Ruth Hatherley – CEO of Moneycatcha Ltd

Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing stories from our technology-inspired 2024 edition of Catherine magazine. 

Our first article is from Ruth Hatherley (Class of 1995), CEO of Moneycatcha Ltd.

Ruth has over 25 years of experience in the finance industry, specialising in residential and commercial finance. Throughout this period, she was regularly awarded for sales delivery and performance success in both Big 4 Banking and Aggregator Broking companies. Whilst leading Moneycatcha Ltd, she has been awarded the Winner of 2019 Fintech Entrepreneur of the Year and AFR Qantas Women of Influence Awards, amongst other awards which reflect the growth and success of the company.

I want to start off by saying I am the least technical CEO of a Tech company going around! For those of you who knew me at school, my favourite subjects were Theatre Arts and English Literature – as far from engineering-based subjects as you can get.

What I have learned as I progressed through life is that technology is an enabler at the very least and at the core of disruption and innovation at its very best!

The first 20 years of my career were spent in finance, working in a Big 4 bank and then as a partner in a mortgage broking firm. It was during this time that I fell in love with what money can enable – the great Australian dream of owning a home. Reading financials and understanding cashflow forecasts is a byproduct of banking and finance, but at its core, the purpose of lending, in particular, is to enable choice and help consumers realise their dreams.

The biggest frustration for me during this 20-year journey was that in 1995, consumers applied for home loans via fax machines using photocopied payslips as supporting evidence, and it took approximately 45 days to settle a home loan. In 2015, we were able to do the application and verification steps of the home loan journey via some sort of software application, but we had not reduced the time or the stress felt by the consumer to obtain a home loan. What I observed is that technology solutions had been built and adopted without a real focus on solving big problems – the focus in my industry had been on micro solutions with small cost and time savings.

This inspired me to invest in building a technology platform to revolutionise the way consumers in Australia were delivered the most competitive home loan offers through any distribution channel as fast as possible. Armed with an idea and some savings, I invested in putting together a group of very smart people to explore how this could be done by leveraging the latest technology in the market. I quickly understood that engineers are the technical construction industry for entrepreneurs’ ideas. The art was to articulate your idea in a way the engineers understood and be brave enough with your vision to bring everyone on your journey! When I understood the language I needed to use to explain my ideas to the team and how to respect the process of agile software development, magic happened, and my innovation came to life.

One of the most critical events to influence our success is the introduction of the Consumer Data Right Legislation in 2018 – read more about it here – https://www.oaic.gov.au/consumer-data-right or https://www.cdr.gov.au/about. This is a beautiful example of how an idea (policy) can not become reality for Australian consumers unless technology companies take on the challenge to innovate with new products and solutions and ultimately enable the outcomes the legislation intends. This legislation meant all the banks and lenders in Australia had to share data about their products and pricing policy, but it needed technology companies to build solutions to interpret and share that data so consumers could benefit.