Simon Costello is co-founder and chief executive of FrankieOne, the Australian company whose platform connects banks and fintechs to hundreds of identity, fraud and compliance data sources. It began as a neobank that did not work.
London and Monzo
He started his career in investment banking in the UK and spent about ten years abroad. He moved into start-ups as the British neobanks were launching and was an early beta user of Monzo. "Even in those early days I could see the banking revolution was about to take place," he has said.
Indonesia
He then moved to Asia to help build CompareAsiaGroup, now MoneyHero, a financial comparison site that expanded to seven countries and raised $96 million from backers including Goldman Sachs and Alibaba. He ran its largest market, Indonesia, which grew past 100 people. After its Series B he headed home to Australia.
The Neobank That Failed
In 2017 he founded Frankie to build an Australian neobank, recruiting Aaron Chipper, a former chief technology officer of Friendster, through a SoftBank introduction. Building a bank proved harder than he thought. He returned the money to investors and let the team go. "It was highly embarrassing, to be totally honest, when you have to turn around and say, 'guys I got it wrong'," he has said.
Fixing Legacy Systems
He had noticed that few products help banks fix their own operations, and compliance was the hardest problem of all. "The big four started before computers were invented," he said. "They have systems that are 40-plus years old." The same investors backed the new plan. By 2021 three of Australia's four major banks, including Westpac, used FrankieOne.
He set out to compete with the big banks. He ended up building the tools they rely on to know their customers.
