David Hornery
In 2014, David was at the height of a highly respected 30-year career as a senior executive in Australia’s mainstream banking sector, with top roles at NAB, ANZ and Macquarie Bank under his belt, when he and long-time colleague Joseph Healy – after years of conversation about what they saw as the growing market failure in the banking of small to medium-sized business in Australia – decided to take the first steps in building a new specialist bank aimed solely at serving the country’s SMEs.
With what they saw as the progressive industrialising, dehumanising and “productisation” of the banking offering to SMEs in Australia, the pair sought a return to the provision of banking to SMEs as it used to be done, with personalised access to the kind of relationships, funding and financial services advice that SMEs need in order to thrive.
Realising their unique position of extensive combined experience within the sector to address this issue, the pair explored international markets and identified the model that could best meet this unmet need. The result was Judo Bank, described as “Australia’s only challenger bank purpose-built for small and medium businesses”– the term “challenger bank” referring to specialist contemporary banks challenging the sector’s dominant players by offering more progressive personalised and client-centred services.
David recalls the sector landscape at the time, and the forces that inspired Judo Bank’s establishment. “In the six or seven years leading up to 2015, Joseph and I were both working at NAB, and we saw up close the growing market failure in the way banking services were being provided,” he says. “This was later highlighted in the Royal Commission [into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, established in 2017 with its final reported tabled in Parliament in 2019], in which the antipathy towards Australia’s ‘big four’ banks was laid bare. The oligopoly was powerful, and SMEs had little to no real alternative.”
