, we’ve had the capability within our very efficient team to be able to deliver against those. That’s really, really hard, especially for a new entrant as well, too.

And so maybe there’s some suggestions that I’ve got around how mutuals can work with new fintechs, as well as fintechs accepting and working with some of the mutuals around their platform. It’s really acknowledging that those concerns of the mutual are real and you can’t just kind of sell them away, if that makes sense. For a lot of software companies, the pre-sale, we’ve all had the experience of the pre-sale activity over-selling the product. You get in and you kind of thought you bought this, but then you got that. We try to talk about promises made and promises kept.

So when we’re dealing with our lenders, we understand that the solution that we’re suggesting to them is going to have to be delivered, is going to have to be regulatory compliant, is going to have to meet all the things that we know that a bank, or an ADI or a mutual bank, is going to need to be provided. And making sure that that’s kind of delivered through the process. It’s not a sell and then kind of manage expectation process afterwards. It’s got to be pre-sales and post-sales with is the one activity as well.

Dexter Cousins
Obviously, I’m coming from the talent perspective, Pete. And I think one of the challenges, frustrations that I tend to have is two things tend to reoccur over and over. So with those promises, the delivery part. Winning the business isn’t actually the difficult part, the delivery part is. And the delivery part in a really talent-short market means that if you’re trying to win business and then you’re going to hope to hire the people to deliver it once you’ve won the business, like, you’re going to… One of my favorite movies is a movie called Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Michael Caine, and he turns around and says, “Yes, but the poacher who shoots at rabbits scares off big game.”

Yeah, it’s a very apt, I think, kind of comment for what we see happen in fintech, where you get little players all chasing around making massive promises, and yeah, screaming to the world how awesome they are, and then they go into a business and drop the ball, and screw it up for the rest of us. So, I think there’s that challenge.

The other challenge that I see from a talent perspective as well is that if you’re going out to try to raise investment, and you’re looking at building a platform that is dependent on emerging technologies, like AI, do you realize how much these people are going to cost you? Do you realize it’s a kind of emerging technology, where how do you assess the skills? So, I guess with that in mind, like, how have you approached the whole talent problem, given that you are essentially a startup, you ain’t got deep pockets. You’ve come from the banking world, and not necessarily the startup or fintech world. What’s been your approach to bringing in the right people?

Peter Jones
Yeah, now, look, good question. Also, too, I think over the last 2 years, we’ve actually changed our narrative internally to where we don’t talk about it ourselves as a startup anymore. We refer as a scale-up. And that changes the mindset of the people in the organization. And because of that, like we talked, we’ve got 20… What is it? 20 banks and lenders. We’ve got over 20% of the mutual banks in Australia. We’ve got ASX-listed companies, and we’ve got some pretty innovative private lenders as well, too.

And I think with the startup mantra, sometimes there’s a little bit of rah-rah. We’ve got to talk a big game. We’ve got to oversell. We’ve got to project bigger than what we are. And I think we’re pretty pragmatic at the end of the day. And then that kind of then comes into people who are successful within Nimo and people who are not successful within Nimo.

I’ve got a bit of a background in sport, and so therefore I love a good sporting analogy, and so in the team we talk about like we need to have… We don’t have to have every player on the team to be an A-grade player. And we talk about like we are… We’re not just A-grade local club level. We talk about we need to be an A-grade international team. Now, we need to be the Australian team that’s playing at the World Cup. And to do that, we only have so many seats on the bus, and every seat needs to be absolutely hands down.

So, we talk about people who want to make a positive impact, people who respect the complexity and difficulty of the business that we run and who our customer is, and the inconvenience around regulation that it’s part of the world. We’ve got to live within those guardrails. So, it’s not for everyone. As we know, sometimes you’re getting the right mix of the person maybe who’s come from an enterprise, knows banking inside out, but then they kind of come into Nimo, the pace in which we make promises and keep promises, that we’re not going to take 12 months or 18 months to do something. We’re going to do something and it’s going to be in weeks and months at the most, not months and years.

And also to the care. We talk about, which is really funny word to use around technology maybe, but actually caring for what you do and caring for your customer.

And then there’s kind of another underlying layer, cuz no one’s going to come from the background you expect, is around education in the system. I love one of the guys who worked here. We call him Andy Bain. We needed to create something which was a home loan experience where you could have unlimited products, unlimited security groups, unlimited split lines. So, you’ve got a developer who through education and through his knowledge of the business and being involved with who our customers were was able to actually create something with relatively… it’s obviously still had engagement from the regulation perspective and from the workflow and process point of view, but they were able to do that.

So what that means is from an efficiency point of view, you’re able to do more with less because you got more of those international A-grade players. Instead of having… I’ve worked at other places where we kind of had a lot of organizations using… but you got the offshore team and 3 o’clock in the afternoon when it’s in all our tickets off, and then we’ve got the stuff back, and it’s like, ticket could have been 1,000 words and very descriptive, and what we asked for and what we got were two different things.

Which is kind of loops back to the whole genesis of Nimo, where we wanted to give control back to the lenders to be able to run their own organization and not have to kind of request off technology all the time and ask for something that was X and get back something that was Y. So that the people in the business need to be engaged with that. Not be a passenger, and yeah, as you know, the recruitment process is very, very important in relation to that and identifying the right talent and the right attributes to go into that as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. How have you done that? Have there been any kind of secrets that you’ve, kind of things that you’ve employed that helped you in identifying those traits in people?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, in the early days it was kind of going back to the people who you worked with in the past, who didn’t have to explain things to, they just knew it. So like we’ve got Cassie Mazurek, who’s one of our, I’ll say, co-founders, who came on the journey a few years in, and I worked with her back in Australian Unity as well, too. So you got people like that. We’ve got Ahmed, who’s our chief product officer as well, too. I worked with him previously. And he’s worked on all the systems of all of our lenders, so he can kind of talk the talk and walk the walk.

And then as we’ve gone through more mature stages, when there’s groups of people or departments of people within the business who are doing those recruiting, it’s really kind of coming back to their knowledge and their behavior, and obviously working with good recruiters like yourself to identify that talent as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. When it comes to the growth side of things, and you mentioned you’re not now a scrappy startup, but you on this journey down the prize. What have you experienced as you’ve gone on that journey, and what are some of the challenges that you get as you start to grow that perhaps you hadn’t anticipated when you were earlier in the business?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, it’s funny using the COBA as a bit of an example. So first years of COBA, like we had a little stand in the corner. And we’d go to there, and one of our lenders, Josh from the mutual bank, tells a bit of a joke. He’s like, me and I used to be this little orange stand in the back corner, talking about all the hopes and dreams of what we could do for you type of thing. This year we’re platinum sponsor, Leann’s speaking at the plenary, we’ve got our own breakout sessions and things like that.

And what is now, what is different is trying to give comfort and confidence that what we say we can do, that we will do for you. And that’s a very different… cuz there’s still a lot of promises being made, especially at the moment. There’s promises in the banner, AI being thrown around everywhere. So we try to calm that down and say yes, you are safe from an AI… We are 100% AI native into the platform. We’ve won awards for AI. We’re doing the AI infrastructure, the AI governance piece as well. We’ve got all that covered for you, but you still need to operate on a platform that is highly regulated and compliant.

And so it’s kind of calming down all the choices, cuz there’s so many more choices now. If you roll back 10 years to go to now, 10 years ago we were all whining that it was hard to run a bank back then, yeah, but like now there is infinitely more choices. So, what we want to do is just work with our mutual banks, work with our customers, and just try to de-risk the underlying portfolios so that they can see what are the clear priorities, so that they can progress and deliver against their proposition.

Because there is so much noise and there’s so many reasons not to do things. We’ve been speaking to some lenders for like over 5 years and they’re just paralyzed. Like really, they’re trying to do this, they’re so internally focused, and we want to help our lenders not be internally focused but be externally focused, and by using our ecosystem and connecting with other partners external to us as even as well, too, to help our lenders… We want our lenders to be able to at their scale not needing to… if they need that time, that’s a decision for them to make, but we don’t want them to have to merge because they don’t have the right infrastructure for its scale to be able to deliver on the promise that they want to make to their members. So, that’s a lot of where we spend our time. That’s why, with our current and with our emerging customers as well.

Dexter Cousins
And when you look back at that 10-year journey, you talked about the start and you mentioned the Post-it notes, what are the lessons that you’ve learned yourself, and like, kind of what are the things that you’ve had to change about yourself as well to get to the point that you’re at now?

Peter Jones
You quoted a movie earlier on, and I think I’m trying to remember what the name of the movie is, but there’s a guy who goes to the pub with his mate and his mate just laughs at him for all the mistakes that he’s making in life. There’s a guy, Tom, who we both, Leann and I, worked with at NAB, and it was really funny cuz our early years of the journey, he was a great sounding board and a great ear and a really good advisor. And through those early years he couldn’t believe how many times we were pivoting, cuz we were trying to find value for our clients and the assumptions that we had at the start weren’t actually… once they start to get tested, they weren’t where the value landed.

So, I always look back on where we started and to where we got to and the amount of pivots that we needed to make, and be humble about it, which is not always… I think you start up, when you’re senior in a business you have to have a sense of confidence in your opinion and what you know and what you’ve learned through your career. But I think about being humbled or something, humbling yourself has something that has worked. Like we have been, up to this point, we are totally self-funded. So, like there is literally no other company that kind of works to the same level with the same level of maturity in the banks and lenders in Australia.

And that doesn’t mean that we’re always going to be self-funded. We’re having some conversations at the moment around how we can partner up with the right investors to actually scale the benefit that we can provide to more lenders in Australia. So, that’s not always going to be the way we are, but it has been pretty hard. It’s been like resilience and staying true to the cause. There’s been many sleepless nights. There’ve been many all-nighters, but that’s what you would expect.

Like you don’t… My sister’s quite wise. I think she was, many years ago, she was business woman of the year or something like that. She used to run a mutual bank in Melbourne called Victorian Savings Alliance. She’s like, “Peter, this is what you asked for. So, don’t complain when you get what you asked for.” So, I just think that resilience over time, but being okay that the journey that you start out with may not be the journey that you they create.

And that’s the reason why, for us at core banking, we’ve been pretty silent about it over the last few years. We’ve got great relationships with a range of other core banking providers. But what we see is by assisting our lenders to work either around those core banking systems or adjacent or else those out can actually be a benefit to our clients, current and future. So, it’s time when it’s being comfortable to enter into that discomfort around saying, “Okay, this is actually a time now where our lenders are paralyzed. They’re frustrated. They actually don’t feel like there is an alternative.” Now, we need to step into the market and say, “Hey, we’re here. It is actually pretty mature. We just haven’t been talking about it, and we can help you solve your problems.” Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
I noticed that you and your co-founder Leann had swapped roles as well. You started off as CEO and you’re now COO. One of the challenges that I find, Peter, particularly working within businesses that are in a similar position to yours, right? Still privately held, still founder-led, is they’ll ask me to bring in somebody who’s going to do the things that they can’t do, and they’ve got that level of self-awareness to know it. But then the challenge becomes that if essentially you’re engaging me to go and find a stranger that you have to build trust with. And letting go of your baby and what you’ve built, right? To somebody who you’ve only just really met and interviewed a few times, rarely works out well.

How have you kind of managed that process, between Leann and yourself, of one, I guess, kind of recognizing, “Hey, it’s time for us to switch roles because this is the direction that we need to head and here are the qualities that you bring to it.” But also then when you start to grow and you’ve exhausted your network from people you’ve worked with previously and you’re now bringing in kind of strangers into the fold. What have been some of the things that you think, “Right, we absolutely have to get this right before we kind of pull the trigger on it.”

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, it’s the cultural fit. We go to great pains to explain what it means to work in a scale-up. And the responsibility of the industry. Now, you do get some people in there like, “Yeah, yeah, I know my BA. I’ve done this before. It’s easy for me.” It’s like, “No, no, no, like the consequence of the business of this.” So, it’s understanding how serious in nature it is what we do. Making sure culturally we kind of use the term “we take our work seriously, not ourselves.” Like there has to be light and shade in the business as well, too. We’re humans at the end of the day, so we need to be able to create an environment of culture where there’s light and shade. And we need people who understand as well, too.

And also, too, I think the challenge… in the past I’ve actually kind of run businesses where we’ve scaled up in the foreign banking. So, the one thing I know, I had two main really good advisers through my early career. And they were, you’re just going to be happy with people doing things 80% of the same way as what you would do it. And so that extends, and you’re kind of constantly reminded of that all the time. Bringing people in, bringing them forward. And we’ve got some great people who have never… like the majority of the team here would never met before. And we’ve got some amazing people who do amazing jobs.

Like we’ve got a few people who are emerging. One in particular I think of them is like, they are the next me of me. It’s not about the people that we’ve got. Like these people who didn’t even know the platform a year or so ago. Their ability to be able to talk to a man through music is just amazing.

And I think the interesting part that you talk about from Leann coming in. So, Leann’s always been the chair, and she made that move in coming into CEO when she recognized the fact that in her career, she’s an organizational psychologist from her background. She’s always been able to work with groups of people and senior executives. Like she’s worked at NAB and all those places. She’s worked with government and all those really difficult and challenging environments to be able to kind of cut through and get good outcomes for people.

So, there was the time where we became big enough where it was right for her to step into that role, because I’m always there to kind of talk the industry talk and to make sense and meaning. But for her to manage that change, manage that kind of conflict, I think it’s a really, really good and really important. And also too, little part of me, I’m a little bit of a nerd at the end of the day. I love the product. I’m the product guardian for Nimo. It gave me more opportunity to really immerse into that product. So, it was a great fit, and our alignment between the direction of the business is 100%. So, it was just a good move at the time, and that’s part of the role change that enabled… I think at the time we had maybe three or four lenders, and that was the time where we went from that up to 20 lenders. So, definitely the right move.

Dexter Cousins
It’s couple of things that you mentioned there that I think are really interesting. So, one, I think Leann’s background. If I look at what I’m seeing, not necessarily in the fintech world, I think they’re already structured in a way and operate in a way that if anything, AI is going to help them grow way faster than they ever could previously. But if I look at incumbents, and how they’re structured, and these kind of command and control structures, they’re the businesses that I see who are most at threat, and whose people’s jobs are most at threat through AI.

And so that kind of having that organizational psychologist coming through, where the things that I’ve been looking for in this last 10 years is assessing people on: can you context switch, right? Like, one minute you’re talking to the regulator, then the CTO, then a client, right? And how do you keep yourself focused and know that point that you made about 80%, right? Like knowing enough to know that when you’re being it… so that you’re not the expert, but yeah, you kind of know enough to know, hey, like this doesn’t intuitively feel right.

And then the other part to it is that what you talked about with how you’re hiring people. For me it’s been about, this last decade, what’s somebody’s propensity to learn fast under pressure, and what ownership do they take? And we’ve got these terms now, growth mindset, context switching. When I started the business 10 years ago, I think growth mindset might have just been kind of starting to get some traction.

But when I break it down, I think it was more looking at my kids, who at the time would have only been, what, five and four, and how they were starting to engage with things like YouTube and tablets and stuff, and they’re learning, and my son would come and show me stuff. Where did you learn that? I just watched YouTube. And so there’s kind of real thing of, they don’t get formal training. They don’t learn in school. They take it upon themselves to go, oh, there’s something I’m interested in here. How do I go down the rabbit hole and figure it out?

And I think that’s the challenge that I’m seeing in most organizations, is even those that are relatively new organizations, their mindset and their experience of, hey, well, how do you organize a company? How do you hire people? Has been based on the command and control hierarchies and competency-based interview processes that, man, if you came to me and I said, what are you looking for? There’s no chance you’d say, just could you find me somebody who’s competent?

That’s going to want you to find a rockstar who’s going to turn us into a billion-dollar business, right? And say, okay, right, how do we find that? So, I think all those things that you’ve shared, it’s kind of that intuition piece of how do we navigate. When you go with your gut, it’s amazing how things start to kind of slot into place, rather than when you go with, “Oh, well, this is what they’re doing in Silicon Valley. Here’s the Netflix playbook,” like all of those things that I think have actually caused a lot more problems for founders in Australia than they have actually helped them.

Peter Jones
Yeah. That’s funny. We even, through this year, we’ve got what we call our macro features. So, we definitely have our themes around… like we’ve got a CDR enablement theme because we want to help address CDR utilization. It doesn’t matter if all of our lenders want to use CDR representatives. We’ve got to have more base lenders using CDR holder. So, it’s funny we talk about… It’s funny, yes and no. I did get the growth mindset book as well, too, along the way. I am a career, so I needed some help somewhere in the company. We all got that.

But context switching, it’s funny, we talk context switching, people can just go down any… So, it’s context switching within a framework or within some boundaries. And I think from an email point of view, if we have our kind of macro themes, internet banking, CDR, core banking, and if we have the people within our team have the ability to have that original thought, that critical thinking.

You mentioned kids before. I’ve got a daughter who’s in year 12 and two other boys, both 14 and 15. And we just talk to them all the time around critical thinking. I think that is going to make a difference in your life and your career, is your ability to think critically. And we don’t reflect that at work as well. Yeah. It’s funny. We’re doing some recruitment. I just spoke to someone before we came in here, and we’re getting developers who we ask them basic questions around the code test that they’ve just done. And in that example there, someone just asked, “Can I just refer back to the internet to actually answer a question on a bit of code that I just gave?” this part of a code test.

Like, those people, they’re making themselves redundant, they can’t be doing it, redundant. But the developers who are critically thinking, who are knowing how and why and know how to use the tools. And that’s just in the development space. From a business… I didn’t know that I was going to be doing this role 15, 20 years ago.

15 years ago, 20 years ago, I was a frustrated CEO on the back of… Our biggest problem then was coming out of the global financial crisis. I was wondering about liquidity and capital and how we’re going to manage the next storm. Now we’re worrying about, okay, how are we going to manage AI? And to your point, there’s always going to be these different things across a career. And how do our kids coming through, and how do we as mature people even in our careers, doesn’t matter whether you’re 50, 30, 40, 20, how do you add value to a company through your attributes and your critical thinking as well.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now we’re coming to a wrap, Peter. You mentioned there that you’re hiring. If people are interested in finding out more about Nimo, where’s the best place for them to go?

Peter Jones
Yeah, look, if you go to our website, nimoindustries.com, if you send me a query through there, it comes through to me. Definitely things like around… we’re looking at risk and governance people who have the capabilities to manage that across things like banking, across payments, across just general banking and knowledge. So that’s a key piece. From a development point of view, we normally have a good flow of developers who are always knocking on the door. But whether it’s through the website or through LinkedIn as well, too. Obviously very happy for people to connect with me directly on LinkedIn and to message through there as well, too.

Dexter Cousins
Well, awesome. Peter, it’s been great to chat with you. Thanks for sharing everything with us, and mate, congrats on everything that you’ve achieved so far. I love nothing more than a bootstrap story, and so, to take on something as complex as this and bootstrap it, I mean, kudos to you, my friend.

Peter Jones
Hey, so thanks. I’m appreciate you having on, and I hopefully won’t be two years until I…

Dexter Cousins
Well, that’ll be interesting. It’ll be interesting to talk about when we talk about October, right?

Peter Jones
Exactly. Exactly. So, now it’s been great talking to you, and I hope those people listening have been able to have a bit of value out of it along the way.

Dexter Cousins
Cool.

Peter Jones
Thanks.

Dexter Cousins
As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and X. If you’re new to the show, then make sure to follow us wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. And if you’re coming back, thank you so much for your support. It really does help me in showcasing great businesses and founders like Peter and Nimo to a worldwide audience. Until the next episode, keep well.

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