Australia

Australian professional services company BlueRock has announced a merger with boutique legal practice Marsh & Maher Richmond Bennison (Marsh & Maher) to further fuel the company's expansion. The partnership sees Marsh & Maher increasing BlueRock’s depth of experience, allowing the business to expand the support offered to its growing clientele.

Shopping today is a digital-first experience for Australians. People are shopping more online than ever before. We have seen another important transformation where a person’s first instinct now is to reach for their phone or laptop and look for more details online — rather than relying on physical stores to discover new products or see what’s in stock.

Aussie owned Catch.com.au opens the doors to its 36,000 square metre fulfilment centre in Sydney’s Moorebank. The new fulfilment centre is the retailer’s next step in realising its long term goal to give Australians the most convenient and plentiful online shopping experience. 

The Australian Football League (AFL) and Animoca Brands announced a 5-year partnership that will bring the power of NFTs to the AFL and AFL Women's (AFLW), and will launch the AFL Mint initiative. The agreement will see the first major Australian sporting league project in the Web3 space come to life, building on the strong heritage and proud audience of the AFL. 

The latest Roy Morgan research into Australians’ investments shows 5%, or over 1 million Australians aged 18+, now own at least one cryptocurrency. Leading cryptocurrencies include the well-known Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as more niche names such as Ripple, Cardano, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Solana, Binance Coin, Litecoin, Cronos, Polygon and many more. Interestingly over two-thirds, or around 742,000 (69%), of Australian cryptocurrency investors are men compared to only 332,000 (31%) who are women indicating there is a significant gender difference on investments in cryptocurrency.

Zipmex, a fast-growing digital assets platform in the Asia Pacific Region, announced a series of sports partnerships with a mix of professional and community clubs in Australia. This sponsorship deal includes three rugby league teams and two football clubs to deepen their relationship with the Australian market and foster crypto adoption via engagement initiatives. This includes professional teams - Penrith Panthers Rugby League Football Club and Central Coast Mariners Football Club, as well as community  teams - Wyong Rugby League Football Club, Penrith Brothers Rugby League Football Club and Penrith  Rovers Football Club. 

Compare Club is scaling with an aim to grow to $100m of managed premium in the life insurance space with the acquisition of financial advisory service Lifelong Insurance Solutions. The multi-million dollar acquisition means the personal finance marketplace company is well prepared to fill the void left by the exodus of life insurance advisors from the industry in the wake of increasing regulation around life insurance advice. Since 2021, Compare Club has added an additional 2,600 additional life insurance customers through acquisitions.

Peak industry body the Accommodation Association says Federal Court decision in relation to Trivago highlights the value for Australian consumers in booking accommodation direct or through Australian travel businesses. Trivago, which is part of American online travel shopping company Expedia Group Inc., was fined $44.7m for misleading consumers about hotel rates. Justice Mark Moshinsky said Trivago’s conduct has cost Australian consumers $30m.

Sabre Corporation, a tech provider that powers the global travel industry, announced that Virgin Australia is migrating to Sabre’s Revenue Optimizer solution to enable optimal pricing decisions and drive total revenue optimization to respond to today’s fluid travel environment. While previously, airline pricing and availability planning has relied on historical data, the pandemic has resulted in changes to the global travel marketplace. Sabre Revenue Optimizer will enable Virgin Australia to take a 360-approach to analysing and optimizing revenue by providing visibility into the total revenue of every flight, market and departure date.  

GridBeyond, the global technology player for managing distributed and flexible energy resources is expanding its geographic reach to provide services to Australia. GridBeyond will provide AI-powered demand response, virtual power plant (VPP) services and generation and storage asset optimisation across Australia’s National Electricity Market.