A woman sits at her kitchen table at eleven at night, five tabs open. One shows her business account. One shows a trust her father set up years ago. One shows a mortgage statement. One shows an app that tracks her portfolio, badly. She is trying to answer a single question: can she afford to help her son with a deposit next year?
No single screen holds the whole picture. She closes her laptop without an answer, the way she has a dozen times before.
Somewhere, a system exists that could have told her in thirty seconds. It just hasn’t been built yet, not for people like her.
Meet Samuel Liu
Samuel Liu is the Founder of Aiviance, an AI-native financial operating system built in Melbourne for individuals, families, and businesses, and the defining thing about him is not that he is a CPA of more than a decade’s standing. It is that he refuses to ask anyone to trust a system he hasn’t tested on his own family first.
The Ledger That Waited
Liu made his first real decision at eight years old, growing up in a small town in southern China. He wanted to see the world beyond it. He didn’t know how, and he wouldn’t know for another seventeen years.
Accounting was not a calling. It was a calculation. He chose it, by his own account, because it promised stability and because he discovered, almost by accident, that it offered a pathway to skilled migration to Australia. He studied independently, prepared for IELTS on his own timeline, and applied.
One memory has stayed with him since 2005: sitting alone on his bed on Chinese New Year’s Eve, studying while firecrackers went off outside his window and families celebrated without him. He whispered a sentence to himself that he still repeats: every bit of this would be worth it.
In November 2009, he landed in Adelaide with no family, no professional network, and English he could barely hold a conversation in. It took him four years to find his way into the profession he had trained for, and the opportunity that finally arrived was a three-month internship that paid him nothing. He treated it like the only shot he had. It became a paid role, then a master’s degree at RMIT completed while working full time, then his CPA designation, then a near-decade inside institutional finance at UniSuper.
By the time he left that world in 2026 to build Aiviance full time, he wasn’t chasing a new industry. He was finally acting on a question the old one had never let him answer.
What the Ledger Was Really Teaching Him
That question was simple and, to Liu, uncomfortable: why had he spent so much of his career inside accounting when he never truly loved the work itself? The answer arrived on a single day, July 2, 2025, when he found himself asking what financial software could do if it stopped only recording the past.
“What if it could continuously understand the financial relationships between individuals, families, businesses, trusts, properties and investments, and help people understand their financial position when decisions actually need to be made?” That question became Aiviance’s founding premise, and it reframes everything he’d done before it. The ledgers, the reconciliations, the balance sheet work across entities and jurisdictions, none of it was a detour. It was training he didn’t recognize as training until he needed it.
His approach to building the company runs on a rule he traces to an old Chinese proverb: do not impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. It shows up in how he picks infrastructure. Faced with cheaper, faster technology options, he kept returning to one test.
“If I were trusting this platform with my own family’s financial data, what would I choose?” That question, not cost or speed, is why Aiviance is built on AWS. It is also why Liu insists on being the platform’s first user, running his own finances and his family trust through it before any customer does.
His view of leadership follows the same logic. Before any major decision, he asks whether it creates genuine value, whether it holds up to evidence, and whether it strengthens or weakens trust over time. He is candid that persistence without humility is a liability, not a strength, in a business built on other people’s money.
He also sees a shift coming for his own profession. AI, in his reading, won’t hollow out entry-level accounting work first. It will compress the middle, the experienced-but-not-senior layer that has always done the reconciling and first-pass analysis. His answer isn’t to defend that layer. It’s to build the tool that moves accountants past it, into judgment work a model can’t own alone.
The Liu Playbook: 5 Lessons
Treat unpaid opportunity as leverage, not exploitation. A three-month internship with no salary became Liu’s entire career because he showed up as if it already mattered.
Apply the family test to every hard decision. Before choosing infrastructure, partners, or shortcuts, ask whether you’d trust it with the people closest to you.
Use your own product before anyone else has to. Liu runs his personal finances and family trust through Aiviance himself, so every flaw is his to find first.
Don’t compare your timeline to anyone else’s. The only meaningful comparison, in his words, is who you were yesterday.
Look backward to understand what you were actually building. A career you didn’t love can still be the exact foundation the thing you do love requires.
The Full Picture
The woman at her kitchen table is still waiting for a system that sees her whole financial life at once. Samuel Liu spent a decade inside institutional accounting collecting the very knowledge required to build it, and he is now betting everything, including his own family’s data, on the belief that trust has to be engineered before it can be earned.
He never set out to design that woman’s answer. He just spent seventeen years becoming someone who couldn’t ignore the question.
Samuel Liu, CPA, is the Founder of Aiviance, an AI-native financial operating system based in Melbourne, Australia. He builds for individuals, families, and businesses seeking one connected view of their financial lives. To connect with Samuel or learn more, visit aiviance.ai.
