Constantinople raises Australia's largest-ever seed round

It is also the largest seed round featuring Square Peg, which invests across Southeast Asia and Israel. Other participants included Airtree Ventures and Great Southern Bank, the first client for the company’s pilot product.

Constantinople was founded last year by former Westpac executives Macgregor Duncan and Dianne Challenor (pictured, left to right) to provide a comprehensive software and operating platform for banks globally.

The idea is that banks are struggling to transition out of legacy technology and processes that make it difficult and expensive to digitalise. Constantinople aims to facilitate this transition with a platform that fully manages and automates critical but undifferentiated aspects of a bank such as infrastructure, servicing, operations, and compliance.

“We were blown away by their articulation of this problem and the incredible market opportunity,” Square Peg co-founder Paul Bassat and Lucy Tan, a principal at the firm, said in a joint statement.

“It’s rare to find founders with such ambition to upend the world’s largest industry. Mac and Di have the track record and mindset to create an entirely new category of software-as-a-service which transforms and radically simplifies how banks run and operate today.”

The technology supports both retail and business banking with a product suite spanning mobile and web apps, transaction and savings accounts, payments, debit and credit cards, and a range of secured and unsecured lending products.

The company also supports underlying operational services, including onboarding and know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML), fraud prevention, payments and lending operations, regulatory reporting, and customer service.

“[T]he biggest challenge in banking technology is not building the front-end software that customers interact with, nor is it building the back-end ledger software or APIs [application programming interfaces] used to connect it all up. These challenges have largely been solved,” Raaj Raya, an investment manager at Airtree, and James Cameron, a partner at the firm, said in a joint statement.

“The biggest challenge by far is automating the huge amount of operational work required around these pieces of software.”

Airtree observed that Australia’s big four banks – all of which have implemented cloud systems – still spend more than half of their operational costs on people, which is up to 3x what they spend on technology. Square Peg noted that the typical bank allocates only 10% of its budget to technology and 60%-70% to people and manual processes.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Australasia
• Financials
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Australia
• Square Peg Capital
• AirTree Ventures
• Fintech
• digitalization
• seed