Before it had a bank licence, a listing or a rival bidding for it, Tyro was a company with a different name and a narrow ambition. On 3 February 2003 three men, Peter Haig, Andrew Rothwell and Paul Wood, set up MoneySwitch Ltd. Its pitch was plain: Australia's card payment system had been controlled by the big banks for years, and nobody had built a new way in since 1996.
There is little public record of who these three were before this. Their schools, hometowns and early jobs have not been told in the interviews that reached this review, and the story is better followed through what the company did than through any invented portrait of them.
That allowed Tyro to hold merchant money and lend against it, rather than merely processing payments.
What they did was difficult and unglamorous. Becoming a new EFTPOS entrant meant plugging into a closed system run by banks that were also their potential competitors. The company became the second in Australia, after GE Capital, to get a Specialist Credit Card Institution licence. By 2012 it was moving more than A$3.5 billion a year in card transactions.
Then came the move that set it apart. In 2015 it became an authorised deposit-taking institution, the first Australian technology company to get a banking licence. That allowed Tyro to hold merchant money and lend against it, rather than merely processing payments.
It also brought the pressure of a public company. In December 2019 Tyro listed on the ASX. The range was A$2.50 to A$2.75, and the final price was A$2.75, giving a market value of A$1.37 billion. It opened at A$3.40. Within weeks a short-seller, Viceroy Research, published a report alleging many terminals had been taken offline, and Tyro asked for a trading halt the same day. A connectivity failure in January 2021 hit merchants too.
Chief executives came and went: Gerd Schenkel resigned in 2017, Robbie Cooke in 2022. In September 2022 Potentia made an unsolicited bid, Westpac later joined, and a later offer of A$1.60 a share, about A$875 million, was also rejected. Potentia left in May 2023 and the shares fell nearly 20 percent.
For the 2025 financial year Tyro reported revenue of A$487.3 million, and in December 2025 agreed to buy the Melbourne fintech Thriday to move into small-business financial software.
The lesson for founders is in the first line of the story. Tyro was born as MoneySwitch, a name about moving money. It took twelve years of licences and regulation to become a bank. A hard, boring infrastructure problem can be the moat.