Dr Andreas Furche has been involved in the development of financial technology start-up companies for 20 years, in Australia, the US, and Europe. As CEO of SMARTS, he led the development and growth of the globally leading market surveillance company, which was grown out of the CMCRC and acquired by NASDAQOMX in 2010. He developed the original commercialisation strategy of CMCRC in 2003, and was involved in the development of a number of other start-up businesses within CMCRC. This includes CMC-IS, Australia’s leading provider of fraud and error detection in health insurance claims, of which Andreas is now Chairman. Prior to his involvement with the development of the CMCRC and its related companies, he was a Partner in Electronic Trading Concepts, which was sold to Securenet in 2000. In the 1990s, he worked as a software developer and project manager on the development and deployment of expert systems. Andreas was also deeply involved in one of the most interesting commercial failures of the early Internet – the attempt to bring electronic cash into global circulation with DigiCash in the mid to late 1990s. Electronic cash remains a favourite topic of his.