Brad Goodall Spent Eight Years Making the Card Optional

The most important button Brad Goodall built is supposed to disappear from your memory. You choose Pay by Bank at checkout. Your banking app opens. A face or fingerprint confirms that you are you. Money moves from account to account, and the merchant sees it arrive without asking a card network to referee. If the experience works, you think about the thing you bought, not the rails beneath it.

Goodall has spent much of his career beneath the surface, where financial data is consolidated, bank software is rebuilt and transactions are reconciled. The public story acquired a neat ending in May 2026, when National Australia Bank bought Banked, the company he co-founded and led. But neat endings can make untidy years look inevitable. Banked’s path ran through a new regulation, several continents, large banks that were simultaneously investors and customers, and the awkward business of asking shoppers to alter a habit they had rehearsed for decades.

The Australian detour that went north

Goodall is Australian. His early financial-technology work was tied to the country’s superannuation industry, where he led QMV Super Solutions and a team building data-management software. It was not glamorous work, which is another way of saying it was useful. Consolidating financial information teaches a person where systems disagree, where customers become confused and how much modern finance still depends on yesterday’s plumbing.

In early 2014 he moved to Britain. He later called it the best career decision he had made. The timing was fortunate: London was busy turning fintech from a conference word into an industry. At ENTIQ he worked around Level39, the Canary Wharf accelerator, and Innovate Finance, the new membership body intended to give the sector a collective voice. He had arrived close enough to watch startups, banks, regulators and government attempt the rare trick of agreeing on what the future ought to permit.

Two years later Goodall joined former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins and technologist Mark Allcock in starting 10x Future Technologies. Its premise was ambitious and deeply infrastructural: banks could replace patched-together legacy systems with a cloud-native core. Goodall did not arrive at Banked as an outsider waving a prettier checkout. He had already spent years learning why bank technology changes slowly and why, despite all the fashionable contempt directed at incumbents, scale still lives inside them.

Four founders and an open door

The spark for Banked came from conversations among Goodall, Neil Ambler, Ellen Fernandes and Patrick Cox. They had helped start a UK fintech together and saw open banking as an invitation to build differently. Britain’s rules were forcing large banks to make account data and payment initiation available through secure interfaces. The founders looked at API companies such as Stripe and Twilio and wondered whether financial infrastructure could become similarly legible to developers.

The first version of the thesis was wider than payments. Banked would help people and businesses get more from financial data while giving customers control over what they shared. It pursued direct API connections instead of screen scraping. It hired people who understood the FCA and the Open Banking Implementation Entity. By early 2019 the company had gained regulatory permissions for account information and payment initiation after what it described as more than ten months of detailed work.

Then the product sharpened. The abstraction called open banking became a very ordinary consumer act: paying. Instead of typing sixteen digits, a shopper could authenticate with the bank already holding the money. Merchants could receive funds quickly, reduce exposure to card fraud and avoid some card costs. Banked could give banks and payment companies a product to offer their own merchants. The idea remained technically demanding, but at least it could now be explained before the coffee went cold.

The card fight becomes a coalition

Fintech likes a boxing poster. New rail versus old rail. Startup versus bank. Banked occasionally appeared in that costume too, described as a network that might rival Visa and Mastercard. Goodall’s later language was more practical. Pay by Bank, he said, was not about killing cards. It was about offering another choice.

That change in framing was more than politeness. Cards are familiar, global and laced through rewards programs. Direct bank payments vary by market and depend on local rails. A merchant does not need an ideological argument about which system deserves to live. It needs higher payment success, lower cost, less fraud and clean reconciliation. A shopper needs the new button to feel no stranger than the old one.

Banked therefore built a coalition. In 2022 it announced a $20 million Series A round led by Bank of America alongside a commercial partnership. Insight Partners later led further investment, while Citi and NAB joined the cap table. FIS partnered with the company to bring Pay by Bank into the United States. These were not decorative logos collected for a pitch deck. Banks and payment processors possessed merchant relationships that would be slow and expensive for a startup to recreate.

Goodall moved into the San Francisco Bay Area as Banked built its American presence. The company operated across London, Palo Alto, Vilnius and Melbourne. Its problem travelled well, but the solution could not simply be copied and pasted. Europe had open-banking regulation. America had powerful financial institutions and a vast merchant market. Australia had PayTo, a real-time payment layer capable of supporting recurring and one-off account payments. Banked needed a global product assembled from local realities.

A small button at Amazon scale

Australia turned the strategy into something a shopper could touch. NAB Ventures had invested in Banked from 2022, then participated in additional rounds. NAB began using the technology for business customers in 2024. Banked also bought Sydney payments company Waave, adding local capability. Investor became partner; partner became customer.

In January 2025 the companies announced that Amazon.com.au shoppers could use a PayTo-enabled Pay by Bank option. After approving the arrangement in online banking, customers could make one-off or recurring payments from their accounts. For Banked, a product built in the relative obscurity of infrastructure had entered one of the most familiar checkout environments on earth.

Goodall predicted a snowball effect as large brands made the behaviour familiar. The phrase is revealing. Consumer payment habits rarely change because an industry white paper has achieved moral clarity. They change because a new option appears somewhere trusted, works, appears again and slowly loses its novelty. Infrastructure needs distribution, but it also needs repetition.

The useful truth after the exit

On 14 May 2026, NAB announced it had acquired Banked for an undisclosed sum. The company would first operate as a wholly owned subsidiary before integration into NAB’s technology environment. The buyer described the move as a way to accelerate real-time, account-to-account payments for business customers. Banked brought product and engineering; NAB brought scale and an existing payments estate. The courtship had been conducted in production.

Goodall’s own reflection resisted the tidy acquisition fable. Building something new was hard, he wrote, and doing it in regulated payments while trying to change behaviour at scale was harder. Banked had been early. The timing had been brutal. A small team nevertheless put its software inside large merchants and partnered with Bank of America, Citi, FIS and NAB across continents.

His proudest point was not the transaction. It was that the work would live on: the code, architecture and accumulated lessons would compound inside a tier-one bank. That is an infrastructure founder’s version of immortality. The brand may recede. The machinery keeps clearing payments at 2 a.m.

This emphasis fits the leadership style Goodall described years earlier: set a broad direction, communicate openly, empower people and support them as they shape their work. His public comments repeatedly return credit to the team. Even the acquisition post ends by thanking co-founders and employees who cared about getting the work right. It is difficult to build reliable payment systems with a cult of personality. The money must arrive whether the founder is in the room or not.

What a founder can steal

There are three useful moves in Goodall’s story. First, learn the plumbing before promising to replace it. His route through superannuation data, London’s fintech ecosystem and core banking gave him a map of the dependencies. Second, simplify the claim as the market teaches you. “Choice beside cards” invites more partners than “death to cards,” while leaving room for the product to prove itself. Third, turn institutions into distribution. Banked did not merely sell software to banks. It allowed their reach, merchant trust and regulated infrastructure to carry the product.

There is also a comic control experiment. Before these companies, Goodall tried a T-shirt printing business with a friend. He later said he did not think a single person bought one. Some markets deliver their verdict swiftly and with admirable economy. Payments took longer. Its silence could mean no, not yet, wrong rail, wrong country or please return after three compliance reviews.

Banked kept returning. Eight years after its founding, the company did not eliminate cards or complete the conversion of global commerce. It accomplished something less theatrical and more durable: it made direct bank payment credible to institutions capable of normalising it. NAB’s acquisition put the technology inside an owner with the customers, rails and patience to keep going.

A checkout is a tiny piece of real estate. It contains decades of habit, regulation, economics and trust. Goodall’s work suggests that changing it is not a matter of drawing a better button and declaring the future open. You assemble the alliances, translate the idea for every market, survive being early and remove complexity until the customer barely notices what changed. Then, if you are fortunate, the button disappears. The money does not.