Meet the Weel Engineer: Matthew Egan

Name: Matthew Egan

Current Job Title: Engineering Team Lead

Favourite Book: A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking

How long have you been working at Weel? 

I've been working at Weel for a bit over three years now. I joined the team just before we decided to focus on business payments and expense management. At the time we we're working on a payment splitting app to help people pay split bills at restaurants among other types of quick payments like shared rental scenarios. We were also developing a product to help individuals create virtual cards on demand to protect themselves online from sharing the same card numbers across multiple services. 

What is your experience so far working at Weel as part of the founding team?  

My experience working at Weel has been great so far! It's incredible being part of the business from the early days, since before we wrote our first line of code for the business product. I think it's been a really fun adventure to watch both the product and the business evolve.

What made you decide to work in Fintech? 

I decided to work in Fintech after working at a silent auction company. We were doing a little bit of payment handling there which introduced me to the world of Fintech. From there I found that I really enjoyed the types of challenges that both payments and finance in general present. At its crux there's all these fragmented systems that make up the Australian financial system and when you tie each of them together you can build some pretty amazing capabilities that haven't been seen before! It's these new technologies and how they change the way that people work that gets me pretty excited about Fintech and Weel. 

You've worked on a number of projects and product releases. Which one or which ones have been your favourite and why?

Of the releases that I remember, the one that stands out is our first release.  With a small team at the time we became the first ones to issue a reloadable virtual Mastercard on both Apple Pay and Google Pay within Australia. Another one of my favourite releases was when we released  the payment mechanisms that underpin both budgets and subscriptions on Weel. The feature appears pretty simple at face value but we had to come up with some quite clever ways to make sure that money was available on every card at the right time so that users were able to make their payments without any of their cards declining and making sure that they also remained within their limits. 

What media are you consuming right now? This could be a TV series, books, games, whatever you are into at the moment. 

At the moment the only book that I'm reading is completely non-technical. It's called Where Song Began by Tim Low and it's an interesting exposition on bird song in Australia and how it's changed over time as we've built cities and reduced habitats across the land. From the technical side of things I listen to Darknet Diaries, it's a podcast I've been listening to for a couple years and it's a really good insight into the goings-on in the shady underworld of the internet. I particularly liked episodes 45 and 46 which discussed hacking the original xbox and how a small band of misfits managed to hack their way into some of the biggest game studios in the world.  

Is there someone in Fintech or Tech generally that influences and inspires you and if so why?

I'm really inspired by the open source community, so, no particular individuals rather the whole community has been my inspiration over the last couple years. There's just so many different individuals in the community that have made both big and small contributions that have helped change the way that developers and increasingly non-developers work. It's incredible.  

What advice can you give to people who would like to make a career switch to Fintech or are interested in learning more about Fintech?

If I was about to make a career switch into Fintech or if I just wanted to learn a bit more about it, my best piece of advice is to just jump into the deep end. There's a lot out there to read and understand but you're not going to digest it all without being in the weeds and working in real environments. The capabilities of financial systems are changing every day which is expanding the possibilities for different products, so really getting in there and just playing around with code and learning the ins and outs of all the different concepts is my biggest piece of advice. I found that attending meetups pre-Covid and reading newsletters or digests has been a pretty good way to stay on top of the latest trends.