00:34:53 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:34:53] S0: This is this is the thing. No one talks about it because our startup community is smaller than something like The US. Right? But we in the startup community get treated like crap. We absolutely... We're like... You think about it. It is a high risk industry, so they kinda ride. But we just get treated like that despite the fact that technology and entrepreneurship is the future of this country. Yeah. We get treated terrible with that. So the the thing that we realized are like, wow. We got validation of what we're building at the very, very start. And then we just promised to keep building the product, building the segment as much as we could. Then we got to relatively recently, and we had this sort of moments like, we hadn't actually turned around and solved it for the other startups yet. Like, we know they can use our products now. Everyone thinks of us as cartoons, but you can actually sign up and use us for a full suite of financial services now. Then the what can we do to actually make them better? Start leaning into startups because we wanna get more vertical specific, but if we did it for health or beauty, for example, we're disingenuous. I I I know nothing about that industry right, but we know everything about startups. We're in the industry. We love it. We have all our friends and... Not all of them, but many of our friends are in that. So how about we do a two way deal here? We launch a product, which is Zeller for Startups. We tailor a lot of features and functionality for them, but in return, we ask for their feedback. Now we're not gonna get everything right, but probably... They're probably... Obviously, that that... At soft, fast paced environments that I'm talking about, they'll want us to do more and go faster, but I couldn't think of a better sector to start working with. And the idea is if we get that right, we can start extrapolating into new sectors. But, yeah, just thinking about banking and transaction services and how how it can be different. So for example, the the classic account. You open an account now, and that's it. You don't get anything with it. It's just there sitting there. So our concept is you might want different people to look at it at different times. Like, you as an admin or financial controller, you want full full rate, but someone else in your team, you might want lesser.
00:36:39 · Ben Pfisterer, Sachin
So you give them a lesser access. They can look at it and do certain things all the way through to view only. You might wanna be giving your investors the ability to look at your bank account at any time as nervous as that might... Everyone makes everyone feel. But that'd be a fantastic functionality where I don't have to build you financial reports every week, month, quarter. Here's my bank details. You log in. You look at what we've got. My account, and if they're a third party account and you log in, you can't transact. You can't do anything, but you can see it. You can download my expenses. You can do that for me. So we started looking at that sort of stuff to make sure we can do it a lot better. The whole ecosystem play is perfect. So you sign up once and you get everything you want to run your business. Yeah, a lot of different functions that we're gonna be doing, a lot of different feature we're bringing. So [00:37:21] S1: So for Zeller for Startups, what you just said sounds perfect. Like, I wanna go and sign up, like, straight after this. Like, it sounds like in a few years' time, that is gonna be its own billion dollar company in its own right. What do you have to get right to make that sort of a massive function for Zeller?
00:37:21 · Sachin, Ben Pfisterer
[00:37:21] S1: So for Zeller for Startups, what you just said sounds perfect. Like, I wanna go and sign up, like, straight after this. Like, it sounds like in a few years' time, that is gonna be its own billion dollar company in its own right. What do you have to get right to make that sort of a massive function for Zeller? [00:37:37] S0: Yeah. I think building off the platform we've got now into the startup community is probably the most exciting thing we've got to do at the moment. So I think we have to just keep moving as fast as we can. Because the problem is is that people don't expect to be able to use financial services the way they do and the way we're showing them how to do it. So, it's a little bit of an education thing to say, hey, actually, with those accounts, can spin up within seconds. How about you split your your team into products? So you've got four new products being deployed as a startup. How about you spin off four different accounts? You have four different access. You have a budget to it, and you control it via financial services. So there's things like that. There's an education piece, but then again, there's that learning ingesting feedback as we go. So I think we've a long long way to go, I can't wait to build into it. But, yeah, it's it's super exciting because it is a problem that every startup talks to us about.
00:37:37 · Ben Pfisterer, Adam Miller
[00:37:37] S0: Yeah. I think building off the platform we've got now into the startup community is probably the most exciting thing we've got to do at the moment. So I think we have to just keep moving as fast as we can. Because the problem is is that people don't expect to be able to use financial services the way they do and the way we're showing them how to do it. So, it's a little bit of an education thing to say, hey, actually, with those accounts, can spin up within seconds. How about you split your your team into products? So you've got four new products being deployed as a startup. How about you spin off four different accounts? You have four different access. You have a budget to it, and you control it via financial services. So there's things like that. There's an education piece, but then again, there's that learning ingesting feedback as we go. So I think we've a long long way to go, I can't wait to build into it. But, yeah, it's it's super exciting because it is a problem that every startup talks to us about. [00:38:23] S2: And Ben, just pulling on that thread, what are your future kind of predictions of what the customer experience will look like? Maybe just because we're talking about startups, let's say on startups, in the way in the way they interact with their banking services.
00:38:35 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:38:35] S0: I've always had this vision, is pretty simplistic and not rocket science, but that way you shouldn't have to touch your money at all. Like, once you make a transaction with your customer, it should be automatically categorized. It should be settled as fast as it can. It should be transferred to the optimal accounts and then hived off to a certain savings accounts and the other transaction accounts. Pay off your bills straight away without touching it, or your BAS done, or your tax done. Like, you literally shouldn't have to touch that proverbial dollar through the ecosystem. That's the original kind of secondary vision that we had. Now I think with AI developing so fast, I think there's another vision which I love, which is a little bit weird, but in terms of as humans, you realize at some point in life that you're actually following a very similar path to each other. We go through similar life stages, generally, and there's bit of nuance as you go, but it's very similar path. So the idea that financial services keeps up with you. So if you can see, then you, a customer, can see that I am buying a ticket to go overseas, for example, you must know that I'm going on that trip I've always dreamt of, and then I'm gonna need to save for a house when I come back, and then I'm gonna have a deposit for a rental house in the meantime, And then I'm gonna keep growing from that, and then I might I might have a family. So let's start saving for that. That side on the on the consumer side is the same on the businesses. Businesses go through very similar things. The transaction records can show you exactly. Is this in a good situation or bad situation? Do they need financial support? Should they get financial support? Should they save more if they got good access to capital? So that ability to predict a business' life stages is there, but it's being able to extract the data to understand those parts different businesses go through. So if we can one day build a business that does that, what it does in return, perhaps a little bit big brother is, it does actually take a lot of the burden off business owners. So to predict where you're gonna go, what you need financially to get out of the next part of your growth, is super exciting. And I think AI is just showing that we can do a little bit of that, so pretty exciting.
00:40:30 · Sachin
[00:40:30] S1: That made me genuinely excited. I think there's, like... As you say that, there's so many different versions of what financial services can look like in the future, based off, like, the the sort of different life phases of the business or consumer. We're sort of heading towards the end of the episode, but... So I'm really interested in asking you is that you've now had this pretty crazy view of a startup, like, doing it in... Within a few years' time, going to this billion dollar valuation, and you've seen the scaling from 20 to 200 to, I'm sure, thousands of people in the future. What what do you think not enough people understand about this entrepreneurial journey?