24 March, 2020

E78 – Toby Norton-Smith, X15 Ventures

February 2020 saw the launch of new venture-building entity X15 Ventures, part of the CBA group.Ian sat down with Toby Norton-Smith the new Managing Director of X15 Ventures to chat aboutlaunching the initiative and what this will look like in the future.

Toby oversees the portfolio of ventures in development and in market. He’s been at CBA for 5years, pushing new innovations, partnerships and features in Digital, including the launch ofnew ventures like Beemit. Prior to this, Toby led a Fintech business in the wealth managementspace.

X15 are looking for entrepreneurs, to present, receive funding and work in a derisk environment,to scale quicker; with support, guidance and access to the CBA customer base and distributionnetworks.

Many of this new team have felt the pain of creating a company. Toby goes into what it was liketo be in the creation team for Beemit; spinning a technology team out of CBA core and how theywere set up off stack to get them away from everyday business and start building in a verydifferent way. They moved fast and broke things. Toby reveals that when you’ve been throughthat pain a few times and you passionately believe that there is more value that you can unlockfor customers this is where an asset like X15 can help you, with their assets they wanted to finda more repeatable and scalable solution.

Join us on 23 April for a breakfast event which will dive into X15 and answer questions as wellas introduce us to the first founders in X15 Ventures.

On this episode Toby tells us introduces X15, and tells us where this new CBA venture-building entity hopes to go. Settle in, get comfy and have a listen!