Those were the days. 86 400's former CEO Robert Bell (L) and former chair Anthony Thomson
It’s a year now since NAB and Cuscal huddled in secret talks over the sale of 86 400.
Xinja Bank was failing fast and Elizabeth Proust, the seasoned operator recently appointed as chair of CUSCAL was in a hurry.
The bold, ‘we can do it, we need to do it, our collective prosperity depends on it’ thinking behind the 86 400 neobank startup and which would consume mutual industry capital (via Cuscal) was old hat.
Capital raising to allow Cuscal to sell down and enable 86 400 to fulfil its product and tech roadmaps was not going too well.
So a baffling foray into the world of neobanking by the Australian mutual ADI movement ended with the sale of 86 400 to NAB announced in January – the exit not so perplexing as the entry.
The official story is that NAB approached Cuscal. Maybe. In any event Cuscal were an eager seller. And NAB wanted the neobank in order to renovate the technolofy platform behind their branchless UBank brand.
Asked for their views during the build phase and early days of 86 400, sector CEOs stuck to the party line, supportive.
Generally, they’d say something like “we expect to learn from Cuscal and 86 400 and apply this in our businesses”.
Basically, they’d been assured they would learn. Lots.
Well, they didn’t, and can’t really. National Australia Bank now owns all the IP.
What their industry members did learn from their three year neobank adventure is that Cuscal saved their bacon and in fact doubled their money.