Fintech Frontiers: Reinventing Money from the Edge of the World | NZVC Portfolio Day
Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Hendrik Remigereau host TechMates, the NZVC podcast. The guest on this episode is Jovan Pavlicevic, Co-Founder of Emerge & SquareOne; Dermot Butterfield, Founder of Wych & Steven Zinsli, Founder of Extraordinary, and it went out on 6 December 2025. It covers the NZVC portfolio companies Emerge, Wych and Extraordinary.
- Guest
- Jovan Pavlicevic, Co-Founder of Emerge & SquareOne; Dermot Butterfield, Founder of Wych & Steven Zinsli, Founder of Extraordinary
- Date
- 6 December 2025
- Companies
- Emerge · Wych · Extraordinary
- Watch
- YouTube
- Listen
- Spotify
In this NZVC Portfolio Day panel, Jovan Pavlicevic (Emerge and SquareOne), Dermot Butterfield (Wych), and Steven Zinsli (Extraordinary) join hosts Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Hendrik Remigereau to show what building fintech in New Zealand looks like. They discuss lobbying for access to ESAS and Payments NZ, designing products around tax law so public transport qualifies for salary sacrifice, and an industry where four Australian banks control most of the market. Origin stories run through firefighting, Intel R&D, and healthcare reform.
- Building a challenger bank: Emerge's path from SquareOne kids accounts to New Zealand's first digital-first bank.
- Open banking rails: how Wych became the plug and socket for payments and data across legacy bank systems.
- Benefits cards at scale: Extraordinary's 34k active cards, 48k more on the way, and customers including ASB, BNZ, Southern Cross, PwC, and the FMA.
- Why New Zealand is a fintech launchpad: one or two degrees to MPs, direct access to Inland Revenue and RBNZ, and regulators who take meetings.
Companies in this episode
-
Emerge
AI and B2B SaaS
SquareOne is New Zealand's first money app for children, giving each child a prepaid debit card and an in-app savings balance that parents monitor.
Read about Emerge
- Wych Wych Fintech Wych builds open banking infrastructure: financial data APIs that connect banks, fintechs and consumers so financial data moves by customer consent over accredited rails rather than by handing a banking username and password to a screen scraper. Read about Wych
-
Extraordinary
Fintech
Extraordinary is a New Zealand company that runs a flexible health and wellbeing allowance platform for employers.
Read about Extraordinary
NZVC Portfolio Day, fintech, open banking, payments, regulation, challenger bank, employee benefits