Acorns Australia chief George Lucas on the challenges facing Aussie fintechs, and the future of the industry
Since launching its fintech offerings early last year, Acorns Australia has been embraced by consumers looking for alternatives to traditional financial institutions, but its chief executive and director George Lucas says Australia still has a way to go to improve innovation and support for startups in the space.
Acorns is an app that allows users to invest their spare change in five diversified investment portfolios by automatically ’rounding up’ leftovers from small transactions like daily coffee purchases, incrementally investing these roundups and allowing users to track the performance of their portfolios.
Acorns Australia was founded in 2015 as a joint venture with Lucas’ company, Instreet Investment Limited and US fintech giant Acorns Grow, which was founded in 2014. The Australian operations were officially launched in February 2016.
Since then, the startup has signed up over 1% of the Australian population, and chief executive George Lucas says the app has seen “a very high adoption rate” among Australian consumers. The company now has 340,000 users on the platform, 120,000 active monthly users, and has reached $100 million in funds under management.
Lucas spoke with StartupSmart about the growing trend for specialised fintech offerings in the country, and the challenges startups in the sector currently face.
The future of fintech
Lucas says Acorns Australia is not the only fintech platform to be seeing “great adoption” in Australia, pointing to the successes and “huge growth” of Afterpay and zipMoney as evidence that Australian consumers are hungry for new fintech offerings.
Earlier this year, Australian consumers ranked fifth in the world for fintech adoption, and a recent report found Australia is overtaking the likes of Japan to become the second largest market for alternative financial services in the Asia Pacific region, sitting behind China.
Lucas believes the rise in popularity for fintech services is a result of a paradigm shift towards financial services and advice being delivered in small, focused offerings, rather than as comprehensive services.
“People historically think of seeing financial advisers being a holistic procedure where they talk about your entire financial future and plan,” Lucas observes.
“Now it’s being offered in bite size pieces — if you want to borrow money to pay you go to Afterpay or zipMoney, if you want to put money away into a fund you go to Acorns, rather than a big, holistic approach,” he says.
These “bite size” offerings are “making way for more startups” in the fintech industry, Lucas says, as consumers increasingly look for niche, focused offerings.
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