Australian FinTech company profile #60 – Ezidox
1. Company Name: ezidox
2. Website: www.ezidox.com
3. Key Staff & Titles: Frank Mastronardo – CEO
4. Location(s): Sydney, Australia
5. In one sentence, what does your fintech do?: Perfectly scalable, an award-winning global cloud platform that helps businesses seamlessly connect with their customers. ezidox™ eliminates as much as 75% of the time it takes to file, search for and retrieve documents. ezidox™ is a secure, compliant portal for any business requiring document collection and uploading such as Identity Forms, Policy Acknowledgements, Qualifications and Induction documents, Income Statements and Tax Returns. All documents are easily and securely named and indexed through our high performance automation software. And where customers need to provide documents to your organization, ezidox™ has been designed as the most friendly, intuitive, mobile based application, delivering a proven, efficient and highly responsive customer experience.
6. How / why did you start your fintech company?: ezidox™ began its journey in 2014 in response to an industry wide challenge in the capture and collating of documentation. ezidox™ has since developed into a popular, powerful, scalable and flexible platform and shaped intuitively by our proven business model of Conceive, Create and Commercialise. Initially developed for the mortgage market, ezidox™ received a major award from Citibank in the 2015 Mobile Challenge as the Most Innovative in Productivity. ezidox™ was then invited to participate in the Stone & Chalk Fintech Accelerator which led to a trial a Tier 1 bank’s direct mortgage business unit where it delivered incredible results. The platform was then fast tracked to enterprise-wide licence. Full SOC 2, Type 1 certification followed, with final approval received in January 2019.
7. What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?: Prepare yourself (and your family) for the long haul. The dream of becoming an overnight success is just that…a dream. Buy a lottery ticket instead – same odds with a faster outcome! Most start-ups will take around 7 years of incredibly hard work to mature to a point of reasonable scale or exit, although there are always exceptions. Make sure you are solving a real problem that you really care about as you will have to eat, live and breathe it for quite a while to succeed… Oh, and one saying I really like is that “start-ups are a contact sport – you just need contacts”…get out there and network like a maniac.
8. What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?: It’s happening now that our blood, sweat and some tears have moved us past the tipping point! The problem of document collection is global and impacts almost every type of business. We are attracting some fantastic customers in various markets overseas without any marketing or promotion to date. Lawyers, insurers, accountants, franchisors are all using ezidox to help make their document processes more efficient. We are also finding new partners that want to build ezidox into their own platforms that address industry-specific problems, which is an area we are keen to explore. We’re big fans of co-creation – every feature we develop is based on the feedback we get.
9. What other fintechs or companies do you admire?: That’s a BIG question as there are many. All of them, however, have one thing in common – putting the customer first. Add a dash of entrepreneurial spirit to a genuine problem and mix it up with an absolute obsession about the customer and you will get some great results. There is nothing more exciting than seeing a start-up go from zero to hero by solving real problems for real people.
10. What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?: A sense of humour is critical, as building a start-up is way too hard otherwise. We love having a laugh, especially at our own expense. One of our first “moments” was when we had spent a long time designing ezidox to help mortgage brokers, yet one of our first customers was a charity that collected confidential information about children at risk. Fortunately confidentiality and security has always been a bedrock of our development.
We hadn’t even thought of the many, many uses for ezidox at that stage. We then entered ezidox in a competition with a bank to help their mortgage processes and found out that 19 departments all had the same problem – that was our “A-ha!” moment – realising there was a much bigger opportunity than we had imagined. So we have evolved from a simple app to help mortgage brokers to become a sophisticated, scalable SaaS platform that solves a global problem that lurks in virtually every department of every major organisation. Now that’s interesting…!
