Our founder and CEO, Steve Crouch, tells us the Auderli story from the very beginning and explains how Auderli is revolutionising the future of life admin.
I’m Steve Crouch and I live with my family in Hove, literally by the sea. I’ve been a tax specialist for over 35 years and I have my own accountancy and taxation practice, SRC-Advisory. I also co-own a probate business, Probaters, and a law firm, Act Legal. I co-founded Crunch, the first UK online accounting practice and helped grow this from inception to over 10,000 corporate subscribing clients within 5 years.
I became very aware of an opening in the market. When I’m advising my clients, I usually only ever have part of someone’s full information. When I started working with wills and family planning advice, I would have to go on a fact-finding mission to source everything I needed. Everything was all over the place and I wanted my clients to re-own all of that. I realised that I would be able to give better advice, more quickly, if I had all the information all together, in one place. Wouldn’t it be amazing for people like me to have everything they needed in one secure place? That’s the power of data – once everything is contained, you can offer much better advice.
I already had an advisory based company; I didn’t want to set up a business to do more advising. I wanted to empower other specialists to advise better and be able to give them the right tools to do that. I figured I could offer that to professional advisers, while also offering the individual user the opportunity to keep everything in one place. It would then allow them the choice of best adviser for that particular question, whether it be legal, tax, financial planning or something else.
Auderli is a simple to use online life management tool. It helps you keep track of all your assets and liabilities, from mortgages, wills and bank accounts to investments, shares and personal items of worth. It pulls everything together and shows your net wealth all in one easy-to-use app. Auderli allows you to store and organise key financial information, that you would usually keep with different advisers, all in one place: safely in the cloud. A key part of the app is that you can then give access to chosen individuals, be it your partner, next of kin or trusted professional adviser. The app will offer prompts and reminders to take the pain out of organising and managing financial and legal information. Importantly, should anything happen to you then it will give you peace of mind that your next of kin will have everything in one place so that your estate can be administered without unnecessary delay and minimise or eliminate any legal costs of probate. It is a clever piece of kit – we're all very proud of it.
My biggest challenge has turned out to be one of the most rewarding elements of starting Auderli. Setting up a business in a pandemic was a concern, but it never put me off. My previous fintech, Crunch, was founded in 2008 shortly after the financial crash. But an idea can only really come to fruition if you can attract and work with the best talent. I had been talking to Nick Doyle, who I'd previously worked closely with when he'd been Head of Technology at Crunch, about the idea I had but he was always super busy and in high demand for his expertise. I finally convinced him to join Auderli. We presented the idea to a bank, who could see the benefit and this confidence provided the catalyst to raise the first round of funding (within one week!). We then began the search to hire an enthusiastic, talented team. We have proven that it is possible to create an exciting product entirely with remote working having built our Minimum Viable Product without a face-to-face meeting. Auderli is designed and built in-house in the UK and we’re enormously proud of that. Luckily for us, building a new product in a pandemic has been less concern and more adventure!
I’d love to see the concept of Auderli grow in popularity and create a brand of choice for families in the future.
Without doubt Auderli’s simplicity and ease of use. Seeing what can often be quite complex information, net worth, simplified into a simple, beautifully presented app is really clever.
The Auderli concept started with an idea a few years ago and has developed over time. We didn’t have a name to start with. I was travelling with a friend through Cambodia - we were in a taxi for 5 hours travelling across country. We started talking about this idea I’d had and how it needed a name. We talked about everything it stood for. The word 'order’ came up which I really liked - the concept was, after all, about getting your life in order. I liked the idea of a Latin derivate and so we started Googling on dodgy 4G in the back of that cab. We looked at ‘Auder’ and then ‘Auderly’, which we really liked. But it was a common name in South America and all the domains were taken. I typed it in with an ‘I’ and loved the look of it. Auderli. It was a winner. We registered the name with Companies House and bought the domain right there and then in the back of that cab!
My turntable, a Linn LP 12 that I originally bought in the late 80s and have upgraded it over the years. It is still an iconic spinner and is one of the best turntables you can buy. Of the original item I bought, it’s probably only the felt mat that survived!
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