00:07:22 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:07:22] S0: No. It's true. I'm a slow learner in that front. I just... The one thing that I had from being that... I guess, from the competitive side of it when you left university, it was kinda like, you know, go get big brands, chase money early on, and I realized pretty quickly that the money part of it was unfulfilling, but I was a bit of a slow learner on the brand thing. So when I sort of joined companies, I eventually had to join them both for the wrong reasons and then realized I need to do something hard at those companies. So for that first eye opening, I did management consulting for probably too long and then joined Jetstar, and I was kinda, like, bit younger then in terms of more watching these people grow grow the company. But I learned a lot, and I thought, hang on. This is kind of the environment I like where they're really pushing. They're up against incumbents, etcetera. So that was the first taste of it. And then, yeah, just slow learner going back to these big brands. But when I was within those companies, I always found a way to find something that was ridiculously hard to do. Otherwise, I would have gone insane. And I'd... And I and I I generally did not like working at these companies, which is, in hindsight, ridiculous. But I like it. Going to NAB, I realized that there was this thing potentially called, you know, chip card technology and then contactless and then mobile payments. The bank should be doing and wasn't doing, so I pushed them really hard. So that pushing internally to get something hard done, sort of, I guess, ticked the box enough to hang around for a little bit. But, yeah, I I learned a lot about pushing through people's resistance and, you know, how to influence people internally to get stuff done, finding advocates, you know, being determined, fighting resistance, all that sort of stuff. So I learned a lot from that, but, yeah, ultimately, it just wasn't for me and finally saw the light. But in Australia, there weren't these consumer facing tech companies you could jump into like today. Just wasn't that when I was, you know, back at that age. So I didn't have too many options on that front, but, obviously, eventually, when the Square opportunity came along, I jumped at that. But in the meantime, I decided two companies to try to scratch that itch and see how it went. And
00:09:16 · Adam Miller, Ben Pfisterer, Sachin
[00:09:16] S2: if we were to go inside your mind, Ben, what would surprise us most about your internal monologue? [00:09:20] S0: Wow. Okay. [00:09:23] S1: I think, [00:09:26] S0: I do surprise myself sometimes that I just don't worry about things, and I move on from things really quickly. I think that a good trait of a lot of entrepreneurs is the ability just to move on. Mhmm. I've seen this before. It's not as bad as you think it is. Things will be fine. Keep going. The ability to push through adversity and push through sort of those times in business where you can't see the other side. And so, yeah, I think... Don't get too deep in there, but I... If you were to look into that, I think that sort of... That ability to look through obstacles and just push probably the number one thing, and and then that sort of goes through all parts of my life as well. So... Mhmm. [00:10:02] S1: And without going too specifically into the details, as you're working in the financial system for so long, I bet you had a list where you were sort of noting down all the problems with the financial system and the problems with how these companies operated, what they weren't doing. And I'm sure a lot of those insights led to Zeller, but, like, what were some of the problems about the financial system that you noticed being across all these organizations in different subsets of the sector?
00:10:27 · Ben Pfisterer, Adam Miller
[00:10:27] S0: Yeah. I think everyone knows that there's so many issues with banking in general because of those. The products out there are just very basic. Like, we open an account, we just leave it there. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't have any sort of intelligence to tell me whether I'm doing the right thing or the wrong thing or whether I could optimize my financial position. So it's very, very basic. I think as we move forward, what Zeller is trying to do is make it extremely more enhanced and the ability to be more customizable for businesses and just give them a better overall service proposition and avoid them having to cobble together. Because at the moment, because the banks do very little from innovation, companies tend to have to go to third parties, fintechs or other SaaS businesses and cobble together the solution they need. But, yeah, we believe that we can offer them all that. And if we don't, they can they can use other products, but, ultimately, we wanna be able to build a product and ecosystem that they can use that, you know, helps solve some of the operational issues as well. [00:11:18] S2: And if you kind of had that insight back in your NAB days, why did you join Square instead of building it yourself from the get go? Did you need to have that experience at Square to really figure out how to how to build Zeller for what it is today?
00:11:18 · Adam Miller, Ben Pfisterer, Sachin
[00:11:18] S2: And if you kind of had that insight back in your NAB days, why did you join Square instead of building it yourself from the get go? Did you need to have that experience at Square to really figure out how to how to build Zeller for what it is today? [00:11:31] S0: Yeah. I think... I mean, if I look back, unfortunately, it was so many years spent at blue chip organizations, but I can truncate that down to a few... Very few small learnings. Half from realizing I don't wanna work there, I can realize how how much friction there is within an organization. And I think jumping from extremities to something like a tech high growth startup like Square, I wasn't there at the start, but I was there at about 300 people up to a few thousand. So I kinda saw a lot of change and a lot of growth there, including in sort of growing it from just myself in Australia. So I guess cobbling those two learnings together of a high growth startup that is clearly a rocket ship and I was joining it anyway, to a very bureaucratic and slow... You kind of got, alright. These are the parameters. This is this is what's wrong with the industry, and this is the potential that we could have. So I think those two learnings were very bad. [00:12:16] S1: And when we go to the start of the sort of founding formation of Zeller, I guess for the person that's not too into financial services, they see there's... You've got the big banks. They do a bunch of payment terminal stuff. You had Square, obviously, that you worked at, and then there's all the sort of zeros of the world. [00:12:31] S0: Yep.
00:12:31 · Ben Pfisterer, Sachin
[00:12:31] S0: Yep. [00:12:31] S1: How would you tell someone that didn't know this industry that well? What that sort of unique differentiation was that you had in mind for Zeller?
00:12:38 · Ben Pfisterer
[00:12:38] S0: Yeah. I think what we did... So after I left Square, I had a few months to work out what to do next. And one of the things I worked obviously, I still wanted to stay in this space, and financial services were my thing. I love payments in general as well, and I thought there's a lot of opportunity in Australia. And as I just said, like, the banks needed... They need competition. They absolutely do, and they're not getting it, and suddenly, some US companies come in. But but, ultimately, when you think about what we thought we'd solve for is, like, every business needs a business transaction account. Every business needs to accept, electronic payments because cash is disappearing. So we thought, well, what do they... If we wanted to be that main financial institution to these businesses, what do they need? They need an account, and they need to take money, and they need to spend money. They need to put it to work. So those are the three things about taking money, holding money, spending money was the genesis of being that, you know, the the the accounts, cards, and payment side of that business. So those three things, we've think, well, if we can do that for businesses, they can use it for anything. They don't have to go to one payments business, then get an account with a traditional bank, and then go and get payment facilities via a card company. Like, they can actually get all that once and signing up. So that was the general thing, that simplicity that altogether and getting better pricing, no locking contracts, better tech, better experience overall. And then from there, we just built out to another, like, 13 products since then.