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?
00:41:04 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:41:04] S0: That it never stops. It just is... We call it the horizon theory. The the... It just it just never stops. Like, you can chase the horizon. You're never gonna get there, obviously. So it's the same thing. We saw, like, we hit... And we don't take this for granted. It's a great thing to be able to recognize this way in terms of getting those valuations, but the unicorn status very, very early. Like, a few months being live, we hit that. So it was kinda like a milestone we didn't even notice. We just zipped past it. And the reason was we're so inwardly focused on building, launching. We're nowhere near where we wanted to be. Like, we've got heaps. I've literally just launched. So we have years and decades, hopefully, multi generations to get to. So that was just a thing that happened, and it was a kind of a little bit of noise on the outside. It was great from raising capital perspective, but we just kept moving. So I think... I mean, people know it when they're in startups or high growth businesses, but it never stops. Like, if you stop and feel like you've reached some form of end state or success or you've done what you want done, you will get overtaken immediately. So our ability to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Now that type of culture, not everyone likes that. And I know I get that. It's probably the number one thing where people that don't work out realize they don't like that. So, like, wow. I sort of delivered that project. I thought I'd just get a kudos and get a promotion. And at the end of that, it was like, no. No. We go to the next thing. Like, the people that work for us love that. They're like, give me something new. Right? We've built that product, but I'm so excited about what we can do next. Do the next part, the next feature, next deployment. I think if people can do that, that's when you'll build a pretty special company that constantly pushing forward, constantly hustling to the next thing, never being satisfied with what you're building. I love those places. Not everyone does, but the people that work at Zeller definitely do
00:42:43 · Sachin, Ben Pfisterer, Adam Miller
[00:42:43] S1: Yeah. Awesome. [00:42:43] S0: I think [00:42:44] S2: that's a really great way to finish up. Ben, thanks for coming on the episode. [00:42:48] S1: That was... Yeah. That was awesome. A lot of learnings there, super excited to see Zeller for Startups Live in Action and Grow. [00:42:53] S0: Thanks, guys. Thanks for helping [00:42:54] S1: me. Awesome. That's a wrap of this week's podcast and we hope [00:42:58] S2: you enjoyed it. The way you can [00:42:59] S1: help us is by hitting that subscribe button because then we can get bigger and better guests and level up our production quality. So you have a better time listening to the show. See you next week.