King watched his carpenter dad, Mervyn, take on what King’s own Millennial workforce would call side hustles, from furniture-making and boat-rigging to property development– constructing 10 build-to-rent units he owned.
“However, I do believe you need to be with an organisation at least three to four years to have an impact.” Development on the platform began in 2011, before launching in NSW and Victoria in 2014. Westpac, ANZ Bank, CBA, NAB, the Western Australian Land Information Authority, Macquarie Group, Link Group and the Little Group became the founding investors.
The department replied that King, who had engaged with PEXA in his time at NAB, had excluded himself and delegated responsibility for PEXA-related decisions to his then deputy secretary for customer service.“The main question that came was from the opposition treasurer Mookhey. He asked the question: did I get a payout? And the answer’s: no, I didn’t, because I resigned. Because often when people move, sometimes get payouts. That was the main thing.
”You still had all the branches – how do you migrate customers from over the counter into these other channels? And what’s the incentive scheme? What’s the right customer experience? I was involved in a lot of that.”It plunged him into a real-time test lab of behavioural carrots and sticks, with methods such as offering higher rates of interest for using digital channels and levying fees on over-the-counter transactions – and again, he was applying lessons from his father.
King is a gentle talker, verging on the serious, who leans forward with one elbow on the table. He lifts it and gestures with two hands to emphasise a point. I ask him if he has a sense of humour.“He’s more dad-joke-style,” Baird says. “But I’ve probably got the same sense of humour.” “It gave me a completely different sector,” he says. “The motivational factors of those sectors are quite different to the financial services sector.”The 17-month stint was helpful for his next pivot, a transition to the NSW public service, which was trying to set up Service NSW, a one-stop shop to access state government services and save people going “to 400 individual shopfronts – hundreds of websites went nowhere”.