Finnlay Morcombe’s dream was to be an investment banker. But his future swerved in a radically different direction after he signed up for an internship with a big super fund while still at uni.His epiphany was this: there must be a simpler, automated way to process documentation – a time-consuming, hands-on, and terminally boring task of explaining how certain work tasks have to be performed by people who have never done them before.

Fluency co-founders Oliver Farnill (left) and Finnlay Morcombe with their mentor, Dr Angel Zhong. Eamon Gallagher“I was given the task of moving a process from one team to another.

And I realised there was room for a product to do it,” said Mr Morcombe, who is finishing his business and finance degree at RMIT this semester.

He started a business, Fluency, and opened offices in Flinders Street in Melbourne’s CBD. The company has clients in Australia, Singapore and Japan and another 50 or so in the pipeline.

He sees no reason why most companies globally would not want to buy into Fluency’s platform.

Having seen the possibility, code was written, funding was secured, and the team grew from two to seven between February 2023 and May 2024.

Having been accepted into Swinburne University’s pre-accelerator program, where his business partner, Oliver Farnill, is a student, the pair won a couple of prizes in a small pitch competition and collected the grand total of $2500 for their MVP – minimum viable product – based on code they taught themselves to write.

Fluency co-founders Oliver Farnill (left) and Finnlay Morcombe with their mentor, Dr Angel Zhong.

That led to being accepted into the accelerator program, which came with an equity-free $20,000.

“The software was only four buttons on a screen at this point, but we somehow sold it to a NDIS service provider,” Mr Morcombe said.

That in turn led to a pre-seed funding raise which achieved $300,000 and a $3 million valuation.

In layman’s terms, Fluency replaces the manual task of explaining how a task, such as generating a daily report in Excel, is done.

“If you hire a new staff member they won’t know how to do it until you’ve sat down and walked them through each of the steps a few times, or you’ve created a set of instructions on how to replicate the process.

That is usually done by taking screenshots which clearly show what to click, where and why.“What Fluency does is use the software in the process by going through it as per normal, and then it can generate the documentation, which is contextually informed,” said Mr Morcombe.

It seems blindingly obvious, right?“That’s exactly what we thought.

”Having abandoned his dream of investment banking, Mr Morcombe now wants Fluency to be deployed “to most businesses across the world as everyone has a user case”.Luckily for Fluency, Mr Morcombe’s girlfriend came to the rescue when it came to naming the platform.

“The name I initially came up with was terrible. It was Con-Plug.”

Angel Zhong, head of the finance at RMIT’s college of business and law, said Mr Morcombe clearly had what it took to be an entrepreneur.

“Finn has this agility. We organise an annual finance trading competition and in 2022 Finn was one of our top performers. We use real-life data that changes every millisecond and he adapts to the changing circumstances in real time and also has great critical thinking skills,” Dr Zhong said.

“And then he has a remarkable ability to apply this theoretical knowledge in practical settings and which is also a focus of our program here.”

Julie Hare is the Education editor. She has more than 20 years’ experience as a writer, journalist and editor. Connect with Julie on Twitter. Email Julie at julie.hare@afr.com