A tale of three parts

MyPass evolved from an idea born of frustration, to a humble start-up, into what it is today: a multi-award-winning global tech innovator. Our close-knit team works hard to deliver what our founder Matt Smith set out to achieve. Let us set the scene…

It’s 2015. MyPass founder Matt Smith is working to the not-so-subtle noise of the washing machine in his laundry-turned-office within their Sydney unit. Matt has just taken the leap of faith to leave his executive role to fix a deep-rooted problem in his industry.

Matt, a Mechanical Engineer by trade, experienced first-hand how sourcing and mobilising large trades crews in the Resources sector was woefully inefficient. Often, this left him feeling personally exposed, not having the ‘hand on heart assurance’ that all his team out in the field were trained and competent to do their allocated tasks. Standalone compliance systems, stitched together using Excel spreadsheets, were to blame. These pain points planted the seed that would later become MyPass. Matt and his wife Nerita took the leap because these information gaps represented real risks to people coming home safely from each and every shift. That’s why to this day, MyPass’ vision is to empower safe, agile and connected communities.

The Origins of a Founder

Matt started his career in New Zealand, wearing hi-vis vests and work boots, coordinating large contractor groups to deliver brown-field projects. He moved from utilities into oil and gas construction, working on an on-shore gas production facility for Shell.  He continued into infrastructure projects before jumping into line management to use his Operations Management degree. Matt built strong relationships and learned a lot from the highly skilled tradespeople he worked with every day. Through these experiences at the coal face, he learned how to get the best out of teams, developing a deep appreciation for what it takes to deliver a project on time, on budget and to a high standard.

Matt and Nerita moved to Australia, and after a short stint in Melbourne, he was appointed to manage maintenance service crews across Western Australia with clients like BHP, Rio Tinto, ConocoPhillips and Newcrest Mining. This involved deploying fifty to five hundred workers to sites each week. Not a small feat for someone who was new to the Resources sector, learning to manage 30 people in the office who were supporting around 1,500 workers across Australia’s most high-risk facilities.

But what does all this have to do with founding a technology start-up?

• Planting the Seed

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The workforce Matt managed was made up of ninety per cent casual workers, who were also contracting for other companies at the same time. The process of managing their skills and competency information was a convoluted nightmare, with massive excel spreadsheets holding their data. Updating internal databases was important, but often the last priority behind a long list of critical tasks.

Rostering and applicant tracking systems were also standalone, and without integration, they couldn’t 'talk' to one another. This compounded the complexity of managing out of date spreadsheets, creating more work for admin teams.

There are 115 process steps involved between receiving a request for workers from a client and having that crew arrive on-site and ‘job ready’. 40% of those steps involve manually updating spreadsheets, creating untold operational costs and risks across the entire supply chain.  

This created wasted time and resources for everyone: Workers, Service Providers and Site Owners alike.

• Project Match Australia

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It’s now August 2013. After validating that others were also experiencing this challenge, Matt set out to find a solution. Matt and Nerita backed their new company ‘Project Match Australia,' with their personal savings. Matt engaged a Software Developer friend, who built a two-sided industry portal called Shutdowns Australia to match workers to shutdown projects. Various pilots were conducted, which validated a series of hypotheses that were critical to ensuring that it could be a viable commercial business.  Whilst having specialist Worker Onboarding software was useful, Matt could see that there was a bigger opportunity for the industry.  And this was to fundamentally re-shape the way that highly regulated sectors operate by creating a ‘single source of truth’ record for each individual, which with that individual’s permission, could be shared across the supply chain and across multiple industries. It was time to dream bigger.

• MyPass Global is born

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It’s August  2016, and we’re back in Matt and Nerita’s laundry. The decision was made to rebuild and rebrand as MyPass Global. This new model was designed to centre around a digital Skills Passport to allow industry to simplify, standardise and share.  This ‘inversion’ of the traditional model of duplicating worker information across multiple organisations, sought to empower each worker and reduce the cost and risk of managing site-based workers.  

Thousands of workers chose to sign up for early access. And we demonstrated how we could reduce risk and cost for our first clients Broadspectrum (now Ventia) and Quadrant Energy (now Santos). We soon expanded to New Zealand to partner with Methanex, and began the process of internationalising our software.

By 2018 we had just 10 employees, and built our core development and implementation teams in Perth.  Later that year we added enhanced worker pooling, compliance management and onboarding functionality to satisfy both Site Owners and Service Providers, ensuring that every MyPass user received a direct benefit from using our software.  

Protecting personal information is our ‘licence to operate’ and in December 2018 we were proud to have our Information Security Management System ISO27001 certified.  

Over the next few years, MyPass would continue to build momentum, gaining the trust from large progressive clients such as UGL, and winning six highly coveted industry awards, including AFR’s Most Innovative Company and Most Innovative Product (Mining, Agriculture and Utilities).  

Our team has been more than doubling every year, and we now have more than 100 engaged and productive MyPassers who want to fundamentally change the way entire industries operate.

Where is MyPass today?

Today MyPass offers a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) that brings together and empowers the entire supply chain.  This is achieved by providing organisations with access to aggregated real-time data, and the ability to integrate MyPass into their overall software and hardware landscape.

We are proud to have long-term partnerships with some of the largest and most highly regulated companies in Australia, and to have more than a thousand local and international customers who trust MyPass to ensure that workers come home safely every day.  

What is equally satisfying is the impact we are starting to have on the Health and Volunteering sectors who are in desperate need for simple and effective technology to support the safe and quality delivery of their services. This includes the pre-qualification of organisations, which can be achieved through our newly released Organisation Passport.  

MyPass supports Industry Associations and governments to collaborate and solve deep industry challenges.  One example is Verisafe, a member organisation that has developed a competency framework that enables organisations to simplify, standardise and share competency assessments across a range of high-risk job roles. This is just the beginning of portable credentialing that can efficiently capture and track workforce skills across multiple industries.  

As the future of work moves towards micro-credentialing, automation, and digital dependency, MyPass empowers and connects industry stakeholders to improve transparency and accessibility to workforce training data. Streamlining workforce management through this industry dataset, MyPass is developing partnerships to track an individual's entire journey through vocational education and training (VET) and into the workforce.