Moneytree app a game-changer for Japan’s siloed fintech sector
With a long track record as a disruptor, Paul Chapman is ruffling the formerly straitlaced Japanese financial system with a personal finance app.
When Paul Chapman is asked how he came to be the chief executive officer of a successful fintech corporation in Japan, he quotes Apple founder Steve Jobs by saying: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”
"Finding purpose at the intersection of what you are good at and what you enjoy is the key to success in an “outlier career”
And with that benefit of hindsight, he says finding purpose at the intersection of what you are good at and what you enjoy is the key to success in an “outlier career” such as his.
Chapman first dipped his toe into the waters of entrepreneurialism when he was a computer-obsessed teenager with a plan to sell a personal information manager app for students through Australian newsagents.
His hobby led him to learn to code, but he decided not to study computer science at university in favour of a double degree in law and banking and finance. He also added Japanese studies to his university course load to build on the language skills he acquired during an exchange year in Japan.
Four years into his degree, Chapman dropped the law component. “I have a short attention span, and sometimes precedents are written by people who just don’t know how to use more than one sentence in a page-long paragraph,” he says with a laugh. “I realised I didn’t want to become a lawyer. I wanted to start a company.”
That company, cvMail, facilitated online applications for legal jobs in Australia, and was bought by Thomson Reuters in 2007.
Chapman then went to Tokyo as the IT director of a recruitment company, at a time when non-Asian foreigners were a rarity in the Japanese workforce. He co-founded Moneytree with two Americans, Ross Sharrott and Mark Makdad, in Tokyo in 2012. Their product: a free app that allows an individual to view their bank accounts, credit cards, loans and loyalty points in the same place.
The trio had worked together on a number of mobile phone apps before launching Moneytree, considered a game-changer for Japan’s formerly siloed fintech sector. “We were looking for a big business to build,” Chapman says. And build they have.
While the basic features of the Moneytree phone app are free for consumers, financial data platform Moneytree LINK is the money-maker, with nearly five million users and more than 60 industry partners, mostly banks and accounting firms. “Nearly two billion transactions are stored in the system, and it’s all done with transparency and consent,” he says. “We don’t share data unless you specifically allow it.”
From the outset, Apple was a fan of Moneytree, featuring it in its App Store and awarding it ‘best of’ status in 2013 and 2014. Moneytree LINK launched in Japan in 2015 and Australia in 2017. The company is now an active contributor to the formation and testing of open banking in both countries.
Throughout his career, Chapman says he’s leveraged what he learned at Monash Law, even though he didn’t complete his law degree. In the early Moneytree days, when funds were scarce, he researched and read guidelines in Japanese, drafting the startup’s privacy policy and terms of service himself. Only then did he give it to a lawyer to finalise.
“What I really love doing is making things,” he says. “I love creating things and seeing what’s possible, and making it real.”
