Matt Heine is the CEO and Managing Director of Netwealth…and Flux’s relatively new corporate overlord.

For those who don’t know, Netwealth is one of Australia’s fastest-growing wealth management and fintech companies - having grown its share price over 450% since its IPO in 2017. Matt has been working at Netwealth since 2001 and has held roles across sales, marketing and product. He became joint managing director alongside his father Michael Heine in 2015 and became the sole managing director in 2022.

In our conversation, we’ll dig into how his early experiences shaped him, how he thinks about scaling a platform and what the future of advice and wealth looks like in Australia and globally.

Welcome Matt - can you share a little bit about your background, where it started before Netwealth and then of course at Netwealth?

I joined Netwealth as the fifth employee. I started by doing some odd jobs around Netwealth in the very early days - it was everything from designing web pages to collecting the mail and writing privacy policies.

I pretty quickly worked out that I was learning a lot more [at Netwealth] than I was at university. So, whilst I had worked also at the family's previous business, Heine Management, my only other real job for two years was working at Nando's.

I was on the tools as a short order chef. I then upgraded and took a role as a delivery driver.

At June 30 this year, Netwealth had $135.7 billion in Funds Under Administration (FUA). But more importantly, how long did it take for Netwealth to achieve that first billion dollars?

They always say the first billion is the hardest. It took us 63 months to get to that first billion dollars and it was incredibly challenging. And I often say it never gets easy, but it gets easier.

And that [first billion] was actually around the same time that we broke even for the first time, which was significantly lower than a lot of our competitors in the big banks.

And I think that reflects the founder-family mindset. When it's your own money, you do tend to spend the money far more wisely.

We often talk about the Rule of 40 on the podcast. Within Netwealth, how do you strike the right between growth and profitability?
We're pretty fortunate that at the moment we actually have a rule of 70 - we've got incredibly healthy margins and incredibly healthy growth as well. There's no point not investing in the business and then finding in two or three years that you actually see that go anti-growth and things slow down.

Each year when we sit around the table and work through budgets and strategy, [we look at] what are the most important things that we can be working on this year? Where do we think we can really move the dial and have a really good ROI?

I think the successful companies are really the ones that are really effective at prioritising the right things.

Netwealth started as the disruptor - but how have you been able to keep that mindset alive over the 20 years when Netwealth isn't that early-stage disruptor anymore?

Scaling a business is wonderful and it's exciting and it does come with its own challenges. You always have to look at what are the things that were really important to us at the start that made it successful, and how do we carry that through into everything that we do?

We're very much a values-based business.

As far as staying hungry, our family is still a major shareholder in the company. We own in excess of 40% so there is a vested and very much a self-interest in making sure that we continue to be very successful.