Ferocia built Up Bank from the ground up. Up is the best digital product i’ve ever used and it’s not even close.
Whats so impressive about them?
I’ve been following the progress of Up since I began using the bank in 2020. It was a unique proposition at the time to build a technology-led bank over banking-led technology; the latter of which I have been intimately immersed in for 7 years and decided to leave last year.
I’ve listened to many interviews with one of the founders Dominic Pym and more recently with the CEO Xavier Shay and the thing I keep walking away from those interviews with is the sense that Up stands for something distinctly different in the fintech space.
Fundamentally they are trying to build a bank that makes a young person that might not be totally financially literate yet, come to terms with and feel good about their relationship with money.
From the ground up, they reimagined how a bank should behave and feel —
- from digital cards, to
- real-time updates in app, to
- pull to save spare change, to
- payment requests in thread, to
- thread-style payment history, to
- splitting and covering payments, to
- built in intuitive insights and analytics, to
- unique and quirky savings experiences, to
- Maybuys - a fun way to save for purchases, and to
- 2Up - the best joint account platform that exists, to
- a local chat-centered customer service experience, to
- fun and quirky colour palettes and aesthetic choices, to
- to Wise international payments integration built directly into the interface, to
- more ambitious initiatives like Home Deposit gamification and getting into Home loans.
 |
|---|
| they told everyone what they would do and then they just did it?? |
All of these and so many more cool features were built by Ferocia and deployed rapidly over the course of the last 3-4 years. That’s an insane rate at which to ship highly impactful regulated BANKING products. There’s a sense of courage and vision inherent in doing something like that which I deeply respect.
You have to really trust your designers and engineers and your tech stack. I’m so curious how they’re able to do it, from ideation to design to implementation, what their CI/CD pipeline is like and how they manage to have such impressive availability despite moving so quickly and trying so many novel things.
I’ve done stints at both Macquarie Group and Commonwealth Bank, both of which have excellent engineers, enormous budgets and are both trying very hard to modernise their development and deployment practices. But despite years of investment, restructuring and retooling, they can’t come anywhere close to the pace at which Up moves. Of course, this is because they are trying to modernise horrendously complicated and aging infrastructure, while Ferocia built Up, from the ground up, with the very intention of agility in mind. And they pulled it off.
I’m writing this in September 2024 and Up has by all measures succeeded in becoming a live player in the Australian financial ecosystem. Based on the latest investor day presentation, the metrics are quite impressive:
- >$2B in deposit balances
- ~900k registered customers (~4.5% of the Australian adult population)
- 27% YoY customer growth, with 80% of that through word of mouth
- Consistently the highest rated banking app
- $370M of home loans settled
To establish a digital bank and to get that level of market penetration and growth, and not to mention brand recognition and loyalty all within 8 years is an incredible feat. Especially in a country with a very well developed banking and finance sector with powerfully entrenched major players.
And to do it all without losing your soul or sacrificing your aesthetics indicates a very unique and healthy culture within the organisation. Things i’ve heard mentioned in podcast interviews about how they think about their culture and from job ads:
- A strong culture of trust in individuals to take on challenges
- A strong sense of trust in each other as humans
- A work environment that feels human is needed to create products that feel human
- An innate desire to do a good job, and to help the people around you do a good job too. “Do the right thing when no-one is watching” is one of our most cherished values. (Damn, integrity is so sexy).
- A group of smart creative people that have good taste and opinions on what makes software good (hook it in my veins!)
- A strong set of values around community and environment
- Ultimately, they’re working together to create products that make people feel good about money, and in turn feel good about life, because money is life.
I have an intuition that when you’re building complex products that have an essence to them, the culture of the company becomes part of the essence of the product!
Yeah okay, but why do you want to work there?
So the way I see it, i’m in the midst of a career transition. I’m rapidly upskilling into fullstack software engineering and I want to work somewhere that is at the intersection of:
- building cool useful things that make peoples lives better;
- working with the smartest, most talented, most creative and most ambitious people;
- in a culture that fosters personal and technical growth, autonomy, leadership and humane working conditions
In terms of working with their tech stack, as far as I can tell their tech stack is principally Javascript/Typescript, React, React Native and Ruby on Rails. I am already familiar with most of those and will be intimately familiar with all but RoR by the end of the year and I’m fairly confident I can pick up RoR pretty quickly.
Ultimately, I want to work with great people, on fascinating and difficult problems that once we solve will move the needle on improving the lives of Australians a little more each day.
That would be a place worth trying my hardest to work for, and I feel like that’s what i’ll find at Ferocia. So that’s why I want to work there.
This sounds incredible.
Some speculative takes
Looking to the future, now that Ferocia/Up have been acquired by Bendigo Bank, they have the security and resources of a larger player to continue their innovation and expansion.
I noticed from the recent investor day presentation that there is a massive digital transformation agenda in place at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank focusing on reducing complexity, consolidating platforms and building new digital capabilities to improve their competitiveness.
Earlier this month Xavier Shay was made Chief Digital officer at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, indicating an enormous reprioritisation of strategy. From the outside looking in, it seems like a significant vote of confidence that whatever magic Ferocia created with Up, they want to infuse that into the blood of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank proper.
That sounds really ambitious and if they pull it off I think they could be a real competitor to the Big 5 over the next decade.
I think there’s a ton of really interesting modernisation work to be done there and although I left traditional banking last year because it felt soulless and uninspired, I don’t feel that in my gut at all looking at what Ferocia might be able to pull off in the coming decade.
Maybe we can reimagine banking and finance to be more humane and interesting. Maybe building beautiful technology is how we get there.
I want to learn how to build beautiful technology from the best people.