Anna Burton, acting CEO of team ex-Xinja
Having oddly declined to drop the term Bank from the name of their company at a General Meeting last year, shareholders of Xinja Bank Limited had another go on Friday.
In a missive signed “The Board”, Xinja advised the special resolution to change the name of the Company to ACN 618 937 054 Limited “was passed with more than the requisite 75 per cent of the votes cast by voting shareholders.”
The founding CEO Eric Wilson has finally parted ways with the company, and Anna Burton is acting CEO. Burton was formerly Chief Performance Officer at the bank.
The Lindley Edwards-chaired board emailed “a progress update” around on Friday, a blend of the hopeful and the doubtful.
“The business has been working hard in the first part of this year closing out its retail banking business and beginning to pivot the business to its new operating model,” the board told shareholders of the company formerly known as Xinja.
“Our initial thoughts earlier in the year were to pivot the business to a retail, direct to consumer offering starting with the US share trading platform. After detailed market analysis it became very clear that this market is rapidly becoming saturated with new entrants, and the limited amount of capital available was not going to be sufficient to achieve a viable market share.”
So Xinja have a new direction.
“We believe our key competitive advantage lies in the technology, and as such the business is now focused on providing technology to other businesses in the wealth and banking space,” ACN 618 937 054 said.
“We will start by providing client organisations with technology that allows them to rapidly and safely offer their customers access to US fractionalised share trading, but we hope to expand that into a multiple product platform over the coming years.
“We of course also have the banking technology which we will be seeking to leverage for clients as well,” the board said.
“The pivot is now underway and our team is approaching prospective clients, designing services and modifying technologies to fit this new business model.
Team ex-Xinja now consists of “four full time staff and a similar number of contractors and part time staff.
“We expect it to stay at this level until the first client organisations are brought on.
“As part of this pivot a new name and brand will be launched in order to better reflect the new B2B marketplace,” the board of the former bank said.