My vision for the future? Everything to be called Superhero.

John Winters on the start-up rollercoaster, his Hollywood dream and building a really good business model.

If anyone has the vision and ambition to make a real change in financial services, it’s John Winters, the CEO and co-founder of the leading Australian investment and superannuation platform, Superhero.

From his big break in financial services to turning the Superannuation industry on its head, when John Winters spots an opportunity, he goes for it.

I always had a dream to get into financial services. I think it was the glitz and glamour that Hollywood put on stockbroking.

“I always had a dream to get into financial services. I think it was the glitz and glamour that Hollywood put on stockbroking. Some of the movies made in the eighties attracted me at first, but as I understood it more, there was a huge amount of attraction around what doors could be opened.”

And it certainly opened doors for John, who got his first job in financial services 15 years ago after calling the CEO of a stockbroking firm ‘pretty much every day for three months’ until he gave him a job.

“I was opening envelopes, stuffing envelopes, and doing data entry and worked my way up to the derivatives desk before becoming an adviser. Working in all those areas, you start to see what’s missing in a sector.”

For John, the missing pieces were transparency and equality. After becoming fed up with the limited access everyday Australians had to grow their wealth, John launched Superhero with co-founder Wayne Baskin, giving Australians a revolutionary way to invest their super (pension) in their chosen shares and exchange-traded funds.

“I had this great idea to build a super fund that would make Super transparent and give people control and would be live in three months. I had a 15-page document, and it was all going great. I went and had a chat with Wayne and said hey, this is what I'm doing. Can you be an adviser? And he said you’re not going to be live in three months. I don’t want to be your adviser. I was feeling a bit deflated, but then he said, I want to be your co-founder. So the rollercoaster went straight back up again.”

I wanted to experiment with different ways of communicating with not just our clients but the next generation of clients too.

You need that emotional support from who you're in business with, someone who is also living and breathing it every day.”

A real-life dynamic duo, John admits he couldn’t have achieved what he has without the skills and support of his co-founder.

“I would not have been able to build what we’ve built without Wayne. It was all about the tech - how do we get this going? Even though we had none of the regulatory licenses in place at the time, and we didn't for another two years, we knew we were going to get there. But we also knew that we needed to build something pretty special and outside of my wheelhouse. Having a wingman to bounce things off is absolutely needed. You've got the business support, the tech support, operational support, but you need that emotional support from who you're in business with, someone who is also living and breathing it every day.”

When asked on the Upfront podcast which superhero he most identifies with, John says he’s been tagged with the Hulk after a couple of moments when he’s turned green. Not surprising, given he launched a start-up during a pandemic.

“It was terrifying. The whole country went into lockdown, and global markets crashed. We had no live product and no licence to launch. It was a soul-searching moment and a low point on the start-up rollercoaster. But then the market very quickly bounced back, and we saw this massive acceleration of the rise of the retail investor. That was the trigger point where we said we've built this trading platform within a regulated super environment, let's pull it out of the super space and launch a direct to customers.”

Since then, he's continued to ride on a high. The launch, John recalls, was a ‘pinch-me’ moment beyond their wildest dreams.

“We told investors that we were going to get 10,000 customers in the first 12 months. We raised a bunch of cash just before we launched on that basis, and we did 10,000 customers in the first three weeks. Looking back, it was a pinch-me moment. It was pretty exciting. Every day everyone came to work, and there was just this buzz that more people were signing up, more people were coming in asking us questions on live chat, and more people were trading. There were millions of dollars coming onto the platform. There were media articles and people calling for comments. It was just going off and beyond our wildest dreams.”

John talks openly about the ‘huge challenge’ of being a new player in a highly regulated market and in doing something different to the status quo. So does he have any regrets?

“Looking back at the way things have played out, I wouldn't change anything. At the time, it felt like we were getting knocked back at every turn. We tried to get the relevant trustees set up. We tried to get the regulators over the line. We tried to get administrators involved. And it was like, you're too small. This is never going to work. No, no, no, no, no. It was finally when we got to a point where we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and very quickly after we launched when all of those pieces very quickly fell into place.”

If you deliver a really good product to your customer that resonates with them, the money will come as secondary, and it’ll be more fruitful than you ever thought it was going to be.

It’s obvious when talking to John that he genuinely wants to use his powers for good. He opened up on the Upfront podcast about the inner conflict he experienced with the traditional investment remuneration model and why that never sat right with him. Above all, he feels financial services have a duty to put customers over profit.

“We’ve built a really good business model where we can offer our customers ultra-low fees but still make very strong profit margins and build a successful business. If you deliver a really good product to your customer that resonates with them, the money will come as secondary, and it’ll be more fruitful than you ever thought it was going to be.”

Just recently, Superhero announced it will be merging with leading Australian cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx. Exciting stuff. So what’s John’s vision for the future?

“Everything to be called Superhero! No, look, we've got a vision to become a major piece of financial services infrastructure in this country, and I think that would lead to much better outcomes for a number of the market players and no doubt for our customers and anyone who is leveraging the infrastructure and the network that we've built. I see us playing a major part in the ecosystem here in Australia.”

What I love about financial services

I love winding back a couple of decades when you look at other industries like video on demand or ridesharing. There's been a huge amount of advancement in those sectors, but the financial services space is still so old school. There are still major institutions running everything off a spreadsheet, and that's really exciting because that's just opportunity. Coming in and automating things, building things digital first is pretty exciting when you're running circles around some of the big incumbents.

John Winters - CEO Superhero

Follow John on LinkedInAnd check out www.superhero.com.au

My vision for the future? Everything to be called Superhero.

What I love about financial services

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