From online trading to blockchain Kerry Roxburgh retains passion for technology

Kerry Roxburgh helped pioneer online share trading in Australia.

Kerry Roxburgh

Back in the early days of online share trading in Australia, former E*Trade chief executive Kerry Roxburgh occasionally had to rouse the Silicon Valley engineers from their weekend beachfront activities to kickstart the trading website.

More than 20 years ago, when terms like “cyberspace” were still part of the technology lexicon, Kerry Roxburgh was taking on fellow early starter CommSec, with each looking to stamp their authority on what was at the time a cutting edge innovation in share trading.

Mr Roxburgh, who is being recognised with a Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia in today’s Australia Day honours, said it was a heady time.

He credits leaving accounting to Labor prime minister Paul Keating, whose deregulation of financial markets led to a scramble for new banking licences.

“I left the accounting world in 1986, it was actually on my birthday, thanks to Paul Keating, who I think was a great treasurer,’’ Mr Roxburgh said.

“There weren’t enough bankers going around so they raided the accounting and the legal professions. I was fortunate enough to be tapped on the shoulder by John Bond, who became executive chairman of HSBC. That took me into banking and stockbroking.’’

Mr Roxburgh said he’d always had an interest in technology — he could program as an accountant in the 1970s — and through his stint at HSBC he became executive chairman of stockbroker James Capel Australia, which the bank had acquired.

“We took the stock exchange into our back office in 1990, we linked the stock exchange directly to our desk,’’ Mr Roxburgh said.

“HSBC were technologically very advanced. They introduced intranet into the bank in the late 80s and we communicated from our own desks to people from all around the world.

“And I started using the internet myself in 1990, so I saw how we could take our desk in the back office, I could easily envision how that could go to your desk through the World Wide Web.’’

Mr Roxburgh left the bank in 1995 and teamed up with BT research analyst Paul Davis and Tim Hughes about getting a trading licence for Australia.

E*Trade was already operating in the US, and Mr Roxburgh said they were “very keen” to collaborate.

Kerry Roxburgh during his days as E*Trade chief executive.

“We launched in November 1997. The first trade was done in National Bank shares. “We pioneered straight-through processing with the help of the stock exchange. We were the first broker to be entirely straight-through online.’’

The website was hosted in Palo Alto, California, and piped to Australia through an undersea cable.

“I’ll never forget: often Monday morning the website was down, and we’d have to ring the guys in Palo Alto ... they’d all be on the beach in California and they’d have to come into the office and crank it up again. It was quite an extraordinary time.’’

E*Trade went on to be a success, with Mr Roxburgh as chief executive and later chairman, and the company was acquired by ANZ in July 2007 for $432m.

Mr Roxburgh’s passion for technology has not abated, with a long stint on the board of Tyro Payments ending in late 2019, and he is currently chairing a bid under the Federal Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) grant scheme for Australian research into “Blockchain & the Trust Economy”.

Mr Roxburgh likens blockchain to being in a similar position to accounting in the 1960s, when there were no generally accepted accounting principles in play internationally.

“I guess it took 15 or 20 years for accounting standards to be generally accepted around the world so you compare side-by-side, like for like.

“Now I see blockchain is in a similar position where we don’t have generally accepted principles for the application of blockchain.

“More importantly, we need to make sure our data privacy is secure and blockchain does facilitate that.’’

Mr Roxburgh said it would be a long game, but the future for blockchain was positive.

On the personal front, Mr Roxburgh remains a passionate sailor, having competed in 12 Sydney to Hobart yacht races, and is a long-time member of the Cruising Yacht Club of Sydney where he was Commodore from April 1979 to April 1981.

Mr Roxburgh said his elder brother, who’d been schooled in Sydney, encouraged him to join the CYC when he moved from Melbourne in 1969.

“Sailing is just a wonderful pastime. It’s a wonderful place where everybody is equal, we all rely on each other for our safety.

“I love the sport and I’m still involved in the club.

“I can remember as a young boy we’d go to Merimbula and stand on the hill above Middle Beach on the day after Boxing Day.

“My father would have binoculars and we’d look out to sea and my father would say ‘those boats left Sydney yesterday and they’re sailing to Hobart’.’’