Frost’s FinTech Awards celebrate a racket

“Quality journalism should hold people, companies and authorities accountable for their actions. I hope Australian Financial Review can do better in the future,” Frost lectured.

Frost, by the way, is the founder of the Ashurst-sponsored FinTech Awards, created from his FinTech Summit Australia unit, which celebrates a sector saturated with unwarranted self-aggrandizement on a scale rarely seen outside the journalism industry.

Last year’s FinTech Awards honored 23 masturbating categories, doubling the dozen fake idols crowned in the inaugural 2016 year. (This is a small sector with many competitive awards nights, the others being the Finnies and the Fintech Business Awards. Did we miss any?)

In 2021, the Frosts FinTech Awards gave the Young Fintech Leader of the Year to the head of OpenMarkets Group Ivan Tchourilovdespite pulling the needle that year on a $160 million float.

Less than six months later, Tchourilov resigned, and a board-led restructuring triggered 21 layoffs (all other executives remained), reining in an exuberant workforce that grew from 17 to more than 100.

In 2021, Mike Cannon-BrookesBNPL-backed firm Brighte won the FinTech award for best fintech lender, a small consolation for the 15 per cent of staff laid off in June 2022. Brighte had separately won a Finnie 2020 for best workplace diversity just months after it sacked 25 percent of its employees. employees at the start of COVID-19. Did they hire a bunch of kids from Western Sydney just for the price?

Still, it doesn’t beat 2019, when it was Female FinTech Leader of the Year Van Lee, co-founder, CEO and director of neobank Xinja which collapsed in 2020 after blowing investor funds on gormless marketing puffs and payments to depositors without earning interest by selling loans. Xinja also won Best Fintech Communications campaign that year, just months before Le and co-founder Erik Wilson deactivated their previously active social media accounts when their company hit the wall.

Of course, there are many deserving award winners in Australia’s fintech industry, but these awards are symptomatic of the sector’s pervasive culture of swine infecting the professional services economy to the point of deterioration.

Finnies in 2019 awarded the New FinTech Leader of the Year (under 35). Jessica Ellerm, CEO of ethical superannuation start-up Zuper who was killed by Diversa Trustees in 2021 over concerns that it was too small to act in the best interests of its members. That was, er, after Zuper promised members “a new way of thinking about super” and promised to be “not another super company” that would “invest in things you care about”. Need more proof that mission statements don’t make money?

In 2017, Ashurst sponsored the FinTech Awards’ Startup of the Year, which went to superannuation start-up Spaceship (fine in 2018 for false and misleading behaviour), whose director Paul Dortkamp was this year banned from financial services for two years due to incompetence and where former managing director Paul Bennett’s received a six-year ban for having a junior employee obtain an Australian Institute of Company Directors qualification on his behalf.

In 2020, when Andrew Bragg gave the keynote speech at the Fifth FinTech Australia awards, the same Ashurst gong went to Beforepay, the glorified payday lender that was so overhyped that its shares have fallen 85 per cent from their initial public offering price.

Surely they can all do better in the future.