The Reinventor's Mindset - Episode 4
Ashton Jones in conversation with Monty Hamilton SVP Asia Pacific & Global Partnerships, TELUS Digital

Ashton: Welcome to the Reinventor's Mindset, insights about transformation with leaders who've done it from the inside. I'm Ashton Jones and I'm writing Bold Water, a book about transformation. Today I'm speaking with Monty Hamilton. Monty co-founded UBank inside NAB, Australia's first digital bank, then moved to Telstra where he co-founded Belong, which they built in just eight weeks. He's since led digital transformation at PwC and TELUS in Canada, and now looks after Asia and global partnerships at TELUS Digital. Monty is one of those rare people who has a habit of walking into large established organisations and building new things from the inside. And that's the heart of what this show is about. Welcome, Monty. Let's dive in.

Monty: Thanks, Ashton. It's great to join you. It's always dragging some skeletons out of the closet telling these stories, but incredibly rewarding, if challenging times. And I got to meet and work with some wonderful people on the journey so far.

Ashton: Monty, you're coming to us today from Singapore. I thought a good place to start might be if you could tell us a little bit about TELUS Digital and what I understand is a recently expanded role.

Monty: I'm in Singapore, pretty common when you work for an organisation that's in over 30 countries with over 80,000 wonderful colleagues. I joined TELUS just over seven years ago and most viewers and listeners probably know TELUS as a Canadian telecom business. But core to TELUS's journey over the past 20 years has been an incredible global business, previously known as TELUS International and recently renamed TELUS Digital.

That is a business that delivers digital customer care, AI and data solutions, a big trust and safety business, which really is the safeguard of the internet that we use today, and underpinning all of those services is a large tech and digital practice. So very fortunate to be here on the ground with our colleagues in Singapore, with a footprint that includes many countries across Southeast Asia.

In my expanded role, I'm looking after Asia as a region and I run our partnerships worldwide, we're very fortunate to work with a number of the hyperscalers and large partners that we go to market with.

Ashton: Fantastic. And I'm going to take you back a little bit, Monty. I was hoping to understand a little bit more about your time at both UBank and Belong. Maybe I'll start with Belong.

I recently led the launch of a new product. I was pretty proud of it because it took us about eight months, and that was a bit of a land speed record for financial services in Australia. But Belong you did in eight weeks from brief to launch. How is that even possible?

Monty: I think you'll find the red thread through any of these stories is that amazing people can do amazing things. Belong is yet another example of people in action.

If you take yourself back to the launch period of Belong, well over a decade ago now, Telstra was facing a daunting but also exciting challenge: a post NBN world. There were regulatory mandates on the industry, so all incumbent providers would effectively need to renew the customer relationships they had. If you're one of the larger providers, that's pretty scary because that inertia of keeping your customer base is important. So Telstra was looking to diversify its customer base and find new ways to expand.

In a pretty regulated environment, and telecom in Australia is regulated for very good reason, acquisitions were few and far between. It was very difficult for the number one, two or three player to grow inorganically. So a decision was made to pursue an organic build for a more direct to market customer value proposition. Belong was an incredible journey to get into market very quickly, with a direct, digitally distributed product.

We assembled a team very quickly. We came out of some discussions on a Thursday and Friday, got asked what we would need to do it, and by Monday we'd partnered up, found a new office location, handpicked some people from across the organisation, stood down from our day jobs so to speak, and moved across to get this business humming. That all culminated in a launch about eight weeks later and a pretty rapidly growing business from there.

Ashton: So you touched on UBank, built inside NAB, Belong inside Telstra. Was there a pattern around what large organisations have to do, or what they have to tolerate, to let something new get born inside?

Monty: It's the biggest challenge, but it's also the biggest opportunity. When you think about any large organisation, there is incredible talent available, and it's not always represented by hierarchy in the business.

One of the parallels I use for corporate change within an organisation is what happens in incident management, particularly IT incident management. What often happens in that environment is that hierarchy gets out of the way and the people who know how to get things done, get things done, that is, fix a technology incident. That tends to shine, but it's very hard to pre-plan. How do you find the right people? How do you remove the very well meaning hierarchy from the organisation so you can just apply the best talent at a particular challenge or opportunity?

The parallels are really simple, it's a bit of a recipe. You need to have enough space, both physically and structurally, to be able to create something new within an organisation. A lot of organisations are built for incremental change, one, three, five percent growth or cost reductions as the annual targets. When you're building something new, you're measuring things in hundreds and thousands of percent. So you need a mindset that can cope with that.

You also need the right team. You need a diverse team that can work more laterally than vertically within a structure. In large corporates with 10, 15, 20,000 people, you often have very senior people with quite a narrow focus. A startup team needs really strong generalist skills. Large organisations are set to reject these things, so thick skin and resilience is probably the number one trait.

Ashton: I love that analogy around how people get together to resolve a severity one incident, because there's a burning platform. The right people with the right skill set have the permission to really solve the problem. There's a lot we can learn from that philosophy when it comes to building new things inside large organisations.

Monty: There's a real purity in it. Take yourself back to a sev one call, it's 3am. There are all sorts of very senior people on this call, but hierarchy is irrelevant. The voice that is helpful is the voice that contributes to the solution or has experience of having seen that film before, having seen around that corner. You can be senior, cranky and yelling, but it fixes nothing.

In fact, the very best incident management processes that I've been a part of actually explicitly segregate executive updates from those working on the incident, because that commingling serves only to prolong the incident or outage.

Ashton: Sometimes in large organisations there are antibodies that tend to reject change. I'm interested in how you've thought about velocity when delivering large scale transformation or building startups. Is speed a strategy or a survival mechanism? Do you need to move fast because you want to, or because you had to, otherwise the antibodies kick in?

Monty: Speed is essential.

I absolutely subscribe to the progress over perfection, starting somewhere approach. Everyone now lives and breathes the concept of an MVP, minimum viable product, but go back to 2008 when we launched UBank, over 17 years ago now. Concepts of MVP were not necessarily mainstream, and certainly not mainstream in corporate.

That approach, if you've got something, you're less likely to be shut down. That's the jocular version of it. But if you've got something, you've got something to learn from and something to build on.

A lot of organisations have to deal with scale on a daily basis. Scale is very much an asset for a large organisation. But scale is an asset at a different end of the spectrum for a startup, because you can actually manage volume in ways that at a smaller scale you wouldn't have to industrialise until later in your history.

When we launched UBank, we had term deposits as our core product. Our shortest term was a 30 day term deposit and we had very limited rollover processes in place at launch. But we had 30 days once we launched to perfect our rollover process, because the first organic rollover was going to be at least 30 days after the first term deposit we sold.

Speed and progress over perfection often get confused with a cavalier, high risk taking approach. That's a convenient narrative, but it's not true. There's a very big difference between being lawful, compliant with regulations and taking the necessary security and privacy steps, and taking months and months to build an automated process for three or four people that another player in the industry has had to industrialise for three or four million people.

Ashton: I love that reframe, it's often safer to start small and move fast, and it's not cavalier at all. I'm going to stay with UBank if it's okay. Full disclosure, I am a UBank customer still to this day, I was one of the early adopters. After UBank, there were quite a few neobanks that popped up both externally and within large institutions. I'm curious what you think were the ingredients of success that allowed UBank to not just be the first of its kind, but still to be alive as a customer proposition today.

Monty: Hats off to the team now, it's over 17 years ago, so full credit to the team that's taken UBank forward. It's a great sense of pride when I see UBank or Belong in an ad, we kind of named those.

If you go back to the UBank journey, we set out to build a digital mortgage proposition. In early 2008 and late 2007, that was a good place to be. The cash rate was very high, people were paying very high single digit rates on their mortgages, and we felt a digital proposition was going to afford some business model efficiencies that would allow a really strong price proposition.

Fast forward to the middle of 2008, things got a little bumpy. We started hearing about credit default swaps, mortgage stress in the US, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and then fast forward to September, we were going headfirst into a global financial crisis.

We launched UBank in October 2008. The decision we took probably 12 weeks before that launch was to shift from a digital mortgage business to a retail deposit business, because with the incredible experience of National Australia Bank we were guided, for non economists like me, that cash would be a flight to safety, that people would move out of equities, and that the bank with the most stable balance sheet would be in a really strong place.

We didn't quite know how complex and challenging the GFC would be. But what's fascinating about this chapter is the scale of disruption we launched into. We launched in October 2008. A few days after we launched, on 8 October, the cash rate dropped by 100 basis points. Less than a month later, another 35 basis points. Then another 100. In February 2009, another 100 basis points. And by April the cash rate had stabilised at 3%, down from 6% at the time of our launch. So in the space of six months after launch, the cash rate had moved from 600 points to 300 points, and I don't think we've seen anything like that before or since.

Not only did we shift the business from a lending product to a deposit product, we launched it into one of the most staggering tailwinds for a cash business that you could ever have. We had a cash generation machine at exactly the moment Australians were fleeing equities, all on the back of a government deposit guarantee of up to one million Australian dollars.

In terms of what made UBank successful, the digital experience really mattered. We were able to build a fully digital origination process and design ways for people to move hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single transaction. Take yourself back to 2008, it was very hard to send more than a couple of thousand dollars in online banking.

Second factor authentication was around, but we found very creative ways to verify bank accounts, penny credits with security transaction details, the direct debit system, BPAY. We even accepted cheques for a digital bank. Necessity is the mother of invention. But importantly, being compliant, having an AusFrac compliant 100 point ID check done entirely digitally, that founded and created the path and platform for the neobank landscape and actually for a lot of other industries. If you think about sports betting today, you can do your 100 point ID check online.

Banking today, how you use a physical banking network, is really a selective choice rather than a necessity. And we should acknowledge when regulators get it right. The restricted authorised deposit taking institution, the restricted ADI or RADI, was quite an important and progressive move from APRA to allow neobanks to come in with some restrictions. Not all of them worked, some quite infamously, but it did promote innovation and really moved the needle. Judo Bank is an example of a business that started just over a decade ago and is now a booming business banking proposition. For the most part, the banking consumer experience in Australia is right up there with the best in the world.

Ashton: Let's give a shout out to the regulators, they don't always get the pats on the back. I was an early stage investor in Xinja, which was a famous failure. But I think from a regulatory perspective it was a successful failure, they returned every single dollar of deposits back to the consumer, which is exactly what the regulators intended when they created those sandbox and restricted ADI regimes. Not everything was going to be a success, but as long as every dollar got back to the consumer, they had done their job effectively.

Monty: Totally. I won't speak to Xinja specifically, but deadline based delivery is very powerful and sometimes you've got to set the deadlines. If we were one week or one month late on UBank, a competitor would have found some way to take some of those deposits. Maybe UBank wouldn't exist today. Deadline based delivery is very powerful.

Ashton: I want to switch gears to the people who were in and around some of the businesses you've either worked in or partnered with. When you look at key moments, UBank inside NAB, Belong inside Telstra, the work you're doing at TELUS Digital, is it the same kind of person that tends to back and sponsor these types of large scale changes? What do they have in common? Or is there really no mindset formula to being successful at driving and sponsoring change inside large organisations?

Monty: It's a wonderful question. I've had the absolute pleasure and privilege of working for some incredibly inspirational leaders, people who identify with level four and level five leadership from Good to Great, the difference between truly empowering leaders and those who lead but have a pretty helicopter approach.

The number one trait of the leaders I've worked with is definitely trust and empowerment. They're there when you need them, they'll very selectively engage on perhaps only the most serious things, but their main role is to act as a sponsor, to empower you to get what you need to get done. Despite their experience, skill, wisdom and general brilliance, they're very selective about when they insert themselves in the process or the journey. Sometimes in retrospect you would have loved some of that skill and experience to be shared earlier in the journey. But that's also what makes a great leader, sometimes you need to pull off your skateboard and hit your chin on the pavement to learn the next time to put your hands out.

I'm 46 now and I started my career at National Australia Bank in the late 90s in a contact centre environment. I met some incredible people early in that journey. Through some of my misspent youth I was cutting code and experimenting on computers in my teenage years, and they learned that I had some skills that they didn't. And I learned very quickly, as the youngest of four boys with three older brothers, that I could learn a lot from them as well.

I have no doubt that I had some predisposition from my upbringing around trusting and learning from more senior and experienced people, but also my brothers were happy to learn from things that I had. That two way piece, when you have a two way relationship with leadership where there's trust and transparency, and you both feel you're learning something, that goes a long way.

What's interesting about the relationships you build in business is they tend to be the ones that transcend a particular role or job or company. The only thing I'm more proud of than the fact that UBank and Belong exist today is that the people we built those businesses together with are all good friends and we all hang out. We'll travel together every year, have a dinner somewhere to celebrate, or you'll get a message from someone on the founding team to say happy birthday. It's not just a work chapter, it's a life chapter.

Ashton: I had never thought about the connection between my own childhood and my aptitude for two way mentoring and learning. But I'm the youngest of three brothers, and hearing you speak, I can now see the connection between how I showed up as the youngest of three brothers and how I showed up in the early stages of my career with more senior mentors and leaders.

I look back on my career and feel very privileged to have had great leaders the whole way through, and to be good friends with a number of them still to this day. When people ask me for career advice, I say: choose the people you want to work with and choose the leaders you want to learn from. Don't worry about the role and don't worry about the company, if you've got those two things, most of the time you'll find your way.

Monty: That's very sage advice. I do hold some reservations around the impact of a fully virtual environment. I'm not one of those people who buys into the binary debate, I think the binary debate is just an argument from people who do and don't. I'm very pro balance. There are very good reasons for working at home and getting things done, and very good reasons for being in the office and interacting. Any argument that it's 100% one or the other is, once you scratch the surface, generally self serving for the person mounting the debate.

But I do worry about the missed opportunities that I was so fortunate to have in my career that helped shape me personally and professionally. The people you would meet that you wouldn't otherwise meet, the coffee, the drinks, the chats, just people you would bump into instead of always staying in your lane.

At PwC, and in big four consulting, there's a golden rule: when you go and meet a client, you take someone with you. And this isn't happening on a screen. I'm certainly a beneficiary of having the privilege of meeting so many people who came from very different walks of life, who had very different experience, who helped shape me and that I learned a lot from.

Ashton: I completely agree that cultivating a mindset around being open to change is helped a lot by having the opportunity to build those incidental relationships. I find it quite difficult to move horizontally across an organisation in a fully virtual environment, stepping outside of your lane is much harder unless you're in the same physical space.

Monty: Think about how we met, a mutual connection said, you guys will get along and learn from each other. And you travelled down to Melbourne. That's the power of connection. If you're listening and thinking that's because someone got on a plane, no, it's actually about taking yourself out of one location, whether it's five minutes or five hours of travel, to a different place.

One of the great education experiences of my life has been travel. There is nothing more sensory loading than immersing yourself in a new physical environment. Travel has been a great education on culture and respecting other cultures, and just an ongoing learning journey.

I'm sitting in Singapore right now, and even in one of the most western cities in Asia, business is done in a very different way.

Ashton: I learned so much from my experience working for a Japanese company. I learned the concept of Nemawashi, basically all the real business gets done in the corridors or in the bars, and all the meetings are ceremonial. You can't get that lesson from reading about it in a book. You need to experience it.

Ashton: Monty, you touched on what it's like being in a role that is more geographically diverse. Not a lot of younger Australians these days get to experience working in industries and roles that are global in nature, particularly in financial services, which has tended back towards a domestic centre of gravity in my career lifetime. I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about your current role and your time at TELUS, and what that taught you about doing business and driving transformation in different cultures.

Monty: TELUS is quite a remarkable company. The foresight 20 years ago to build a global digital CX business, launching contact centres as a Canadian telecom business, then growing that business and keeping up with the pace of change in the contact centre industry, then launching an AI and data solutions business that is fuelling some of the largest AI tools in the world at the moment, and a trust and safety business that is providing comfort to families, end users and operators of large social networks, underpinned by a world class enterprise technology business. It's a 20 year overnight success story.

Over those 20 years, there has been considerable expansion, often inorganic, into other countries. We reached over 30 countries late last year when we added an important strategic asset in Southeast Asia. I haven't actually sat down and counted how many cities or countries I've been to in my seven years with TELUS. But I haven't spent a lot of time in Central America, for example, and we're one of the largest employers in Guatemala and El Salvador. As an Australian, you kind of think, well, why would I go there from a business perspective? But as part of TELUS Digital, these locations are a powerhouse of delivery for us. The culture is incredible, the passion is undeniable, and the skills and growth in these economies are remarkable. Whether it's Cape Town, Morocco, Brazil, Guatemala, India, later today I'll be in Surabaya in Indonesia, the second largest city in Indonesia, and I've been going to Indonesia for 30 years and have never been to Surabaya.

When was the last time you did something for the first time? People say, don't you get tired, don't you get bored? There are times where you're travelling and you don't want to be travelling. At its worst, you're always in the wrong place at the wrong time from a family perspective. At its best, you get these incredible experiences, things you've never done before.

The travel does build up, and you have to be incredibly self disciplined, from exercise to sleeping patterns. Working for a North American company, when we scheduled this podcast a few weeks back I didn't know I was going to be in Singapore. So it's 5am when we start our call. But that's just part of it.

The discipline thing is something I had to work a lot on when I joined TELUS. I was in Vancouver for a bit and then the pandemic arrived, and all of a sudden I was back in Australia with an upside down time zone, starting work at midnight or 1am and finishing at midday or 1pm. That was a pretty wild induction process, that's for sure.

Ashton: Thank you so much for honouring the commitment, Monty, at 5am in the morning.

Monty: It's a pleasure. To be honest, I would have woken up anyway, I only got here yesterday. It's 9am back in Melbourne.

Ashton: I'm just going to finish with one more question, a question I ask all my guests. It's a bit more philosophical. I'd love you to reflect on whether you had any childhood beliefs that you've had to let go of to become who you are today, or to become the person or the leader who you are today.

Monty: I've got a lot of childhood beliefs that I've held onto that I think have served me very well. There's a beautiful innocence you have around goodness and general positivity. I think when you first get really burnt, you lose a bit of that innocence, and I think it happens well before you're in the workplace.

I would consider myself a very optimistic person. For those who know me, they would probably say sometimes a little too optimistic, hey, we can do this, anything's possible. And so bringing that positivity. But most people who aren't at that same level serve as a wonderful balance between the wildly audacious goal and something a little more grounded in reality.

The belief I've probably had to let go of is that some people just aren't interested in doing that at all. In a work sense, what does that look like? It's very hard to create change when work for some people is purely a case of going through the motions, of perhaps unlocking something else important in life. And let me be clear, I do respect it. I'm sure there are parts of my own career where work has been very much an enabler to do other much more important things. To this day, of course it is with family.

But I've always sought to create change and make things better, even better than how I inherit them. It is a little difficult for me when I encounter people who really don't possess any desire to make things better. Not a wild transformation, just going through the motions. Letting go of the Eeyores in life.

Ashton: Eeyore's a tough mate. I share your relentless optimism, so it's been a pleasure to chat. I hope you now get a chance to go and have your morning coffee. Thank you so much for your time. This has been the Reinventor's Mindset. Thank you, Monty.

Monty: Thanks, Ashton. Congratulations on everything you're doing and look forward to tuning into future episodes.