I have spent thirty years turning investment problems into products, working with pension funds, wirehouses and direct investors across fourteen countries, on everything from agricultural land to credit. But the most important brief of my career did not come from an institution. It came from my wife, Trenna. And it took me years to fully understand what she had handed me.
Trenna's problem, affecting millions of women
Before I tell you what product we built, you need to know why. And the why belongs to Trenna.
At 34, Trenna was a single mother starting again from almost nothing. She had already held senior roles, run her own business, and lived what looked from the outside like a charmed life. When it unravelled, she discovered how thin the safety net under an Australian woman can be. She borrowed A$3,000 from her parents. There were nights she struggled to feed her son. She has told that story publicly, with more courage than I could summon about my own worst chapter, and I will not tell it better than she does. What matters here is what she chose to do with it.
Most people who claw their way back from the edge spend the rest of their lives building distance from it. Trenna did the opposite. She went looking for the problem she had lived, unexpectedly, and she found it everywhere: in Australia, women retire with roughly 40 percent less superannuation than men. Single women over 55 are among the fastest-growing groups at risk of homelessness in one of the wealthiest, most socially conscious nations on earth. The threat she had faced to her own security was quietly stalking millions of Australian women. And beneath all of it sits a global gender wealth gap that Oxfam estimated in 2024 at US$105 trillion: men owning that much more wealth than women, worldwide.
Most people who claw their way back from the edge spend the rest of their lives building distance from it. Trenna did the opposite.
Anyone who has met Trenna knows she has never met a challenge she isn't equal to, a person she won't help, or an injustice she won't fight. After rebuilding her life, from broke to Head of Strategy at Macquarie Private Bank, she refused to stay comfortable. She decided to act.
Super Fierce was her answer. She called it her “war cry for equality.” First conceived in 2019, she set out to close the gender wealth and retirement gap, starting with the one lever nearly every Australian woman holds and almost none are helped to pull: her superannuation.
I want to be precise about our roles, because it matters. Trenna was the founder, the CEO, the public face, and the driving force. I was her co-founder, and I built the machinery. She supplied the vision, the voice and the heart that started a movement; I supplied the mathematics and built the algorithms. She crafted the product, formed a powerful team, raised the capital, and attracted thousands of customers and advocates. We were, as we have been in everything for decades, equal partners with different roles and complementary expertise.
We were, as we have been in everything for decades, equal partners with different roles and complementary expertise.
Building the machine
Our goal was to address her mission to close the gender wealth gap starting with a financial-advice engine that could give every Australian woman access to properly customised advice, in language she could understand, at a price she could afford. That is a far harder engineering and regulatory challenge than it sounds.
Personal financial advice in Australia is heavily regulated, labour-intensive, and priced well beyond the reach of the people who need it most. The industry's usual answer had been to digitise the back-office paperwork, focusing on internal efficiency. Ours was to rebuild the advice itself, targeting a marginal cost of around A$1.00 per advice report while improving its quality and clarity at the same time.
I designed the algorithms, ran the process to secure our own financial services licence, and architected the data, rules and mathematics inside the platform. By the end, our advice engine ran more than 180,000 calculations instantly at a near zero marginal cost to deliver a single personalised Statement of Advice, with a custom model portfolio, delivered to the customer in accessible language at a price they could afford: A$40 instead of thousands of dollars, for an average fee saving of over A$100,000.
The centrepiece was the research process we called the Fierce Performers Index. We unravelled more than 2,000 investment options across all 359 Australian superannuation funds, 99.8 percent of the market, and tested each one for something subtly different from what the industry's league tables measure: not who performed best lately, but who performed consistently, across good markets and bad, across every option they offered, adjusted for risk and fees, over two decades of booms and busts.
Only fifteen funds passed.
The financial press covered the Index on its merits, and the methodology made me a finalist for Thought Leader of the Year at the 2023 superannuation industry awards, the only non-fund nominee in the category. I am proud of that. I am even more proud that later in 2023, at the Australian Women in Finance Awards, Trenna won Thought Leader of the Year and the coveted Excellence Award.
But the recognition we both really cared about was simpler: within five months of launch, the platform had identified more than A$116 million in unnecessary fees its customers could save. By the end, we had improved the future retirement positions of Australian women by more than A$400 million.
We are proud of the A$400 million impact we have had on the future retirement positions of Australians.
The fifteen Fierce Performers, as a group, had outperformed their peers by around 0.8 percent a year, and nearly half of that edge came from something entirely within a fund's control: lower fees.
That last finding sums up my career in one number. Paraphrasing what Australian research institution the Grattan Institute has said time and time again: Performance is transient. Fees are persistent. That is why we focused first on unraveling the complexity of fees so they could be compared on a like-for-like basis. Our goal was to arm Aussies with unbiased information. Start with what can be known (fees) and make sure you are not paying too much. It worked, and our customers (women and men) will retire to a better financial future as a result.
What I learned building for the women our industry forgot
Everything I knew about financial products I had learned serving institutions and the advisers of the wealthy. Super Fierce forced me to find a way to apply that expertise to suit the customer the industry had structurally given up on: a 30-year-old woman with A$45,000 in super, no adviser, no time, and a well-earned suspicion of everyone in my profession.
Although I am grateful for both, that customer taught me more than the institutions ever did. She taught me that complexity is not neutral: every page of jargon is a tax paid disproportionately by the people with the least slack in their lives. She taught me that trust is not built with brand campaigns but with respect, humanity and understanding built into a product that meets the customer where they are, on their own terms: unbiased, personalised advice in language that made sense, that she could afford.
And she confirmed something I had believed since my Macquarie days but never seen proven so starkly: the gap between good financial outcomes and bad ones is rarely intelligence or discipline. It is access.
The gap between good financial outcomes and bad ones is rarely intelligence or discipline. It is access.
The hardest chapter
In late 2022, days after Super Fierce had its breakthrough, everything changed.
We had just landed major national press. Growth started looking like the hockey stick every founder dreams about. The Series A capital raise was about to launch. And then I suffered a life-threatening stroke in a regional town 9 hours from home, and our two-engine business lost an engine. Me.
What nobody writes into the risk section of a pitch deck is what happens to a mission-driven company when its two key people are married to each other and one of them nearly dies. Trenna was suddenly founder, CEO, head of product, capital raiser, carer, mother and the family's financial keel all at once, across state borders, through my months in and out of hospital, and through the years of rehabilitation that followed. She kept the company alive far longer than anyone could reasonably have asked, and she did it while carrying our family. I am also grateful that she maintained my privacy throughout even though it made the carrying so much harder.
What nobody writes into the risk section of a pitch deck is what happens to a mission-driven company when its two key people are married to each other and one of them nearly dies.
In mid-2025, Trenna made the decision to close Super Fierce gracefully. It was a values-led call, made the way we believe endings should be made: deliberately, while every obligation could still be met, before the path forward demanded more of the company, and of our family, than either could sustainably give.
I have written elsewhere that how you leave is the last product you ship. Trenna is a consummate professional and she knew that instinctively, choosing to close her life's work with the same grace and care she put into everything else. All you need to do is read her post “Farewell & Fierce Love from Super Fierce” to see this in action, and the endless comments to see how widely she is respected and honoured, even in this moment of ‘failure.’
I will not pretend it did not hurt. Watching the person you love wind down the mission she built from her own scar tissue, largely because of what happened to you, is its own kind of grief and guilt. But I have never been prouder.
What remains
Super Fierce closed. What it proved did not.
It proved that more than A$400 million of retirement improvement was sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to make it accessible. It proved that an unbiased, rigorous, personal Statement of Advice could be generated at almost zero marginal cost, years before the industry accepted that was possible. It proved that women were not “disengaged” from their finances, as industry lore insisted; they were underserved, which is a different problem with a different solution. And it proved, one more time, the thesis I have carried through every chapter of my career: sophisticated finance can be translated for the people it was supposedly built for, without dumbing it down and without compromising its integrity.
Sophisticated finance can be translated for the people it was supposedly built for, without dumbing it down and without compromising its integrity.
The gender wealth gap is still there. The imbalance in Australia's superannuation system is still there. But so are we. Trenna says she is not done closing that gap, and after thirty years of watching her do exactly what she says she will do, I would not bet against her. We will probably go again, whether in Australia or offshore.
Some missions do not end when the company does. This is one of them.
