Joseph Healy had just walked away from the biggest business banking division in Australia, and he did something unusual with the time. He took a year off at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. It was there, away from the boardrooms of Melbourne, that he began working on what became Judo Bank.
He had spent his career inside the machine. He started at Lloyds in London, moved through Citibank and CIBC World Markets, joined ANZ in 1998, then NAB in late 2006. From about 2008 to 2014 he ran NAB's business banking, the largest such unit in the country. He knew the system from inside, and he left it.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison later held it up as a fintech success story.
The question he kept coming back to, as a podcast write-up about him puts it, was why start a new bank rather than reform an old one from within. His answer was in the numbers of the market. Australia's small and medium businesses relied on four big banks, and the banks were moving them onto formula-driven lending. In Britain, Aldermore, Shawbrook and OakNorth had built challenger banks around the same gap. Healy wanted one for Australia.
David Hornery, a fellow NAB and ANZ veteran, joined him in 2015. The name they chose came from a 1999 Harvard Business Review article about 'judo strategy', the idea that a smaller player can win by using a larger one's weight against it.
The next step was money, and a lot of it. Judo was formally set up in October 2016, seeded by a consortium of family offices led by Geoff Lord. In 2018 it raised more than A$140 million and arranged a A$350 million debt facility. A banking licence came from APRA in April 2019, and the company dropped 'Capital' from its name. Two months later came a A$400 million Series B. Then the pandemic arrived. In April 2020 the federal government committed A$500 million to Judo through two funding schemes, and in May Judo raised A$230 million at a valuation above A$1 billion. Prime Minister Scott Morrison later held it up as a fintech success story. It listed on the ASX in 2021 under the ticker JDO.
For the year to June 2025 Judo reported statutory profit of A$86.4 million, up about 24 percent, on a lending book of A$12.5 billion. It guided to underlying profit before tax of A$180 million to A$190 million for FY2026. Healy has announced he will step down, with Chris Bayliss taking over.
The lesson is in the order of events. The company did not begin with a pitch deck. It began with a year of quiet thinking by a man who had run the incumbent's business and decided that insiders see the gap better than anyone. Often the best start-up idea is a frustration a founder has carried for a decade.