Finding the Magic in Banking with Up

Up is a unique bank. As the first digital bank in Australia, they launched with a team of less than 30 people. They’ve since upended expectations of how banks can operate, using cloud hosting, continuous deployment and an ever-expanding list of unexpected, customer-first features. Their secret? A magical engineering culture.

“The idea of the pitch was we want to build technology led banking, rather than banking led technology” says Up co-founder, Dom Pym.

In today’s episode, we’ll dive into how Up is making us feel comfortable with our finances, what they’re doing differently in the engineering team, how to lead with authenticity within a product team and so much more.

Episodes air every second Wednesday/Thursday at 5:30 am. Don't forget to subscribe.

Episode interviewees: Up co-founder Dom Pym and Head of Product Anson Parker.

Key topics covered:

• Up's origin story and working with Bendigo Bank
• Creating a superstar engineering team
• Product management at Up

The best of Dom Pym:

• “We didn't want to be running a service business, but we also didn't want to just build technology and license it to the big banks"
• "Our idea was how can we use those technologies that exist in other industries and use them in banking?”
• "Up was the first bank where you could open a real bank account in less than three minutes, just by downloading the app from the app store and putting in your details.”
• "I still interview everybody. I do the last interview whenever we bring anybody on board”
• "We built a physics engine inside the actual app using the capabilities like the gyroscope and the gravity engine within your iPhone, so that you could feel your money sort of wobbling when you share your phone around. It seemed like it was almost a gimmick, but it's using technology to create an interaction and user experience that didn't exist with any other bank in the world.”
• "We want Up to be the number one bank in Australia for under 35s. That's going to take decades."

• The best of Anson Parker: “As much as we were frustrated or thought that it could be a lot better, I think a lot of our customers, especially those early adopters, had exactly the same view."
• "Some features we ship are almost nonfunctional - like celebrating people's yearly anniversary since the day they joined up, for example. It's not necessarily a piece of traditional functionality, but it really speaks to the relationship and valuing that.”
• "We didn't want to be a sign on top of a big building downtown, we wanted to be something p