Prospa Chief Revenue Officer, Beau Bertoli has long recognised the benefits of diversity and inclusion and attributes much of his business success to being open to hearing the diverse perspectives of others.
Since co-founding Prospa in 2011 with Chief Executive Officer Greg Moshal, he and Greg have listed Prospa on the Australian Stock Exchange, grown their staff to 240 people with operations in Australia and New Zealand and delivered more than $2.1 billion in lending to small businesses.
“If we came to this industry with the same lens as the incumbents - I don’t think we would have a successful business today,” Beau said.
“So being open-minded, celebrating diverse thinking and thinking differently off the back of that - that’s always been core to our success, and I think we’ve been very lucky to have had so many great people around us who have been on the journey.”
Beau says as a fintech start-up, it’s hard to ignore the obvious lack of gender diversity in the industry. With females representing only 10 per cent of technical engineer candidates, Prospa has set a goal of increasing its population of female engineers to 25% in the short-term and 50% over the longer term.
Beau says diversity whether it be gender diversity or age or cultural diversity, is not just about being the right thing to do, it’s critical to driving business growth and high performance.
“In my mind it’s the starting point — the people are everything,” he said.
“Even before you have defined your strategy — you still need to have the right people to discuss and debate the strategy. When we first started Prospa it was just Greg and I, which then very quickly grew to 30 people.
“And if we looked around at the team of 30 people and they all looked like Greg and I, then we are not going to get high performance — you are going to get a lot of Group think — a lot of people on the same page with the same experiences probably arriving at the same answers.”
Having diversity as a core part of how Prospa operates, also ensures that the fintech is able to truly understand the needs of diverse customers. And Beau says the thing he likes most about partnering with finance brokers, is the trusted adviser relationship they have with small business.
“Business owners and small business in particular are very hard to find and reach so we found that partnering with the finance broking industry is a wonderful way of tapping into people who are trusted advisers,” he said.
“When we are launching a new product our first port of call is to sit down with finance brokers — brokers are not backwards about being forward — we trust the industry as a partner to us and their customers trust them.
“I’ve worked in a number of different industries, and I think the broking industry has a great comradery — I feel like the role of brokers is a critical one in the success of the Australian economy and I really like that there is a purpose to the industry”.
So, given the obvious business benefits of diversity, does Beau think that increasing the diversity of brokers should be more of a priority for the mortgage and finance industry?
“Absolutely it should be — if half the market out there looking to borrow money is female, you need to start with the customer,” he said.
“It is not great to see that female broker participation has fallen again but it’s been a turbulent few years and change takes time.”
Beau says while it would be good to turn this trend around in the short-term, he encourages the industry to think about solving for the longer-term by finding tangible solutions that build sustainable change.
“There is this great quote that I like to use of Bill Gates who says that most people will radically overestimate what they can achieve in one year and radically underestimate what can be achieved over 10 years,” he said.
“It’s that kind of long-term lens that we might need to take as an industry and think in 2021 lets make progress for 2022 but what does 2030 look like?”
Beau adds that the industries like mining and technology are good examples of what can be achieved by taking a long-term approach to finding solutions.
“In technology where candidates are only 10 per cent female, the actual problem is less about how do you create good incentives for females to join your business it’s more about the workforce — how do we create opportunities for more women to come into the industry through school and university,” he said.
Beau says career pathways, nurturing future generations of female brokers and creating career experiences for young women are just some of the initiatives that have worked in other industries.
“How do we create the setting and how do we double down on the stuff that is actually working and create more profile and best practice — success breeds success,” he said.
And finally, what’s Beau’s advice to his younger self?
“You know less than you think you know — constantly be seeking wisdom from people around you,” he concluded.
