‘I got tired of watching the same gap go unaddressed’

What unsettled her, she told Lawyers Weekly, was how little she had to verify who she was dealing with, and that nothing was sitting between her and the other party to hold the money safely.

“I felt so anxious at one point [that] I tried to sell the car back to the dealership. They offered me $16,000 less than what I eventually sold it for privately and told me I wouldn’t get a better price than that. The whole process felt like it was stacked against me,” she said.

This, Wright said, is the everyday consumer’s reality.

“You’re exposed on many fronts all at once: identity – is this person who they say they are; payment – is the money real and paid at handover; and the asset itself – is the car stolen, written off, or carrying a loan the seller never mentioned. Miss any one of those, and you can lose the car, the cash, or both. Most people only learn this after it’s gone wrong,” she said.

Wright – a former general counsel and firm partner – ended up founding Vehicle Exchange Made Easy (VEME), a platform that gives all people a safer, more structured way to buy or sell vehicles privately. It’s a bit like PEXA, but for cars, she explained.

As a lawyer, she said, one spends one’s career building guardrails – around lending, around payments, around property. But, she added, “almost 5 million Australians buy or sell a used car with a stranger every year – in an industry worth $50 billion – and the process is two strangers meeting in a car park to hand over a $50,000 asset for a delayed bank transfer and a handshake. No identity checks, no payment protection, no real contract”.

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“We’d somehow decided that one of the biggest purchases a household makes deserves less protection than buying a concert ticket,” she said.

“I got tired of watching the same gap go unaddressed,” Wright continued, noting she couldn’t let it go. After hearing similar stories from others, she stopped thinking that someone should fix the problem and started thinking that she was the one to build it.

VEME puts the trust infrastructure that exists for buying a house around buying a car. “You shouldn’t need to be a lawyer to sell your vehicle safely – whether it’s a Corolla or a Lamborghini,” she said.

The platform offers one structured journey, Wright said: “First, both buyer and seller verify their identity via ConnectID – an Australian government-accredited digital identity platform – so you know the other person is real, without oversharing personal information. Second, we run PPSR checks automatically, so you find out before money changes hands whether the car has finance owing on it, has been written off, or is reported stolen. We also help verify any finance owing directly with the lender and pay the lender at handover. Third, we generate a sale contract and hold the buyer’s payment in escrow – released only when the handover is done properly. We also continuously monitor every sale for fraud and safety risks and guide both parties through until they hand over.”

Having collaboration between regulators, consumer groups, banks, and lenders is a critical aspect of the platform’s potential moving forward, Wright noted, because no single stakeholder can fix the problem alone.

“Identity and protection of personal information is the regulators’ world. Payments and escrow sit with the banks and AUSTRAC. Timely encumbrance removal sits with AFSA. Responsible lending sits with the lenders, ASIC, and the NCCP framework. Consumer harm is the consumer groups’ domain. The transaction itself touches every one of them at different moments – so we quickly realised that the only way to make it safer for everyone was to consult and solve each of their pain points,” she said.

This reality speaks to the scale of the problem, she went on: “When banks and lenders, regulators and consumer advocates all look at private vehicle sales and independently say, ‘Yes, this is a gap’ – that’s a systemic blind spot. The fact that one of our first institutional customers was a big four bank, and that we’ve been approached by other banks and lenders, says the appetite to fix it is real and overdue.”

Being a lawyer has made her well placed to shape VEME’s growth strategy, she said, as she’s been “compliance-first by instinct – which sounds boring until you realise trust is the product”.

“In a category built on people getting burned, the regulatory rigour isn’t a cost centre; it’s the moat,” she said.

“We built identity, KYC, lending, and cyber security compliance into the foundations rather than bolting them on later, and that’s exactly why serious institutions are partnering with us. We also don’t see this as just a platform solving an Australian problem; our platform solves a global problem.”

Lawyers, Wright said, are underrated as builders. In start-ups, lawyers shed the “Department of No” stereotype and instead have a “Here’s how” attitude. “We’re trained to see where systems fail people, and that’s literally a product roadmap,” she said.

The platform and its broader objectives are personal for Wright. Since she was eight years old, she spent her weekends reading motorsport magazines and teaching herself to drift her father’s work car on their farm (“haven’t confessed that one to Dad yet,” she said). She wanted to ride motorbikes professionally, she said, but since her mother deemed it too dangerous, she became a lawyer. As soon as she finished her articles, she got her motorbike license and bought her first bike – which she rode to her city law firm most days.

“I love this stuff – and it bothers me that something that should be such a good experience, buying or selling a vehicle, has become something people approach with their guard up,” she said.

“We don’t want to take the human moment out of it. That’s why we built VEME. We want to make it safer so the excitement and the joy stay. Get that right, and we don’t just reduce fraud – we give a $50 billion market back to the people it’s supposed to serve.”