Fred Schebesta steps down as co-CEO of Finder and wants to fix finance next

Fred Schebesta has been the face of Finder since its inception back in 2006. Despite Finder having three founders, it’s Schebesta who naturally commanded the spotlight with his eccentric style, cryptocurrency evangelism and penchant for being ‘straight up’ in external comms.

But this will now change as the crypto king takes a step back to work on other projects and ventures within the Finder stratosphere. Speaking exclusively to SmartCompany, Schebesta has revealed he is stepping down as co-CEO of Finder’s global business and will no longer be the primary public face of the company.

Schebesta will now be Executive Chair at Finder and working on more venture-related projects.

Co-founder Frank Restuccia will now take a more active role in the brand’s media and communications, in addition to the day-to-day leadership of Finder’s global arm. This includes overseeing country operations in Australia, USA, UK, Canada and another 30 countries.

Chris Ellis continues to be CEO of Finder Australia after stepping into the role back in 2020.

According to Schebesta, changing roles is baked into the Finder DNA.

“With Frank and I, our roles have always changed throughout time. There was a time when there was only me… I was the coder, I wrote the content, built the links and called the clients,” Schebesta said in an interview with SmartCompany.

“Over time, I replaced every single role with people who are much, much better than me. Frank is a much better day-to-day leader and capital allocator than myself in a larger organisation… Frank’s a much better CEO.”

Restuccia also points to Finder’s evolution and growth and how this has led to this point.

“Fred and I have worked together for 20 years and have worn many different hats throughout that whole journey,” Restuccia said in an interview with SmartCompany.

“He has tended to take on more of those corporate spokesperson duties. And over time I’ve done my share of them, but now it’s really important for me to take on more of that share of responsibility.”

However, Restuccia says the internal, day-to-day business operations at Finder haven’t changed a great deal.

“My skillset historically has been more about managing the overall business, the P&L, the people. So the actual formality of the title change is one thing, but the actual underlining responsibilities haven’t really changed a great deal.”

Finder co-founders Fred Schebesta, Jeremy Cabral and Frank Restuccia. Source: supplied.

New ventures after HiveEX and Finder Earn

Schebesta may be taking a step back from the public-facing and management sides of the business, but he’s not leaving Finder. Instead, he’ll be working on other initiatives, such as the laptop recycling program the company recently launched with Good360.

“I think my natural passion is to take big creative risks and in some small way you create unexpectedly amazing things for people,” Schebesta told SmartCompany.

He also continues to be active on his personal social media accounts. In addition to posting personal and aspirational content, he uses Instagram and TikTok to promote other business ventures and side hustles. This includes his book Go Live as well as renting his South Coogee ‘Crypto Castle’, which can be booked for $10,743 a night on Airbnb.

Schebesta also recently engaged in a paid partnership with Red Rooster where he tried some of the brand’s chicken burgers.

@fred.schebesta

1 bite burger reviews.. @redrooster 🍔 The Picklebird Burger – available only at selected Red Rooster restaurants! #foodtok #burger #sydney #chicken #redrooster #australia #foryou #ad #theroosterscalling

♬ original sound – Fred Schebesta

A key aim for Schebesta is re-injecting himself into build-phase sections of the company.

“Frank asked me a question the other night. He said: ‘Blank slate, if you could build anything, what would you build?’ He asked me that same question back in 2017 and that’s when we built HiveEX and all the crypto content and all the crypto projects.”

HiveEX was the cryptocurrency exchange that Schebesta and Restuccia founded in 2018, under Hive Empire Trading Pty Ltd.

In August 2020, 100% of the shares of Hive Empire Trading Pty Ltd were sold for $300,000. They were purchased by Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm founded and owned by FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried. These shares were then passed onto FTX itself in December 2021 for $100.

More recently, Finder launched Finder Earn, a stablecoin investment product. Earn allowed users to invest in TAUD for a high-yield fixed return of 4.01%. Between May and June 2022 this was bumped up to 6.01% for users who had more than $10,000 of TAUD invested in Finder Earn.

But the product was short-lived. Finder sunsetted Earn in late November, just one year after launching. The company cited the current economic climate as the reason. It’s unclear whether the continued crypto bear market factored into the decision.

“At Finder we always put our customers first, and determined that Earn is no longer serving our customers as it did in a low-rate environment,” a text to customers read.

Restuccia confirmed to SmartCompany that Earn had around 5000 customers and that $500,000 in interest was paid out to customers during the life of the product.

According to Restuccia, this was not at a loss to Finder due to investors frequently engaging in another action on the comparison platform, such as buying insurance or getting a better home loan rate.

The company says all TAUD held by customers has already been converted back to 1:1 AUD and returned to customers’ Finder Wallets. Balances seen by SmartCompany confirm this.

“It’s time to fix finance”

Finder plans to continue trying new things, with Schebesta at the helm.

“Freddie’s really keen to spend as much time as possible on ventures and building new businesses from zero and take them to one,” Restuccia said.

And according to Schebesta, this is still likely to be in the fintech space because he wants to disrupt finance as we know it.

“So much of finance is still broken,” he said.

“It just irks me to the point of ‘I’m just going to fix this and make the ultimate experience.'”

During the interview, Schebesta described recently calling contacts about this while driving home after a meeting at 10.30pm.

“I was really fired up. I’ve had absolutely enough of this. It’s time to fix finance and build something incredible to do it where people go ‘wow, that’s unexpected and startling’,” Schebesta said.

“I want to spend zero dollars on marketing. It’s all publicity and product all day.”

While this product hasn’t taken shape yet, for Schebesta it is about sustainability and efficiency. He quotes from a recent Valuechain report that revealed the banking sector uses up to 56 times more power than cryptocurrency.

“What’s in all these transactions, what are all these pieces of paper? How many trees get chopped down from inefficiencies in this? It’s people just going over stuff and over stuff. What’s happening back there?” Schebesta asked.

“There must be a more efficient way to do this.”

While shaking up deeply ingrained institutionalised finance may be a long-term goal, for now, Finder’s aim is to help people weather the current economic and interest rate storm.

“Finders’s mission is to help people save and make money. And at the end of the day, we take a very customer-centric view of how we go about things,” Restuccia said.

“I just want to ensure they’ve got all the information and tools at their disposal to be able to make great decisions.”

Disclosure: the author is a former employee of Finder.