💡 Wych - Dermot Butterfield

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Welcome to Founder Focus, your semi-regular deep dive into irish insights, Founders’ origin stories in every corner of the globe.

In this edition, we bring you the story of Dermot Butterfield, Founder and CEO of Wych, Dermot launched from Auckland, New Zealand - possibly the furthest distance from Ireland an Irish startup has been launched?

Wych has been growing incredibly quickly lately as ANZ banks are adopting open banking. Just yesterday, the CEO of one of NZ’s biggest banks (Kiwibank) announced a partnership with Wych. 👏🏻

Announcements such as this have taken years of hard work. Dermot’s story embodies an Irish Insights favourite: unexpected moves, stubborn grit, a healthy disregard for norms, and a vision quietly building infrastructure for the next wave of open finance.

If you are interested in finding out more about Wych or can help Dermot in any way, reach out to us or Dermot ([email protected])

Enjoy ☕

⚡ Dermot Butterfield, Wych Fast Facts

🌱 The Beginning

You left Ireland and ended up founding a fintech in New Zealand. Fill in the blanks - what was the winding road that got you from Limerick to launching Wych?

I’m from Limerick originally, having studied at the University of Limerick (UL), and I started at Intel in Shannon, which provided me with great exposure to R&D and innovation. Then I moved to Dublin and joined BearingPoint. Lived in Celbridge. Hour-long bus commutes.

The job sent me abroad almost immediately, to Birmingham and London, but I barely had a chance to see those cities. I’d fly out, live in hotels, come back, swap out clothes, and fly again. Our house became a wardrobe. Meanwhile, my partner was in Peru, Barbados, Jamaica, building mobile networks. She got the exotic gigs. I got Birmingham.

One day, we said “feck it,” booked one-way tickets to Mexico, and went travelling through Central and South America for about nine months. From there, we drifted into Australia, crashed on a few couches, then hopped over to New Zealand.

What was the “right, feck it” moment that made you decide to build Wych?

It wasn’t a Hollywood-style moment. It crept up. At the time, I was consulting for Barclays on their open banking integration — from NZ, working evenings and testing broken APIs at 3 am. I was sleeping on the stairs between cycles.

I just thought, “This shouldn’t be so difficult.” So I pitched a better approach to my employer. They weren’t interested. I asked if I could explore it on the side — they said yes.

At the same time, my partner was pregnant with our twins. She’d go to bed early, and I’d sneak back to the laptop to code. After they were born, I stayed home the second year. When they’d nap, I’d keep building. Eventually, I tested a prototype that found $1,100 in savings — real money, real household bills.

That’s when I pushed back from the desk and thought, “Oh shite… this works.” That was the real start of Wych.

👀 The Problem + Why Wych Exists

Open banking isn’t exactly dinner-table conversation. How do you explain Wych to your mum (or a room of non-techies)?

It’s about control. Open banking is one flavour of open data — and it’s all built around consent. You decide who can access your data, for what reason, and for how long. Check out the full explainer from Dermot in the video below (from 16:30):

Rather than sending your mortgage broker 16 PDFs filled with private information, you click a button, share access securely, and revoke it when you’re finished. No cluttered inboxes, no unexpected data breaches six years later.

We establish the secure connections that facilitate this sharing for banks, applications, and even your utility provider. However, the true magic lies in empowering individuals with the tools to manage their information.

Everyone’s shouting about AI, but Wych is quietly using it to make real financial decisions easier. How do you approach AI differently?

I’ve been around tech for 20 years. Some shiny new trends are more trouble than they’re worth. AI is powerful — but also risky. Once your data is inside a model, you can’t just delete it.

That’s why we don’t train AI models on customer data. Instead, we focus on the agent layer — we teach it the process, not the personal details. How should a loan be assessed? How do you spot a fraudulent transaction? How should a savings tool behave? Here’s Dermot talking about AI in a podcast:

🚀 Building the Thing

You scaled up to 140+ CDR data providers — how did you pull that off without VC rocket fuel?

We are primarily bootstrapped, although we secured some angel investments when we required funds for significant compliance certifications.

We talked to 680 investors in the early days. I even had a CRM just for tracking conversations. But honestly, it was costing me more time than it was worth. An investor pays you once. A customer pays you every month.

So we shifted gears. Started selling low-cost, high-impact solutions — $1K/month pilot projects. That built trust. Then came $5K contracts. Then $20K statements of work. Revenue led the way. No “we’ll make it up in 10 years” stories here.

What’s been the toughest call you’ve had to make as CEO so far?

Not walking away during COVID.

We launched just before the pandemic - had contracts and deals lined up. Then everything was cancelled, all of it. I examined our finances and stripped the business down to the bare essentials. No fat left at all.

So I didn’t. I promised myself I’d only quit on a good day. Thankfully, we got through that spell and have gone from strength to strength since.

☘️ The Irish Bit

What Irish traits do you think give you an edge in international business?

The experience Irish grads leave with is world-class, especially in tech, pharma, and med devices. When I landed here, I’d already worked with budgets bigger than entire government departments in New Zealand.

That made me oddly valuable. When something broke, I wasn’t panicking. I’d already seen worse. We Irish often operate at a level that’s not obvious until we step into smaller ecosystems abroad.

Any surprising Irish connections you’ve found in the fintech scenes in New Zealand?

Loads. The Irish Business Network in New Zealand has been brilliant. As a solo founder, you need someone to lean on. If I needed a legal intro, HR support, or even an electrician, someone in the network had a connection.

More recently, it’s been the Irish mammies’ WhatsApp groups — you’d be amazed what they can sort.

🔮 The Future

If you fast-forward 5 years, what is Wych doing that it isn’t doing today?

Open banking is now a global phenomenon, with implementations in countries such as Canada, Brazil, Europe, and Mexico. But everyone implements it differently. That creates friction.

We want to standardise it to become the infrastructure that lets fintechs expand without rebuilding everything from scratch.

We’re launching payment automation soon. After that? Fraud detection, synthetic identity solutions. The goal is trust and control globally.

And yes, I want to open our European office in Ireland. That would be a real milestone for me.

What does it mean to be an Irish founder abroad? ☘️

Honestly? I didn’t feel Irish until I left.

Growing up, I never had a strong sense of Irish identity. I was interested in books, science, and technology. And there wasn't a "stadium" for that in Ireland, if you get my drift.

But once I moved away, that’s when I realised how much it mattered. You feel the absence. You think the people-shaped hole.

Now, nearly two decades later, my entire social and professional network here in New Zealand remains predominantly Irish. That’s not accidental — we gravitate toward each other. We get each other. There’s no need to explain Limerick, or why you're saying “sure look.”

That’s what being an Irish founder abroad means to me. Carrying home with you - and eventually bringing what you’ve built back with you.

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