BOQ Group · Aug 2018–Nov 2023
Virgin Money
Australia
Building the innovation function and FinTech partnerships that gave a 148-year-old institution the agility of a neobank.
Building the innovation function and FinTech partnerships that gave a 148-year-old institution the agility of a neobank.
Bank of Queensland acquired Virgin Money Australia in 2013. By 2018, the digital banking landscape was being disrupted by a wave of neobanks — Xinja, 86 400, Volt — all building cloud-native, app-first banking from scratch, unburdened by legacy systems and accumulated technical debt.
The challenge for BOQ Group: how do you compete with the agility of a neobank while leveraging the scale, capital, and regulatory standing of a 148-year-old institution? The answer was to build the innovation capability that could identify, pilot, and scale the FinTech partnerships needed to make that transformation real.
I established BOQ’s Innovation function from zero — defining the strategy, governance frameworks, commercial thresholds, and organisational capability required to run structured pilots with globally leading FinTechs and scale what worked into the core business. Each partnership went through a defined test-and-learn process: a targeted pilot with live customers, validated against commercial viability thresholds, with a board-level business case before scaling.
A key partnership that reached scale included Frollo for financial wellbeing and open banking — enabling Australia’s first bank-led Open Banking account aggregation — giving BOQ and Virgin Money the technology infrastructure of a neobank at institutional scale.
The Virgin Money app launched in 2021 — account opening in under five minutes, real-time Osko payments, PayID, biometric authentication and Savings Round Up. The Lock Saver Feature launched shortly after — a first in Australian banking — allowing customers to lock savings and earn a higher interest rate.
BOQ went live on the Temenos Banking Cloud in August 2022, migrating retail banking operations for both BOQ and Virgin Money onto a single cloud-native platform. The group gained the agility of a neobank at the scale and standing of a 148-year institution.