Smartgroup chair John Prendiville’s path to lease assistance

John Prendiville may not have called Western Australia home for many years, but the experienced finance executive says his strong professional connections to the state remain.

In an interview with Business News During a recent visit to Perth, Mr Prendiville spoke about the events that brought him to the east coast and his 30-year career in the finance industry.

Mr Prendiville, now chairman of Smartgroup Corporation, one of Australia’s largest pay-packaging companies and recently valued at $1.1 billion, left Perth when he was 17 to attend the Royal Military College, Duntroon.

After graduating and serving in the Australian Defense Force, he left the Army to complete a Master of Business Administration at the University of Western Australia, with studies funded by the Bond Corporation.

However, what appeared to be a linear next step in his fledgling career did not materialize when Bond Corp’s financial troubles became public.

“Bond Corporation, which had done an MBA and returned, was floundering,” Mr. Prendiville said.

“My mission was to go back and join them.

“Their obligation was to provide me with funds for a world-class MBA education, but we parted with a friendly farewell.”

While the door of opportunity closed with the Bond Corporation, another opened with Macquarie Bank in Sydney, which Mr Prendiville joined in the 1990s.

He made his name in the Fintech industry here.

“I spent about 20 years there, the last 10 as one of the global heads of the investment bank,” he said.

“We were expanding globally at the time, so there was a lot of traveling during the second 10-year period…about 15 different countries and 25 different offices around the world that we developed or expanded into.

“It was a very exciting time. It was hectic but also fun [and] There is a lot of energy.”

After working at Macquarie Bank for nearly 20 years, Mr Prendiville and his colleagues founded their own investment firm, Shift Financial, in 2011.

Shift Financial focuses on financing the small and medium-sized business space in Australia, providing funding to private companies across a range of sectors.

“We would basically invest in or buy assets we like – property, industrial, fintech or development assets – whether it be debt or equity,” Mr Prendiville said.

“At Macquarie we were hoping to utilize many of the skills we acquired during our time there and put those skills to use on behalf of the office.

“This has been going on for the last 14 years or so and it has been a very successful process.”

In 2014, shortly after the launch of Shift Financial, former Smartgroup owner Ananda Krishnan contacted Mr. Prendiville with an offer to join the company.

Mr Prendiville said he could see the potential for the business to grow across the country.

“That’s when [Smartgroup] “It was a much smaller company,” he said.

“[A] The colleague I left Macquarie with got involved. We went to the board and listed the company on the ASX. At the time it was worth $150 million.

“They had a very customer-focused approach to management and that was really good. We basically gave them room to expand and they did a number of acquisitions and organic growth across Australia.

“It’s currently worth about $1.1 billion and I think it’s the largest pay packet and the largest refurbished leasing company in Australia.

“The last acquisition was probably six or seven years ago, so most of the current growth is happening through organic growth: new customers coming in and customers with previous pay packets working with a competitor moving to Smartgroup.”

Renewed leasing is an agreement between an employee, an employer and a finance company regarding payments for a vehicle and associated operating costs through the employee’s pre-tax salary.

Mr. Prendiville became chairman of Smartgroup in early 2024.

Although headquartered in Sydney, Mr Prendiville said WA was a key focus for Smartgroup.

“We have customers in WA, for example, who have been with us for 15 years, and that’s because we take the complexity out of the game and make it really simple for employees to engage,” he said.

“We aim to grow [and] develop this work and take it further. We’ve been here a long time and we’ll be here a lot longer.

“In terms of what we see as a development-oriented market where we want to grow, [WA] one of them. This is one of our most important markets.

“We have 50,000 [customers] but we would love to have many more companies, organizations and employees packaging their wages in WA and taking advantage of the opportunity there.

“We are dedicating a large amount of money and capital to developing our assets here to try and develop them as quickly as possible.”

Federal and state government bodies, including the ministries of health, education and defense, are Smartgroup’s customers.

Mr Prendiville said awareness of salary packaging had increased and this was beneficial in the current environment.

“What this essentially means is that an employee could take home a lot more money than if they had not received their pay packet,” he said.

“Salary packaging allows for pre-tax payments for certain items under federal government sanction.

“Basically, it allows people to have more money in their take-home pay

“In a cost-of-living crisis like we’re in right now, if you can access this type of product for your employees, you’d be crazy not to.

“This gives them a larger take-home pay than they would normally receive.”

Mr Prendiville said Smartgroup expects the electric vehicle market to be a new avenue for growth.

He said businesses are increasingly looking to offer their employees the option of renting a refurbished electric vehicle.

“Organizations recognize the benefits of employees using electric vehicles; this is a really good position for them,” he said.

“This is a pretty big growth area.

“These are the areas where growth is coming and it is across Australia.

“Western Australians are certainly taking notice and agreeing with all of this.

“We have 50,000 employees [on the books] here in WA. We have an office here that is doing well and we would like to expand.

“[And] “We have a dynamic where these employees are willing to be part of the carbon transition.”

Mr Prendiville’s ties to WA are also evidenced by his position on the board of the University of Notre Dame Australia for the past 10 years.

Mr Prendiville sits on the finance and investment committee for Notre Dame, which operates campuses in Fremantle, regional WA and Sydney.

“I can only give credit to WA for the quality of what it produces. So it’s one of the strongest states financially,” he said.

“It’s hard to say there are huge differences between the east coast and the west coast because I think you have to be really good these days to be successful anywhere in Australia.

“The evidence of WA’s success is its finances, its state of development, the condition of its assets and the quality of the business people who live here.”