Swyftx founding team member Tommy Honan named founding CEO of Prospr

Tommy Honan (pictured), a founding team member of Swyftx, has been appointed Founding CEO of Prospr, a new digital asset trading platform combining trade execution, simplified trading tools, automated strategies and an AI powered information and market intelligence layer in one place.

Honan joins Prospr after spending almost seven years helping build and scale Swyftx from day one.

As part of the founding team, Honan worked across a number of roles on some of the business’s most important product, commercial and strategic problems as the company grew into one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest digital asset platforms.

His responsibilities expanded across trading, payments, regulated financial products, lending, customer experience, risk, new product development and M&A, before serving as Director of Product and leading multiple product and technology teams. Among his contributions, Honan designed and built Swyftx’s on-chain treasury function, and supported the business more broadly on treasury management alongside his other responsibilities.

Now, as Founding CEO of Prospr, Honan is turning his attention to what he sees as the next evolution of digital asset trading.

Bringing the experience together

Prospr is being built around a simple observation: customers today often need to use several different products to get access to the same breadth of capability.

One platform might provide execution, another market information, another automation, and another research or AI support.

Prospr is aiming to bring those capabilities together in one experience.

“Where Prospr is different is in bringing the core parts of the experience together in one place,” Honan said.

“Trade execution, simplified tools, automation and an AI co pilot all sit within the same product.”

“Today, customers often have to stitch together several different platforms to get that same breadth of capability. We want to remove that fragmentation.”

“The aim is to give customers one place where they can understand what is happening, access the tools they need, make their own decision and then execute or automate that decision within clear parameters.”

A different commercial philosophy

Prospr is also being built around a different commercial philosophy to the standard transaction led model common across digital asset exchanges and trading platforms.

Rather than relying solely on transaction based revenue, the company intends to explore a model where its incentives are more closely aligned with the value delivered to customers.

“I’m a strong believer that a financial platform should be built around delivering genuine value for the customer, rather than simply maximising the number of transactions they make,” Honan said.

“Of course, investing and trading involve risk. There are no guaranteed returns, customers can lose money, and no strategy will produce a positive result in every market or for every customer.”

“What we can control is how Prospr is designed. Our commitment is to relentlessly focus on the customer outcome, whether that is clearer information, better tools, more transparent costs, stronger risk controls or technology that helps customers execute the decisions they choose to make.”

“If customers consistently see genuine value in the platform, we believe that gives us a better chance of retaining them for the long term and, hopefully, turning them into advocates for the brand.”

From founding Swyftx to founding Prospr

Honan was a founding team member at Swyftx, joining at its earliest stage.

Over the following seven years, he worked across a broad range of roles and problems as the business scaled.

That experience included core trading products, payments infrastructure, regulated financial products, lending, risk, governance, commercial strategy and M&A.

“One of the most valuable parts of joining Swyftx so early was that there was never really a narrow job description,” he said.

“You worked on whatever the most important problem was at the time.”

“As the company grew, those problems changed constantly. They could be product, technology, regulation, risk, commercial, people, capital or M&A.”

“That experience teaches you how quickly a business can evolve and how important it is to stay focused on the small number of things that actually matter.”

AI as an information and intelligence layer

Artificial intelligence will form an important part of the Prospr experience, but Honan says the company is not building predictive investment technology or an AI system designed to tell customers what to buy or sell.

Instead, the AI layer is being designed to help users make better use of the information already available to them.

It will bring together historical market data, trends, current information and relevant sources in a way that is easier to access and understand.

“Prospr’s AI layer is not being built to predict markets or tell customers what to trade,” Honan said.

“Its role is to help customers make sense of the information already available to them by bringing together historical data, market trends and relevant, up to date sources in one place.”

“There is an enormous amount of information available to investors, but finding what is relevant, understanding the context and keeping up with it can be difficult.”

“The customer remains responsible for the decision. Our job is to give them better access to the information, context and tools they need to make that decision themselves.”

The same principle applies to automated strategies, with customers reviewing the strategy, understanding how it works and authorising execution within defined parameters.

Building an AI native company

The role of AI at Prospr extends beyond the product.

Honan believes AI enabled engineering, design, product and operational tools are rapidly changing what small teams can build and how quickly they can move.

“What a small, highly capable team can deliver today is completely different to even 12 or 18 months ago,” Honan said.

“The engineering and delivery game is changing almost minute by minute.”

“Tasks that previously required entire teams, long handovers and significant coordination can increasingly be accelerated by the right people using the right AI enabled tools.”

“That creates a huge opportunity for companies being built from the ground up today.”

Prospr intends to remain deliberately lean and design its operating model around these tools from day one.

“A company with hundreds of employees can have extraordinary talent, but it also has years of systems, processes and technology it needs to adapt.”

“We get to start with a blank sheet of paper.”

“If you combine great people with the right AI enabled workflows, a relatively small team can move at a speed that would have been extremely difficult to achieve only a few years ago.”

“AI does not replace the people building the company. It makes the right people dramatically more capable.”

Preparing for launch

Prospr is currently progressing through product development ahead of its initial launch, with the team focused on its core trading, wallet, automation and intelligence experience.

As Founding CEO, Honan will lead the company’s overall strategy, product direction, commercial development and fundraising.

“We are not trying to build a huge organisation before we have earned the right to,” Honan said.

“We want to stay lean, move quickly, get the product into customers’ hands and learn.”

“The companies that benefit most from this next phase of technology will not necessarily be the ones with the most people.”

“They will be the ones with clear thinking, highly capable teams and the ability to use the technology available to them better than everyone else.”

“That is exactly how we are building Prospr.”