Investment Notes: Constantinople A$32M Seed

We are thrilled to lead Constantinople’s A$32m seed round, with participation from AirTree Ventures and Great Southern Bank. This is Square Peg’s largest ever seed investment and Australia’s largest ever seed round.

We’re excited to join Mac and Di on their ambitious mission to build a complete software and operating platform for banks around the world. We were blown away by their articulation of this problem and the incredible market opportunity. It’s rare to find founders with such ambition to upend the world’s largest industry. Mac and Di have the track record and mindset to create an entirely new category of software-as-a-service which transforms and radically simplifies how banks run and operate today.

The Problem:

Every bank in the world struggles with expensive infrastructure and complex ‘back-office’ operations. These are critical responsibilities for a bank, but they are undifferentiated with customers. Legacy technology and processes also make it difficult for banks to support digital customer experiences and meet their compliance requirements.

It is extremely difficult for a bank that has been around for many decades to transition itself into the digital world. It can take hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many years to convert a legacy tech stack into a modern one. Even with a modern technology stack, banks continue to rely on legacy manual processes that operationalise their business whilst introducing inefficiencies and human error. The typical bank spends only 10% of their costs on technology and 60-70% of their costs on people and manual processes.

This is a problem for all banks globally. In particular, there is a long tail of small regional banks and credit unions who cannot afford to make these investments or do not have the technological capabilities to manage them from end-to-end. These banks face an existential threat as they attempt to keep pace with modern, customer-centric offerings.

Enter Constantinople:

Constantinople is defining an entirely new category of software-as-a-service, which simplifies how banks run and operate. Constantinople provides banks with a complete software and operating platform, which fully manages and automates the critical but undifferentiated aspects of a bank, such as infrastructure, servicing, operations, and compliance. 

Under this model banks are freed from running expensive infrastructure and overseeing manual operational processes. By abstracting away the operational complexity of banking, Constantinople allows banks to focus on the business of banking and what really matters for their customers.

Constantinople’s platform supports both retail and business banking. Its product suite includes mobile and web apps, transaction and savings accounts, payments, debit and credit cards, and a range of secured and unsecured lending products.

On top of these consumer products, Constantinople also supports underlying operational services required by a bank. These include onboarding & KYC, AML, fraud prevention, payments and lending operations, regulatory reporting, and customer service.

The Team:

Mac and Di each have over twenty years’ experience as global executives. They’ve had a very broad depth and breadth of experience in banking and technology across the United States, Asia, and Australia.

There are three things that stood out when we first met Mac and Di:

1. They both have enormous ambition and drive to address this global problem at scale
2. They have an outstanding track record and execution experience to get this done
3. They have assembled a world class team with deep domain experience in software engineering, automation, legal, risk and compliance

It is not easy to create an entirely new category of SaaS. This is particularly true when you are operating within the regulatory framework of the world’s largest industry. However, if there is any team who can achieve this, we are sure it is the team at Constantinople.

The Progress:

Since Square Peg made its investment, Constantinople continues to build at an incredible pace. They recently released their platform into production with their first client bank, Great Southern Bank, and are currently in a live pilot. 

We are so excited to have partnered with Mac and Di. They are the definition of exceptional founders, and we share their vision for what the future of banking will look like. 

Paul Bassat Lucy Tan

This post has been republished from the Square Peg Blog