What PEXA chief Glenn King learnt from his dad’s side hustles

Mervyn’s flexibility guided his son over a career that took him from Geelong to Melbourne, Auckland, Yorkshire and Sydney, through the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, before leading a world-first digital platform for property exchange. PEXA (Property Exchange Australia) – a $2.4 billion business that listed on the ASX in 2021 – transacts 89 per cent of the country’s property settlements.

King now applies his father’s attitude to his younger workforce at PEXA – almost 60 per cent of the 1000-plus staff are under 40 and more than one-fifth have yet to reach 30. He doesn’t demand a life-long commitment to the organisation.

“I do not believe you need to stay at one organisation and what works for some may not work for others – there is no simple rule,” King, 60, says.

“However, I do believe you need to be with an organisation at least three to four years to have an impact.”

It also helps that King himself is a father – of an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old – which helps him relate to his younger workforce.

But he makes clear that the way he manages a career served in large organisations – including National Australia Bank, Save the Children Australia and the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet – is based on lessons from his father, who died in 2004. His mother, Elaine, passed away in 2022.

“Things he taught me besides integrity – thinking about cash flow, thinking about the business side and the other side, the importance of your customer, the importance of your word, all that sort of thing – I still think they’re valuable attributes to have,” King says.

He needs those skills every day as the second chief executive of PEXA – a business created out of a 2007 state, territory and federal government agreement to take property conveyancing transactions from paper into the digital age.

Development on the platform began in 2011, before launching in NSW and Victoria in 2014. Westpac, ANZ Bank, CBA, NAB, the Western Australian Land Information Authority, Macquarie Group, Link Group and the Little Group became the founding investors.

Then in 2019, a consortium of Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, CBA and the Link Group acquired the company. They remain PEXA shareholders after the company listed in 2021, including the CBA, which still owns around 24 per cent.

Box seat in the national sport

King is now leading the former start-up into its next role as a regulated monopoly in Australia that can carve out new opportunities overseas as he insulates the business from federal government moves to open the market up to greater competition.

It’s a heady mix of technology, regulation and financial services that is changing the inner workings of Australia’s national sport – residential property.

E-conveyancing saves consumers up to $300 million a year in costs, he estimates. The platform provides the bedrock for a suite of new data and transactional services.

For example, PEXA recently released data showing that more than one in four residential properties purchased in NSW, Victoria and Queensland last year were paid for entirely with cash by older Australians.

Running the platform draws on all of King’s experiences, says former NSW Liberal premier Mike Baird.

“Glenn is someone who brings and combines uniquely great commercial understanding and an outcome focus with public purpose and public good,” Baird tells AFR Boss.

Crossing between worlds can also create problems. In late 2019, after King’s PEXA appointment was announced, then opposition Labor MP Mark Buttigieg asked in Budget Estimates if he had been involved in regulating PEXA or had access to confidential NSW information about the company.

The department replied that King, who had engaged with PEXA in his time at NAB, had excluded himself and delegated responsibility for PEXA-related decisions to his then deputy secretary for customer service.

King puts a different focus on it.

“The main question that came was from the opposition treasurer [Daniel] Mookhey. He asked the question: did I get a payout? And the answer’s: no, I didn’t, because I resigned. Because often when people move, sometimes [they] get payouts. That was the main thing.”

After school, King undertook a part-time commerce degree at Deakin University – working to support himself – and ended up in a graduate role with National Mutual, where he stayed for seven years and also did a postgraduate degree in business administration at Swinburne University.

In 1997, with the commercial internet still in its infancy, he took a role running NAB’s digital banking channels. Websites and internet banking existed, but the vast majority of customers still used branches. King’s job was to get them out of branches and online.

”You still had all the branches – how do you migrate customers from over the counter into these other channels? And what’s the incentive scheme? What’s the right customer experience? I was involved in a lot of that.”

Understanding the customer

It plunged him into a real-time test lab of behavioural carrots and sticks, with methods such as offering higher rates of interest for using digital channels and levying fees on over-the-counter transactions – and again, he was applying lessons from his father.

“Test, learn, test, learn. You can’t, in reality, just set and forget – do one thing and then hope that works. Tying it back to the dad conversation, you’ve really got to understand the customer – the incentives, their needs, what’s going to be the positive nudge versus the nudge that might be an adverse behavioural nudge.”

By 1999 he was heading marketing for NAB’s Australian bank, a position he describes fondly.

“It gave me a really unique insight into the various forms of marketing, advertising, segmentation, the pricing element, the linkages between the CRM and analytics.”

From 2003 to 2008 he was in the UK, running marketing for NAB’s four UK banking brands – Yorkshire, Clydesdale, Northern Bank, National Irish Bank. While in the UK King and wife Gina had their two children, Xavier and Ella. Gina has been “very supportive” of the relocations that enabled his career, he says.

Back in Australia in 2009, then chief executive Cameron Clyne put King, executive general manager of NAB’s small business segment, in charge of the company’s shared services operation Servco, a back-of-house system aiming to support different parts of the big-four bank.

Not every new idea works. Servco didn’t pan out and was merged into the wider bank operations, King says.

King is a gentle talker, verging on the serious, who leans forward with one elbow on the table. He lifts it and gestures with two hands to emphasise a point. I ask him if he has a sense of humour.

“I do,” he reflects. “I do like to laugh and have fun.”

I’d asked the same question of Baird.

“He’s more dad-joke-style,” Baird says. “But I’ve probably got the same sense of humour.”

King gives a long laugh when I pass on Baird’s observation. Startled that the conversation has veered so suddenly into the personal, he gives himself time to respond.

“I am curious, I always like to learn, and always want to see how I can do things better?” he says. “What can I learn from others? That does require a degree of humour if you’re always going to learn and experiment.“

PEXA was still almost a decade away in 2011 but King left NAB, seeking a change from financial services. He went to Save the Children Australia.

“It gave me a completely different sector,” he says. “The motivational factors of those sectors are quite different to the financial services sector.”

Premier calls

The 17-month stint was helpful for his next pivot, a transition to the NSW public service, which was trying to set up Service NSW, a one-stop shop to access state government services and save people going “to 400 individual shopfronts – hundreds of websites went nowhere”.

Creating a platform allowing people to apply for a driver’s licence, pay fines and claim rebates required his banking skills in customer service and measuring their response.

But his understanding that staff are motivated by more than money also proved valuable.

Organisations vary, but the basics are the same, King says.

“There’s a lot more in common than people often think,” he says. “If you have engaged people it leads to engaged customers, [which] should lead to better performance outcomes.”

He again brings up his father’s wisdom.

“Dad didn’t obviously have lots of people, but being engaged himself and looking after his customers led to a good outcome for the small business owner.”

Baird then asked King to lead the Premier’s Implementation Unit, tasked with realising 12 key priorities such as a reduction in child obesity and the establishment of a container deposit scheme.

“Ten moved the right way, two didn’t get sustainable improvement of note – a couple of the priorities got delivered ahead of time,” King says.

In 2019 King, then secretary of the NSW Department of Customer Service, was recruited to replace PEXA’s first chief executive, Marcus Price.

Duopoly push

Early in the role, King had to manage threats of anti-competitive sanction from NSW customer service minister Victor Dominello, who had been pushing the case for a second operator, Sympli, and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss Rod Sims.

Sympli, a collaboration between the ASX and InfoTrack, is pushing hard to break open PEXA’s monopoly.

A federal parliamentary report last month backed greater competition.

King says creating a duopoly would have no sustainable positive impact and, with PEXA’s core service heavily regulated, it is better to allow competition to develop customer-facing services that use the exchange’s platform.

”There’s an opportunity to think about what on the retail front-end side we can do in terms of ensuring there’s the right level of innovation and competition,” he says.

“What can we do to improve the connections with practice management software? What can we do to improve the outcome for citizens and real estate agents?“

PEXA faces other challenges, such as a weak, but recovering, property market. King says Australian residential property bottomed in the third quarter of last year and will strengthen in the second half of this year and more next year.

The $2.4 billion company is expanding in the UK, where acquisitions of two businesses, Optima Legal and Smoove, give it exposure to the remortgage market.

Fatherly reflection

King sticks to the company’s guidance, expecting up to 40 per cent share of the UK remortgage market by the end of calendar 2025 and at least 25 per cent of the sale-and-purchase market by the end of 2027.

PEXA is also testing the use of AI in three areas – in analytics and valuation business Value Australia; in tech company Elula, which predicts which customers are likely to refinance or sell their property and which financial institution customers will use; and in back-office areas such as call centres.

So how would his father regard this evolution of the property market?

“One of the things he said in my very young age was: make sure you invest in property. Buy a house because there’s only a finite amount of land – and somewhere where you always know the value will go up,” he says.