For every successful Australian company I can think of, there are thousands not so lucky. Atlassian and Envato are the only two companies I can think of off of the top of my head who have had major success spawning web based businesses in a country as small and somewhat lacking as Australia as Australia is. Melbourne and Sydney are definitely two locations you're most likely to start a successful business in. Good to see Pin tackling payments because in Australia you have two options: Paypal or a propriety expensive bank solution with horrible API.
You can't blame Australia too much for that. It's a tiny market, and the US is an abnormally large one. It's logical.
(There is some mixing, eg. a few devs in Austin, a few support guys here.)
I suspect the real reason the status quo was protected was something to do with a brilliant track record of globally high fees and unending profits for Australian banks.
Hopefully the Wikileaks Party can put the fear of transparency in to these people!
And the smaller cities aren't going to be much cheaper, either. The median house price across all of Australia is around $500k (!).
1. Doing anything financial in Australia is hard. For better or for worse (IMHO it's mostly better) there is strict financial regulation in Australia (mostly due to the Corporations Act revamp under the Howard government as well as the longstanding Trade Practices Act, which is one of the most consumer-friendly pieces of legislation I think in the world).
I'd be interested in knowing the story and how high compliance costs are for something like this.
2. It was done (based on comments here) at least in part in Perth. Perth is my home town and has become increasingly tech unfriendly for three reasons:
- a lot of the bigger employers got bought out and consolidated their software development over East;
- the state as a whole is very focused on digging stuff up from the ground (or under the sea to be pedantic) and selling it to the Chinese. The startup scene is tiny; and
- cost of living in Perth is terrible in wage-adjusted terms. Honestly it's cheaper for me to live in New York (I moved here about 2.5 years ago to start a job with Google). Housing is a huge part of it but food, utilities and, well, everything is expensive in Perth now.
I'd certainly like to here more about the development story and the team (the site is scant on details on this).
As for the service itself, I'll echo the comments of others and say the FX and other fees coule make this quite expensive.
Still, good to see this coming out of Australia and good luck guys. I'm also glad to hear about more tech things happening in Perth. I might have to check out the meetups and stuff next time I visit.