Warren Billington and the trouble with a brilliant idea

Warren Billington arrived in America with a small sporting problem. Football, as he understood it, involved a round ball. His new market had other arrangements. In 2008, while selling mobile marketing at 5th Finger, he turned that confusion into a business argument: a promising import needed more than a famous arrival to become part of everyday American life.

David Beckham supplied the analogy. Mobile marketing supplied the difficulty. Billington was concerned with the distance between attracting attention and winning a place in a brand’s budget. An interesting new channel still needed experienced people, adequate investment and results a buyer could understand. Being new could get it through the door. Keeping it there required work.

The argument has aged rather well. The technology in Billington’s working life has changed from mobile campaigns to customer data, document AI and blockchain. The recurring question has stayed recognisable: what must happen before somebody can use this? Follow that question and his career becomes easier to read than a list of software companies.

Before the pitch, there was the customer

Billington began in brand marketing at Kellogg’s in the UK, then worked in businesses including Claritas, Experian and Red Sheriff. That route placed the customer’s behaviour near the centre of his working life before the later ventures arrived. Selling technology would mean understanding the organisations expected to buy it, as well as the capabilities being offered.

He went on to co-found Australian mobile marketing business 5th Finger and helped take it into the United States. Its early work belongs to a period when a phone campaign could involve text messages, voting, competitions, ringtones and an enthusiastic assortment of wallpapers. The phone was becoming a route into a customer relationship, one small interaction at a time.

In 2005, the business was offering its air-cast self-service product, which let marketers manage communications across channels and monitor responses online. Taxi ordering by SMS sat alongside surveys and financial updates among the examples. These were ordinary transactions made easier to initiate. The glamour of the mobile revolution sometimes arrived in the form of a cab.

By 2005, 5th Finger was reporting more than 5,000 mobile campaigns, interactions with 5.5 million Australians and its 100 millionth transaction. Those figures belonged to the business as a whole. They help explain why the details mattered: a marketer needed to be able to manage responses, follow up with a customer and see what a campaign was doing. A ringing phone was only the beginning of the transaction.

In July 2012, Merkle acquired the San Francisco-based 5th Finger business. Its announcement described an operation combining agency experience with technical delivery, including mobile commerce tools for retailers. That combination helps explain the commercial setting in which Billington had been working: a campaign, a platform and a customer’s business problem had to fit together.

His next senior roles continued that work across a different set of tools. At Acxiom, he led the Australia and New Zealand data, analytics and software business. In May 2014, he joined Chicago-based BrightTag as managing director for Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, with responsibility for strategy, sales and business development across those markets.

The useful detail at lunch

By November 2016, Billington was managing director at Signal and among the local technology executives gathered in Sydney for a lunch with Optimizely’s global sales leader, Travis Bryant. Bryant was exploring an Australian launch. Around the table were people who had already done versions of the job: bringing an international technology business into a particular local market.

One of Billington’s contributions was pleasantly specific. Signal had sent a pre-sales colleague from Chicago to support him for the first twelve months. Before returning home, that colleague trained the local person Billington hired as a replacement. Knowledge crossed the Pacific, stayed long enough to become useful, and was handed on before the return flight.

It is an instructive detail because international expansion can look deceptively tidy on a presentation slide. Add a country, open an office, appoint a leader. The lunch conversation put people and practical support back into the picture. Someone had to understand the product, help local customers assess it and leave a team capable of continuing the work.

Billington’s Signal experience included relationships with enterprise customers such as Optus, Coles and flybuys, and Westpac. The work concerned making customer data usable across digital channels. A retailer, a telecommunications company and a bank could all care about personalisation while bringing different systems, buying processes and customer expectations to the discussion.

The paperwork gets a turn

Sypht brought Billington to another unglamorous obstruction. Businesses could hold information digitally and still need a person to read it and type it somewhere else. A PDF invoice was a digital object, certainly. Its contents might nevertheless be waiting patiently for a human pair of eyes before becoming useful to another system.

Established in 2018 through BPAY Group and BCG Digital Ventures, Sypht applied machine learning to that problem. Under Billington as CEO, the Sydney business pursued documents such as invoices, bills and receipts. Its service extracted fields from varying layouts, addressing a difficulty that fixed templates handled awkwardly: businesses had rather different ideas about where information belonged on a page.

By May 2019, Billington was describing commercial agreements, trials and subscription services. His short verdict was: “So, we’re very much in production.” It was a useful milestone for a young AI business. The conversation had reached the stage where the system had to work inside an organisation, with all the awkward documents that an organisation could supply.

In 2020, he described building sales, marketing and customer-success capabilities alongside engineering and data science. The technical team had to be accompanied by people who could explain the service, bring customers in and keep deployments working. That is a less cinematic account of AI development than the usual breakthrough story. It also sounds more like running a company.

The 8common partnership supplied a concrete application: extracting information from receipts for travel expense management. It connected Sypht to an existing product and its users, rather than requiring every person submitting a receipt to become an enthusiast for machine learning. Automation could do its job in the background, which is often where useful software earns its keep.

Billington also took part in a 2020 discussion with BCG Digital Ventures’ David Viljoen about automation and business transformation. Across these appearances, the subject kept returning to practical deployment. Sypht’s eventual acquisition by Paymerang in April 2023 placed the business within accounts payable automation, another setting where document information has somewhere definite to go.

Who gets to use the data?

Alongside commercial adoption came questions about the terms on which data could be used. Billington was one of twelve founding board members of Data Governance Australia in 2016. Chaired by Graeme Samuel, the association set out to develop standards and education around collecting, using and managing data responsibly across Australian business.

That board brought together people from finance, retail, law, aviation and specialist data businesses. Billington represented Signal. The appointment placed him in a conversation wider than marketing performance: consumer confidence, organisational practice and the responsibilities attached to increasingly capable data systems. A new capability could create a new set of obligations for its buyer.

In January 2023, he joined Redbelly Network as CEO. The company’s work concerned blockchain infrastructure, and its September launch of Compliant Asset Tokenisation focused on regulated assets. Billington’s commercial explanation stressed creating markets while reducing costs and risk. Here, too, the intended application gave the technology its business argument.

The work also involved the less abstract business of meeting colleagues. In March that year, he and general manager Francois Latouche visited Redbelly’s development team in Chandigarh, India. In August, he attended Intersekt in Melbourne with partnerships and community leader Leighlah Ashmore. Products that travel across borders still involve people making the trip.

The homework before the flight

Billington now works as an operating partner at Accelerate Growth, where his listed practice covers regulatory technology, AI, data and cyber. HUKM Launch Pad also lists him as a mentor. His experience is being applied to other businesses’ decisions about customers, positioning and expansion, after years of making those decisions inside technology companies.

His public advice has become strikingly concrete. Before visiting a new market, he recommends preparing an opportunity paper, a ranked shortlist, a clear account of the intended customer and a sequenced list of target companies. He puts that preparation at about ninety days. The itinerary comes after the homework, however attractive the airport lounge may be.

“You don’t need an expensive plane ticket to do market research.”

Warren Billington · on preparing for a new market

In another post, he advises founders choosing an industry to examine their own recent wins: which customers buy, which deals move quickly and where an existing customer story resembles the next prospect’s problem. It is an argument for giving experience some authority over ambition. The largest imaginable market can wait while a business identifies a customer it understands.

There is a line from the football analogy to that target-account list. Both ask what a promising idea needs in order to take root somewhere specific. Billington has worked through several generations of technology while returning to the people expected to adopt it. Before the next flight, the next launch or the next demonstration, he still wants the homework done.