The Startup Powering ANZ's Open Banking Moment

I'm putting the mortgage on the line here. One paycheck and three hungry mouths at home that had found three Amazon Prime subscriptions. And literally, I was paying um for that for what turned out in one case to be 18 months. People download a document, stick it into the good old open AI and say, "Hey, I told them I earned a h 100,000 a year. Update my bank statement to make it look like that." Right? Getting into startups, particularly tech startups, but is generally a 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. gig. If if you're not planning on to do those kind of hours, you're going to find it very difficult. They say, "I I don't have a personality anymore. I have a startup. I can't. I haven't had time to come back to reality for those kind of pieces. I'd invest now, but you're not asking for enough. Just come back to me when you want 10 million US."

You you said that 87% of individuals can be reidentified using just three points of their data.

That's that's terrifying.

Nobody's going to pay $5 per per account essentially to to access data. just go and do it and see what happens.

Ideas are worth like jack [ __ ] Absolute jack [ __ ] If you can't execute, there's nothing.

Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it.

Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it, love it, wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud.

New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. Go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. Dermat, welcome to Techmates.

Thank you.

You built the first version of which while your twin daughters were napping and you were the primary caretaker while your partner still had to go back to work and you were running out of money at the same time. So most people in that position, I guess, would look for a job, but you decided to press ahead. Why did you do that? Well, let's say the way I described it was double down. I knew the gap existed. What really mattered was how to communicate it to our customers, right? That was the that was the early challenge that we had with which trying to talk about or sell the idea of APIs is a bloody difficult one when people can't visualize what it is that actually means. And so, uh, I kind of had to do three different kind of streams. There was an education stream to bring customers on a journey.

Then there was the kind of a technical stream which was building a product that used open banking so that you could demonstrate it. There was no way to go into a room and say you can do all these cool things with our APIs. Here's the thing and then everybody sit there and say can I see an example of one of those pieces. So the idea was how to build out that that piece to the front. And the second piece was how to then uh try and monetize that as a as the stream that would come off it. And that was kind of the you know pay bills, sell product and at the same time bring customers on the journey to get there. So they kind of over overlapped in a way. I saw it was working. I think if you can see a piece of paper on the wall uh as a as a founder uh got advice very early on about having a sixmonthly check-in whatever frequency you wanted but six monthly was what we were told.

You know check in is it working for you? Is it working um you know as a business? And then is it the right to to keep going or or to not? And I kind of kept that cadence. And so at the six month mark, I'd ask myself the questions, you know, has this changed since the last time. Is this going in the right way or not? And I actually run a pitch breakfast um not long after uh startup. And that was the piece where a particular bank said, you know what, we actually like this idea. And I was like, okay, that's it. Somebody now understands. So I've got my first piece of traction. And that was kind of the the momentum giver.

And I think anybody who's gone through this journey will know that there are little points of momentum which bursts you forward and and gives you that extra boost and so that was that was one of those and I think that was the one that meant the kind of it was time to double down.

Jerma, the Irish insights profile caused your founding journey one fugit decision at a time. Was there one specific [ __ ] moment that started everything or was it a pattern of small surreners to the idea? Well, I suppose the idea I had before before I came to stay at home dad and so I I was working in a business. I was doing pieces and I'd done a piece of work and I I'd realized that it didn't have to be as hard as that was. And so when Anna was going back to work and I'd agreed to take the the second year off, that was the piece. She'd do the first year, I'd do the second year. It was all kind of in the back of my mind. And it was really that fcket moment came at the end of my year. So the the kids were at 2 years old now. And it was really just that moment of saying I want to stay doing this.

And so I was really the moment was was that kind of point saying actually I'm not going to go back to work. We're going to stay single income for another year. And and then at the end of that year we'll make a decision. And that was really the piece of saying we're going to put everything into this. And literally uh when I say everything I mean I've been in startups. I sold all those shares. I cleared savings.

So I literally when we say bootstrapped there was what can I do to fund this and get this over the line bearing in mind that this is compliance software so you can't MVP compliance you're either compliant or you're not and so a big piece of what we did was get into that position and so it was a it was a hefty moment of saying in a way I'm putting the mortgage on the line here but I have that kind of sense of conviction that this is the right thing to do so and here we are with seven almost 8 years later

you tested a prototype on your own household finances and found 1,200 an annual savings you didn't know existed and your actual reaction was sh this works. Take us back to that moment and what did you do next? What did you tell your wife that night? Well, that was kind of that that was the piece, right? So, um I'd said I'm not going to go back, you know, I think I'll stay off. I I'll give I'll give the company a go.

But in reality, uh that means you know back to that staying single income it or I think I described it at the time was um one paycheck and three hungry mouths at home you know so every time you come back you see people going you know we're feed us and the idea being that there was a lot of pressure going to go on to on my partner right and it was a case of look uh the the reason I think this is going to work is because of that so what I had done is sat down with our data our own financial data the stuff that was available in open banking and pumped it into my my Play app and it popped up with with savings and some what I thought were bugs. Uh there's a bug. Uh cuz it had found three Amazon Prime subscriptions. I was like, well, you know, something doesn't work. I'll have to go and check that out. And then as I dug in there, yeah, there was three Amazon Prime subscriptions.

And the thing about it is, if anybody remembers 8 years ago, uh Amazon Prime wasn't a TV service available in New Zealand, and they didn't do next next day deliveries. Uh, literally I was paying um for that for what turned out in one case to be 18 months I think and it was just bought stuff on Amazon and it auto ticks that little box for you and I missed that and it just subscribed me each month and I'd done that on my card on the joint account card on the, you know, credit card those kind of pieces. And so I had these these little little amounts that were streaming out every month in different places. And I was like, "Oh, okay." And then putting our phones and our internet together brought in another bunch of savings.

And I kind of had that moment where I sat back and went, "Okay, if if I can find $1,000 savings and we can do that for everyone in New Zealand, you know, that's yeah, 5 billion. Hey, that's GDP impacting. I'll take that. We can we can make this work." And I I think that was really that piece where I was like, "Right, I'm in. Let's do this." And that was scary because it really is, as I said, you know, putting the putting the house on the line then. You're you're kind of saying, "I I'm going to commit everything to making this this go."

Yeah. For someone who's never heard the phrase open banking, can you explain in I guess easy language what you're building and why it matters to the average consumer?

Yeah. So, um, open banking is a concept, right? It's the easiest way of putting it. It's the idea that your financial data is yours. That's the crux of it. That's the the underlying piece, but it's driven by government regulation. The idea is back in 2016, global financial crisis occurred. Banks started getting wobbly everywhere and people's money were stuck in places and they couldn't move it around. And so the European government stepped in and said actually going forward you don't get to lock a customer in. They need to have the opportunity to move and move their data with them because at the end of the day the reason people stick with banks is because it's bloody difficult to move, right?

You can't easily decide I want to swap to this other bank because you get paid into that bank and you've got bills that are going out of that other bank and essentially it becomes a core part of your your kind of financial life and so it's not easy. So the EU came up with what they called PSD2 payment service directive and it came under that way to also allow customers other opportunities to move their money. So think about it. The only other way to move right at that time was log into internet banking or mobile banking do an account to account transfer or pay with a payment card right and so that was your Visas or Mastercards you know you can go tap a card and away you go or in those days swipe and stick a chip in that meant customers were again locked into those services right that was owned by the bank and owned by the card rails and and and those pieces.

So the idea was actually we're going to break apart this and we're going to let customers do what they want and move things as they need which was kind of innovative at the time. The UK was part of the EU at the time. They adopted it as well. They took on a different approach to the EU mandated a particular standard and a way of doing it and and defined it from an API perspective. Whereas the rest of Europe said go sort it out yourselves. It's up to you. And that started this revolution in new innovative ways of interacting with data. And so instead of screen scraping, which was the old way to get access to data, that's where you gave somebody your internet banking username and password, which sounds crazy as an idea, but I mean it still happens today, right?

You give them your username, password, they log into your internet banking, and they download all your history, and then they'll give you a mortgage, right? That could stop straight away. You could actually go and consent to it. And anybody who's logged in with Apple ID or logged in with Google into into something, you know, you go to Netflix and it's like, you know, create a Netflix account or login with your Google account. That is the exact same process for open banking. And so when you go there, it says select your bank. And that's the same as finding Google on the consent list. You go there and Google pops up and says, "Hey, do you know you're logging into Netflix?" And you're they're going to see your email, your name, and address. And you say, "Yep, I'm okay with that." And away you go. Open banking is the same.

You don't actually have to put in your Google credentials to log into Netflix. It takes you to Google. Google says, "Do you know what you're doing here? This is who and this is what's happening." And you say, "Yep." And away you go. It's the exact same now with your bank. You get sent to your bank and your bank goes, "Hey, by the way, this mortgage service is asking for this data for this period of time so it can achieve whatever outcome you're looking for. Is that what you're agreeing to?" You click yes and away you go. And the joy is that's all accredited. So random hacker X can't turn up tomorrow and accidentally request your data because that system that is set up because it's governmentdriven means that everybody has a license to interact with your data. And so from a regular person uh you should never have to know what open banking is. That's the important key piece, right?

In the same way we don't necessarily know how banks move money between each other when we do accounttocount payments or how when you tap your card at a terminal to purchase your coffee. You don't know how that works. Open banking is similar to those pieces in the background. It's what's enabling cool things to happen. But the idea is at its core, your information is yours and you own it. You own your accounts, you own your money, and you own access to them. And now you can decide who has access and who you share that information. So it's it's really it's really empowering.

And what's the role that is playing in that?

So we are the pipes, the connection, the infrastructure as such that this sits under. So in the simplest sense, if you think of banks as reservoirs where all of this information and money and all those things sit and you think of those mortgage brokers or personal financial management apps or or another bank on the other side that's trying to offer a service to the customer, you as a consumer would go to that other provider and they would you would click buttons there and they would use our pipes, our connections, our secure endto-end flow to make that happen. And the idea being there is they don't need to be experts in these technologies. They don't need to be experts in security and governance and all those pieces to be able to offer you services.

We take away that away that burden from them and we ensure it's secure end to end and that way we become that core system over which these things operate. So it's a it's a really kind of big and important part of what happens because once it's embedded it becomes part of everybody's dayto-day. You don't notice you're using it,

right? And why are the banks not innovating on that side as fast? I mean they could use that opportunity of the regulation for open banking and go and build this kind of you know lock in with your bank themselves right what what's keeping them from doing that

well there's two pieces one they are by their nature conservative organizations right um they are designed to keep things inside not let things out right that's they they've got a vault mentality right and so they don't iterate fast they can't respond to markets the same way as smaller, more agile organizations or or just organizations who are technology companies first, right?

Banks are financial institutions first and they use technology to enable that and so technology is a cost for them rather than providers like us who are technology companies whereas technology is the product as such and so it's very difficult for them to to be innovative in that space and we've we saw this coming out of Europe initially and out of the UK before the Australian regime started and it was very similar what happened was startups came they did really cool really innovative stuff and they got between the bank and the customer and then the bank panicked Right? Because from their perspective, that's a risk. So the first lot of banks tried to gobble up as many of those startups as they could, but that stopped the innovation, right? It killed it there in the tracks cuz that startup could then only serve that bank's customers.

And let's be honest, that bank has had that information for 100 years, if not more, and hasn't been able to do anything innovative with it, right? So the challenge was now they had a tool that required connecting to all banks, but was now limited to one. And so that was the first lot that was the the kind of the panic purchase protect our market position approach of banks. Since then the second wave came true and that's the really smart stuff that's now come out. That's where banks realize actually their core product is financial services. That's deposits or lending or those kind of pieces. And owning all the way to the customer is expensive and it allow doesn't allow them to change very often. Right? Imagine you have a large bank and your cohort of customers tends to be older people. you've got more retirements, more savings.

It's very difficult to change your brand to say we're now cool and hip and we want young people, right? So, how do you do that? Well, what you do is you step back and you let another service deliver that all the way to the customer. And so, the way I look at it is Spark has the Spark brand. That's about telco. They're selling phones. That's your incumbent service provider. And then they started their skinny brand. And skinny was, you know, different cost base, different customer targets, different product offerings. And so it didn't dilute their existing customers. They weren't targeting their same customer base. And so people could feel the same brand alignment, but now they were able to do it. So banks start doing the same pieces, right? And you can see this in Australia.

There's, you know, Bank of Queensland invested in in a number of technology companies and neo bank style pieces, right? the idea of saying, "Hey, look, we have our core brand, we have our core services, and we can actually now leverage those and ring fence the thing that we call core banking and core financial and then use tools and services to target new customers and markets and and deliver differential services to the rest out there." And so, and that's one of the big things that open banking gives, right? The original thought from the regulators was very simple. Customers will move. We're going to see a shift in the percentage of market share. What they didn't anticipate was that that isn't how it was really going to work. Customers did move, but they didn't move all of their banking. They moved services. And so what it meant was actually customers became multi-banked, right?

I can get my best mortgage from here, my personal loan from there, my credit card from here cuz they got airpoints. That's good for me, you know. And so those kind of pieces meant people were actually able to pick and choose the services they want from the ser providers that were best for them. And so it becomes way more uh empowering to the consumer and then whether that's an individual or a business for example the consumers in this is is generally anybody who has a a bank account and so that enables those to to pick and choose the services from the providers and what it actually means from a financial institution perspective is their risk is also spread right rather than being locked into their 12.7% market share they have the opportunity to grow aspects of their business and to be able to turn dials up and down as they need them. So, it's a case of we'd love to grow deposits.

Right now, we can use open banking and a service which we can go and draw deposits because we can interact with customers looking for those types of services. And then once they've grown deposits, they could say, "Hey, look, we're going to pull that back because we really want to do that uh home loans now. We want to drive out those pieces." And so you can do targeted uh pieces to that make sense for your business at a point in time, which is great for things like mutuals and credit unions and other financial institutions that aren't the big guys, right? Because the big guys can can sell everything to everyone at all the time. They got more money than they can um give away at any time. Whereas smaller institutions need to be smarter. They need to be more agile with that. And it's a case of actually to be able to lend more, we need a higher deposit rate.

So we're going to target that type of piece. And you can now then go out and acquire customers in areas that you wouldn't normally have done with targeted products and in a way deliver a new service to customers that wasn't available before. And so it it becomes really innovative.

Interesting. Now you said the ultimate loser in the current system is the customer who can benefit from better choices and know in the current system who who's winning is is anyone winning in the current broken system or or is it more just the the you know the momentum of the current system is just kind of driving it forward and no one's really winning. it well there's inertia nobody's winning right um because it's static and that's that's the result and let's let's be clear that that inertia is built in so um historically those financial institutions would rather stay where they are and have their 12% or whatever it is market share then risk you know pushing too hard to try and get to 14 and end up with 11.

you know what your revenue is, you know what your your growth numbers are and you can just kind of stay and do it and because they generally generate hundreds of millions if not billions is it worth risking that for an extra half a percent you know and so for them the inertia is built in they want it to be as static as possible and I mean that in a general sense obviously you talk to the people in the banks they want the best outcome for their customers right they are literally looking to do those pieces but you're trying to move a colossal financial institution and that's not easy to do on a person byperson basis Right. So that's the piece. So there there isn't a winner in the existing system. There's lots of losers though. That is all of the customers who aren't getting the best potential service or who are locked into a service which is not right for them.

But the cost of moving it used to be called a um a lazy tax which was a kind of a semi-insulting way of talking about your customers, right? You know, it's a case of customers could be saving if they'd only bothered to try and find a better service. But that ignored the fact that that the burden was on the customer to do that. The burden was on to to to be able to go through the process. And I say that as a person who recently took out a loan that took must be 4 months to get through the bank's process, right? And that was with the existing organization, right? I already had accounts with them and it took 4 months. That is not a reasonable expectation. Imagine having to do that and say, "Right, I'm going to start. It's January. I'm going to start and I'm going to move my banking."

you're still at that in September, you know, you're still finding bills that are pointed to the wrong account and you're doing that. That is a big risk to people. It's time consuming and at the end of the day, they said, "And all I got was an extra, you know, 2% of my mortgage." You know what? In the end, it's cost me more time and energy and stress than to do that. And so, in that way, the customer is punished for loyalty rather than uh being rewarded as part of being able to move. And open banking changes that. It unlocks that. It provides the ability for other partners to come into the ecosystem and really drive change. And you'll see that there's already a big in New Zealand for example following the Australian piece there's these neo banks coming in right these are targeting customers offering them unique services and by unique I mean it is for that customer.

It it isn't a generic product. It is a case of I've got an offer that works for you and they're able to do that even though they're running sometimes on the same core systems as existing banking services, but they're able to be innovative. I'm talking they're able to to talk to customers in different uh cohorts of customers using those pieces. And again, they utilize services like ours to be able to move those that data and that money around. But right now when somebody applies for a mortgage or like you said a loan, they print bank statements, scan them, email them, wait for days, weeks, months, I don't know, maybe years. Kiwi Bank introduced which what changes? Walk me through that process from applying for a Kiwi Bank mortgage.

Yeah. So with Kiwi Bank, it's a it's an interesting one because they're using two sides of our product, right? The first side is actually the compliance side about sharing data, right? When I talked about the banks having mandated that they need to share, that means that they have to go into those core systems where data has been ringing fenced and secured for against all sorts of threat actors that might be out there to try and hack it. And then they need to make it available through a governmentmandated standard to other apps out there and they can start to build those things themselves. But in reality, as we've said before, that requires standards, understanding, more security people, more developers, more engineering capabilities about doing those pieces and then securing that and auditing it and doing all those pieces.

So they use our service to wrap around their existing capabilities because they already expose that information through things like mobile banking or internet banking, right? So we enable them to do that in a secure way and transfer that out into the streets. And so that's the first bit, right? So that means they can now share data with everybody else. The second part is they can start to consume that data. And when you talk about that, they've got a bunch of initiatives that they're going to run on, but things that that would look like would be, you know, uh single pane of glass style piece, which is a nice way of saying all of your finances in one place. And that means all of those pieces can come in, they can look, and they can see those pieces. And that means as a customer who has got things in different banks, you can look in that one place.

And so that's a great way of being able to show customers pieces. Other than that, there is a range of pieces. I can't talk about KB Bank once specifically because obviously they've got uh their own kind of drivers and initiatives. But the idea is if you were for example uh a red bank in New Zealand, you could consume information from a blue bank and a yellow bank and bring that information in and show that to your customers in one place.

allow them to click apply for a loan and bring that information in without requiring them to manually re-enter it or to download and upload it and and we've seen this right so I think the numbers for 2024 and 2025 were uh 40 billion US globally moving to 60 billion global don't quote me on those numbers in document fraud which is where people download a document stick it into the good old you know open AI chatgpt style um piece and say, "Hey, I told them I earned a h 100,000 a year. Update my bank statement to make it look like that." Right? And so your bank statement gets updated and you're like, "Great. Update my transaction history to to look like that, too." And you get the same document back out. It's just the numbers now look better. And then they can upload those pieces and they can get a loan or a credit card or whatever it is they're applying for.

But it's not based on real numbers. It's based on the fact that we can now with relative ease, a person with no technical skills can forge documents and push those pieces forward. And so that meant that relying on documents now is a massive risk. Relying on things that somebody downloads and uploads is crazy. And so the only thing that they could fall back on was give us your username and password to your internet banking. Now you know as well as I do that the banks are always sending the pieces don't share these credentials with anybody else.

And then they first thing they do as part of your mortgage application is say now please share the other ones though you know don't share our ones but you should definitely share those ones with us so that we can see those pieces right and so in their terms of service if you've done that you can lose access to your accounts or more importantly if something was to happen to your information or data they are essentially absolved of all responsibility and accountability because you gave away your credentials right and so that's an important important piece so what do they do they have no other option and they're stuck in a space of either get credentials or take these pieces. And that's where open banking comes in. It's a guaranteed rail. It's a secure connection between point A and point B. Nobody else can interact with it. And your data flows securely.

And you get to click decline, you get to click stop, you get to click revoke whenever you choose. And so it means that you don't have to give it away forever, which is kind of the the current approach.

David, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about how you ended up in New Zealand. Proud Irish man. You grew up in Ireland. You studied in Ireland. I think you started your career in Ireland as well. Yeah. What's the background? How did you end up in New Zealand? Yeah. Give us give us the real story, not the not the LinkedIn story, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, what we'll say years and years ago, I studied in the University of Limmerick. I studied information technology and telecommunications. That's hardware, software, and all the bits that make them communicate between each other. It was a great generalist course. it wasn't very targeted in one area and it was allowed me to kind of have cross industry skills. As part of my internship, I got a job in Intel in their R&D site in in in Ireland where I was working and testing on fabricated pieces, right? So, somebody else is doing fabrication and we were trying to break them. It was a nice way to to do it and I discovered a a huge amount while I was there, right? Intel ran multiple teams on the same project, for example. So I was working on it with a team um from Ireland and India. There was a team then working in Ireland with Ireland and the US on those pieces.

And then there was another team between the US and India essentially. And we were all working one of us was going to succeed. The other two teams were going to fail. You know that kind of way. So who was going to get there first? And this meant that they didn't have all their eggs in one basket. They had a chance to having groups of intelligent people working together. Right? It was a case of and also having that little bit of competition between them, right? Who's going to get there? Who's going to be the one to succeed? That was an amazing experience, right? It was a a huge learning curve for me to go into the space and be surrounded by brilliant people trying to come up with ways to out compete and out work even within the space.

And so what I would describe is that had a real startup style feel even though it was a ginormous piece because you were working together tightly and you knew somebody else was coming along at your heels and so you had to be innovative. You had to be thinking you had to be uh working ways to to move forward and I when I finished my internship I got a job in consulting technology consulting. So I traveled the UK and Ireland mostly going to banks, government, large enterprise, really going in and doing massive scale projects and and delivering those pieces. And at the same time, my partner, she was traveling the world. She got say Barbados, I got Birmingham. And so after a while, I was kind of feeling a little bit um jealous. Yeah.

Uh feeling a little bit jealous that she was getting to sunny places and I was getting to places that were wetter than the west coast of Ireland, which is where I was from, you know. So it was a case of uh maybe it's time for a bit of a bit of a break. So um and at that stage we uh were kind of we were renting a house in Ireland which was effectively the only way to describe it was it was a wardrobe because the only thing that stayed there was our clothes and we'd fly back from working wherever we worked. We'd swap over I'd swap over my suits into the new bag and back out the next day. So you know you're short-lived over interactions and those kind of pieces. So, we bought one way ticket to Mexico, traveled through Central and South America, learned Spanish, did all of the the fun stuff you do there, and then arrived in Australia. And Australia has rules around visas.

You know, you can do certain types of work, but then you have to spend six months on a farm and those kind of pieces. And it didn't really fit with our career kind of growth pieces. And so, we looked at that as being a short holiday in Australia. Then, we popped across to New Zealand and I got a job. I mean inside three weeks I was working in I think it's Sky TV and I was doing you know cool things working with nice people doing fun stuff right then all of a sudden you're like this isn't bad and then the jobs kept coming and it was startup enterprise startup enterprise and my um my mentor we'll say back in Ireland all those years ago I handed him my notice from the consultancy they immediately they you know their hand was on the phone to say am I walking you out of the building are you going to a competitor you know how before I touch the button, where are you going?

And I said, I'm I'm going traveling. They were like, okay. And the phone was going down, but it wasn't all the way down. I was like, I'm going to New Zealand. They put the phone down. He said, great. Okay. So, this is what you're going to do. You're going to go work. You're going to find a financial institution. You're going to work in payments. You're going to find a startup and you're going to work in in UI pieces. You're going to find a an infrastructure company and you're going to work on hardware pieces. And he literally talked through. He's like, "This is what you're going to do. And by the end of that, you will have identified an area after working through all those pieces that has a problem that you can solve. And that's where you're going to pick your piece and you'll start your business and you'll solve that piece.

And I thought you looking at him at the time, I was in my early 20s going, "Nah, that's not for me. I like to get paid. I don't really like the idea of the risk of going out and doing that." But as I went through those pieces, I found a job came up and I say, "Look, I'm not really keen on that one." And then somebody called me and say, "Hey, I've got a problem over here."

and I go actually that does align that is an infrastructure piece that is a you know hardware component that does align with what he told me I'm going to learn something new here and I took on those pieces and so we'll say 10 years later in New Zealand I had uh a large network of technology people that I knew I'd worked in a number of of different industries and I had as as he had pointed out found a um a piece and back all those years ago before big data was big data I'd been doing one of my last projects was a so-called big data project. And so um the last one I was doing was a big data project. And so it was that kind of join between those two pieces of saying I've come full circle.

I've now gone into a place that is doing those pieces and I can see an opportunity and I can see something that is painful for both the financial institution but also the customer on the other end and the business trying to offer them a service. And so I I can I can solve for that and I not only can I I know how to do that. That is you know the skills that I built up over those years and so that's pretty much what I did. I built the first version and then New Zealand never turned on open banking. So it was there to be the leader fast following the UK. It had a really smart and a kind of say almost aggressive approach to it.

the banks had said we can do this and so the regulator looked away and then the banks said nah maybe not then if the regulator isn't going to look how are we going to get a budget and so it never happened and so I built this thing and as I say those uh moments of checkpoints of saying within the business what do we do and I was looking kind of going all of our competitors that had started at the same time were disappearing they were all you know I seen the messages on LinkedIn you know it was a good start we tried everything you know sari we tried talking to investors and investors like we're not putting a dollar near that because New Zealand's not happening. And then the Australian government, the ACC, I think, tweeted back then, we're looking for a test partner for the Australian standards. So I replied, you know, happy to help.

And they called me on the Friday and they said, right, you know, this is what we'd be looking for. This is the things we'd need. And I was like, can I get back to you on Monday? I just, you know, need to um make some decisions about how we do this. And then on the Saturday and Sunday, I was frantically on the keys. So that on Monday I had converted the entire platform over to using the uh the Australian standards. Uh and then it was on Monday I picked up the phone and said yes I can do that. I can do this and uh we can we can make that happen. And so

it wasn't me alone at that stage. There was one and a half people in the business. Um and so it was uh myself and um my kind of first teammate Alan who uh was kind of what we say employee number one.

Um and so uh he was there to to help drive all those pieces and we delivered that and then we did that for four months or more with the at the end of which the uh Australian government said you know when when could you or are you interested in getting your own accreditation and I it hadn't even occurred to me I was thinking with one and a half people were way too small but they sent me a lovely email which said you know you very helpful your platform was very flexible you know it was amazing to be able to work with you guys because we were able to do things uh very swiftly and so we did we that was that was that checkpoint you know that moment of going there's the first one is should we be going Australian government says they've got demand let's give it a go and then 6 months later the getting that feedback to say you should get an accredititation was a case of there's another boost okay let's go through it and we did I think at the time we were the smallest entity accredited on on the Australian ecosystem we had a full we'll say bank grade license with one and a half people and we were able to do that because we automated everything from start to finish before the world the Vagentic AI.

Our view was we need to remove people from practically everything so that we can scale cuz the only way you can do things with one and a half people is if the system does all the work. And so we had to make it really cost- effective to run, remove all of the risk, all of the pieces, and then be able to go through and essentially get yourselves what was at the time an ASA 3150 industry standard piece to say we do all of the government level compliance pieces. And we grew that out into a sock 2 compliance showing that we could actually do it at an international standards and those kind of pieces. So really kind of checkpoint driven. Have we done it? Yes, we said we were going to achieve this. we have achieved it. Now what's the next piece? And that milestone approach and that reflection point really helped make sure that we were always on track.

You just mentioned that um you had a hard time getting investors on board in the beginning because of the regul regulatory piece. We read somewhere that you had 680 investors in your CRM. How many of those said no?

67 maybe. As I said, this was this was bootstrapped from pretty much the get-go. Um, I I always found that going for investment was difficult because we were never at the right point for investors. So, when we wanted to raise, we were post preede preede, if that makes sense. We were we had done a a friends and family round for to get our sock to compliance. essentially that was um uh about you know 300 to 500,000 in build and so we had to go and raise some capital for that and then secure some customers but that meant we were not the right size at any time for going out to talk to investors they were we were too small for the seed round and then by the time we were ready to do uh a seed round we were uh almost beyond seed um but not quite series A and so you know when you're talking to people you're look, we're looking for a $500,000 check. They go, "Oh, really?

We see you in the $100,000 checkbook." And you're like, "Look, to be honest with you, I've signed a customer who pays me $100,000, so that doesn't help. I'm looking to try and accelerate." And then the next time you we went out, it was a case of, "Hey, look, you know, we're we're looking for 1.5 million." And they're like, "Oh, you know, I see you in the $750,000 check. You're again, I've just signed a $6 million deal. you know, it's the the size of our business didn't necessarily align with investor expectations and those kind of things. So, it has it had been a very difficult kind of process to go through and you're always trying to have the right conversation at the right time as such and we met some fantastic investors. We had some great feedback as well, you know, how how to better pitch, how to align our numbers better, how to communicate the story effectively.

And so, even though it was, you know, hundreds, and I really do mean hundreds of of calls and meetings and and sitdowns to get through those pieces, what we eventually found was we realized how in a way investors are another customer. We had got the story and we had understood how to communicate that to the financial institutions and the ones who want to consume our product and we had learned how to communicate with those. What were the pieces that were of interest to them? What were the pieces that weren't? But we hadn't worked out how to communicate those kind of pieces effectively to uh to investors in the same way. And so that meant that we were having to adjust. And so we we did I mean late last year we closed closed around. It's our first, we'll say, proper big piece and that set us up for an amazing year.

We finished 2025 ahead of where we had anticipated and 2026 has taken off gang busters. And so even even as we say those pieces, we're still looking at these pieces about saying how do we continue to accelerate? How do we continue to grow to do those pieces? And so from the early days of bootstrapping and by bootstrapping I do mean I worked a full day in witch and I ran two other contracts at one point in time. So I was working three three roles so that I could pay other people to work in which and so I did two other jobs um and still made my daytime meetings with witch and and all those pieces. So it was we say as startup world goes try to explain to people that getting into startups particularly tech startups I don't I don't know about any anything else but is generally a 6 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. gig that's that's kind of how I put it.

If if you're not planning on to do those kind of hours you're going to find it very difficult. And I know you hear people say it all the time you know work life balance and all those pieces. I've yet to work out how you do that and still grow and scale because realistically I I didn't get paid. I you know I haven't taken salary from from which for that entire time because my view was anytime I was doing this do I pay another person to take away a task from me and maybe I can finish at 3:30 a.m. or do I pay myself and do those pieces? My view was always grow the business, right? Grow and I can do more with more hands. And so that was always the the view. And so it meant that there's a lot of a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings, burning candle at both ends and those kind of pieces.

And now as we're approaching eight, I think the conversations around work life balance can maybe start to come in, you know, but uh I wouldn't I wouldn't say to anybody take this on and do this type of thing lightly. It is it is an all-encompassing kind of role uh to do these pieces. German, when you when you finally did raise the 1.5 million from from us at NCVC and the NZ fintech fund and booster late last year after seven years of bootstrapping, did it did it feel like vindication or did it feel like you'd already kind of proved that you didn't really need the money? And also like what that seven years cost you personally, not the business, but but

well, you can see the gray hairs. So, I'll tell you it cost gray hairs and uh I won't be winning young New Zealander of the year awards. I'll tell you that much. Um it's a it it's a lot but it I mean it we'll start in the first piece cost was time in a way I say I don't have a personality anymore. I have a startup um I can't have a general conversation w with people. I I don't know I don't know what's happening in the world. I can't um have a chat about football or the rugby because quite literally I don't have time. I haven't had time to come back to reality for those kind of pieces. And so somebody sits down and says do you see the match at the weekend? And I say no but I did sign two contracts. So, you know, how was your weekend? You know, it's a case of you become it's all-encompassing. It becomes part of part of your personality. But it it did also put a lot of pressure on.

I found those years where were a lot of physical and mental strain. So, this body I now have what I call startup body. That's a body designed to sit in a chair for large periods of time. So, you don't you don't have time for exercise. You don't have time for those kind of care pieces. And so you need to be very much willing to, as I say, put your body on the line um to be able to get those pieces over the line. So I'd say those costs lead to kind of a burnout. I I did you know around co time we had gotten a big customer thing on a on a wall, a certificate, things are going well, we're going to win. And then of course everything stops. And that is that was a huge strain that was, you know, all of this piece that you are personally pulling and pushing into the world essentially stopped all around. And so I I found that that was a very hard time.

But on the other side, you sign another one and that little spark, you're like, "Yeah, okay, it's in." And then you sign another one and you're like, "Okay, we have momentum." And so by the time we by the time we closed the round realistically the conversation was starting on when are we starting our next one because we have already got demand which exceeds our abilities of the last round. And so in a way it was more a case of great that does the pieces we were talking about but I need to plan because it takes nine bloody months to get people from hello to let's be friends right cuz realistically you're talking about people going in and saying hey we want to have a long-term relationship with you. This is how it's going to be. You're going to need to trust me. You need to understand what we do.

You're going to need to understand the vagaries of what we do and understand that it might take 6 months to sign that customer. But when that customer signs, they're going to sign for 10 years. And so, you know, come on the journey with me and that kind of piece and that takes a long time. So, coming out of the back of that, it was like, we know, we know exactly what the next 18 months looks like, but we're already planning how that has to start 9 months later to say we need to go because we want to be bigger. And for that, I mean securing New Zealand market and securing the Australian market. And then what's your next market, right? Because we want we want this to be a global piece. There's no reason this needs to be a an Australia, New Zealand only piece. What we have are solutions to problems that exist in all of the open banking industries.

And I think at last count it was over 70 countries have an open banking initiative of some variety. And some of them even more than open banking, what we'll call open data. So that's open energy as well and soon to be open insurance or open finance which includes non-bank lending and buy now pay later and all of those types of pieces, right? So how do you continue that momentum and to do it in a way that you know in my view conquers conquers the world?

It was your wife who I think told you not to quit when COVID hit right. She said don't quit on a bad day. You'll regret it.

Don't quit in a bad day. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of those ones where you know I just slumped down. I was like this is too hard sometimes. And she was like well look you know it's very easy to quit in a bad day right. It's it's easy. I mean you know the page is written for you. You sign on the bottom. Yeah. Done. She was like that it's not it's not a good it's not a good time to make those types of decisions. It's a say go, you know, get to a good day and then make that kind of decision about how you want it to be. Is this right? And and I think that's the good thing about having those six monthly check-ins, you know, with myself essentially and with the business to say, is the business moving in the direction that it's supposed to be going? Is is it still working for me? Is it still working for the business? Is it still working for those pieces?

And what I found is over the years those got clearer as I understood what it meant to be and as the business accelerated it was uh easier to have those pieces I knew I was getting um you know more from it and it's it's a give and take with with this with the wonderful world of startups. Um so it drives faster, it drives harder but it also takes more know. So we grew to 22 people uh in 2025. You know that requires more time than it did when we were 12. Um and so it's about continuing that structure of saying right it's working but it's taking more from me. So how do we restructure the business to be better and to accommodate and grow and be more secure and those kind of pieces. So that's kind of been the the big piece and having that checkpoint and having somebody who backs you. I think having on there to to back me on each one of those pieces to say, you know, we're doing this together.

So, you know, that's that's an important space to be.

Yeah. Um, and let's talk a little bit about what's ahead for you. You mentioned the opportunity is much bigger than just New Zealand and Australia. Looking at the competitive landscape played for 66.1 $6.1 billion valuation, Inc. was acquired by Visa for $2.1 billion. you're a startup with, you know, 10, 20 people, $1.5 million raise. Um, are you a little bit crazy or do you see an opportunity there?

I mean, quite literally, uh, if you look at what's happening right now, uh, UK is moving towards open finance. Canada's moving towards open banking. So, that's that's another piece. We have a very particular plan about how we want to grow, what is the best alignment of pieces. And going back to the original piece, I'm I'm means I grew up in a country which is dual lingual. So we know how to and I said that we I know how to build for multil- language countries. I know how to build and deliver platforms and services that can be accommodate pieces. So something simple as going into into Canada means we have to be able to accommodate two jurisdictions of languages and be able to to manage those within the same piece. And so we've built and baked those kind of capabilities in from day one.

So, you know, somebody who would necessarily have started in Australia is going to find that more challenging because they have a a single language country and a single language product. We have the ability to do those pieces and I just use that generally. But the idea is joining those pieces I I think very easily the growth trajectory is mapped by if you see the numbers coming out for as as you said for the acquisitions that sit on these pieces. It's about showing and demonstrating your value to those organizations being able to do it. And there's maybe two conversations a year we have with very large organizations who see us in that same way of saying this is a way for us to deliver value to our existing customers and to grow our other customers and how we deliver to them.

So you know if we talk about exit there's always acquisition at the end of that but equally given the scale of the market there is the ability to to grow to that point of maybe being the acquirer rather than the acquiry if that makes sense and being able to to essentially dominate the market. Good oldfashioned IPO style exit.

That's great. Dermit you mentioned being from Ireland that giving you advantages. Ireland has a very thriving fintech sector and Stripe is founded by Irish founders. Why not build this in Ireland?

Well, in the simplest sense, I was here. It was it's about time and right time, right place and those kind of pieces. I think I could uh I could have done this in Ireland. Uh it probably could have been easier in at the start as well. I would have been closer to family. I would have had my network to to to call on whereas being in New Zealand meant that I was you know myself as a family we were alone in two ways. We didn't have a family support network but equally we didn't have a family support network through for connections to people or my business network or any of those pieces. I was essentially, you know, Irish person in New Zealand. And so I had to to rely on different pieces.

And to be honest with you, um, they each time we reached out, I I often call it the Irish Mafia, reaching out to the Irish network to say, "Hey, look, this is a problem I'm having or this is an area I need advice in those kind of pieces." And you seeing the Irish community come out or opening a door to somebody else to say, "Hey, by the way, I don't have the answer to that, but I do know this person and they work here. Can I get can I get them in? All of a sudden, you have pieces to play with. And as I said, I had a huge tech kind of network to play on. Didn't have a huge business network to play on. So, when I talked about those early days and having skills and those kind of pieces, a lot of the skills at my disposal were overlapping. In the old ven diagram, everybody fell into the same side. So, you know, everybody turning up with a shovel and you're like, "Okay, great.

But we still need a person to hold the post. Do we have any post holders here?" And it's like, "No, no, we've just got a load of people who can dig holes." and say, "Okay, so we need to expand. We need to grow those pieces." It could have been easier if I'd done in Ireland. And to be honest with you, I think the the startup ecosystem is probably a little bit more mature on the Irish side. There's a lot of technology companies, a lot of those pieces. New Zealand is still very small in that space. And as we talked about trying to raise capital earlier, what I find was or what I found was that there are big gaps in the investment market in in New Zealand. you know, it's we'll say easier to get a $10,000 check. It's harder to get a $50,000 check. Uh from there, you might get a $100,000 check, but you won't get a million dollar check.

And so, what you have to do is you have to kind of uh aggregate a lot of smaller checks together to make those same milestones. And the same goes, you know, in those early days in those almost 700 800 um investors on on the piece, the amount of times I met with investors who said, "I love it." to be honest with you, I'd invest now, but you're not asking for enough, right? I was like, look, what number would I need to ask for? We can work this any way you want. You know, we can we can do it in installments, franchises. How do you want this to work? I'll ask for any number. And as they came back said, it's it's not that. It's that being a New Zealand based startup, you're going to be a rounding error on our balance sheet. And so, unless you're asking me for 10 million US, you're kind of not you're going to cost us money to maintain as a piece. And I love what you're doing.

just come back to me when you want 10 million US. And I, you know, I have to turn around then look at the New Zealand economy and look at the Australian economy and say, "Holy [ __ ] it that that's a big time. That's that's a large growth. That's a large piece." And that means I need acceleration now to be able to get to there. So, what do I need right now that would allow us to to get that right up tech? And so, you kind of have to plot your way back, you know, that kind of piece. Whereas, it would be potentially much easier within within Ireland having access to Europe as well.

in the UK as financial markets to be able to say hey look I just want to raise a million euro and I want to get going whereas saying I want to raise a million New Zealand dollars I want to get going even though you know dollar for dollar it's 500,000 um uh euro it's still it's still a bigger ask of this market and so you have to try and balance those pieces how do you do those bits how do you do and and just not get get trapped because of the vagaries of of where you started right because you they potentially started anywhere, but now you're kind of locked into the growth trajectory based on a New Zealand piece or or based on an Australian piece. So, um, yeah, but to be honest with you, I'm fortunate that I did it here because I got to work and have had work with some amazing people and I wouldn't have had those people if I was in Ireland if I had other people.

And these ones have allowed us to do what we've done. They've supported us. I've got to meet you guys. have got to really build what what I find is a a really strong support structure and I probably wouldn't have leaned as heavily on that because I would have had other things to lean on in Ireland.

And talking about the future of um fintech in New Zealand and um how open banking is going to play out in the next 12 24 months. You're working with Kiwi Bank. They have pledged fee free access to the API. um they really try to work with fintech companies and use that in a way as a weapon to compete with the other banks. At the same time, the commerce commission is saying that some of the other banks are delaying open banking to lock in their market share. How do you think it's going to play out over the next 12, 24, 36 months?

We've got kind of two key markets to look at as examples. What's going to happen now in New Zealand is we're going to have that first wave, the one we talked about earlier, which is where all the innovation starts to happen. And we've already seen indications of that. So some New Zealand banks have bought or invested in particular institutions or uh fintex right so you'll see very specific ones in the early days I used to kind of feel sad when that happened kind of go that could have been us and then I saw what happened in the UK and I saw what happened in Australia and I realized it's the best thing that could ever happen is a financial institution a big bank investing in one of our competitors our competitor gets a huge influx of cash right now but essentially they go stale in 18 months they become locked as an outsourced developer essentially for that financial institution.

So that has a a benefit and our independence means that we can work with anybody and so trying to grow those pieces. So you will see that a few of those will slowly disappear from the market or uh their branding will become bank aligned and they will slowly get absorbed and then it's the second wave where the real innovation comes right that is those who have been able to demonstrate that this is survivable. these are the pieces that are out there. Then there's appetite within the investor market to be able to say, "Hey, look, we can see demand. We can see pieces." And if nothing else, we know we can do better than what was done because we've learned those lessons. And so, you start to get that second one. So, I'm I'm saying in the next 12 months, we will see the real second wave come out and really start to do cool things for for Kiwis.

And that's going to be that's going to be the real strong uptake on the piece. Between now and then though, the banks, the first ones, the big four are live. Kiwi Bank is going to go live and then the remaining banks inside there are going to be at a a disadvantage, right? So right now they're being told they don't have to and that's smart. They're smaller. They've got a higher cost to serve. You don't have to come in yet, but it's at their cost realistically. So whether they put a technology solution in and do this or don't. It's their customers who are going to be the ones that are suff suffering. And so you're going to see customers start to migrate to those who who do offer these services and you do have those capabilities. And so we'll be looking to support as many of those to come in and on as as fast as possible to be able to say, "Hey, look, there's no sense in losing out.

It doesn't have to be I think there's numbers quoted for Westpak Australia whenever they did theirs, you know, 100 million Australian to to go live." It doesn't have to be anything like that. When you use um SASbased provider like us, we can remove a lot of those pieces. And so it'll be about helping those in because open banking succeeds when all of the financial institutions are there. It cannot succeed when some of them are there because you still don't have your fa your um financial life in one place. And what ends up happening is something like screen scraping will live forever because these other providers can't come online. And what we really should be doing is looking to ensure that it is appropriate and effective for them to be able to participate because it's like it's not collecting anything. Your collection isn't really worth it until you have them all.

And that really has to be has to be the view and that would be the big difference. So we've seen it. I mean there's 140 financial institutions on the Australian side and they're about to bring in non-bank lenders which means you know your payday lenders buy now pay later your Qard style uh lending pieces all of those coming together as a cohort you got to bring in 500 or so more institutions or brands at least into that piece that is going to be hugely vibrant within the Australian space and so New Zealand needs to keep that pace and we've seen that the the uptick of that demand on on the Australian side and Now we're seeing the demand on the New Zeal Yeah. On the New Zealand side, so we can see where that kind of um hockey stick goes.

Interesting. German, you you said that 87% of individuals can be reidentified using just three points their data. That's that's terrifying. You know, separately, you pointed out that AI models don't forget data once it's been used for training, right? The right to be forgotten is essentially impossible. The current kind of architecture and you're you're building data infrastructure. How do you think about what your responsibility is and are you making the problem worse, better? How's your consumers think about this?

Yeah. So, the way we look at it is back to the original description. I describe it as pipes. All right. Um, we're like the water pipes that run from the reservoir to wherever the tap is. Your tap your pipes run best when nothing gets stuck in them. All right? And so it should be as straight through as possible. That removes the the risk of data remaining in places. The second part is when it gets to the other end, if you keep a tank of water, that goes stagnant too. And so really the best way for an open data ecosystem to run is to leave the water in the reservoirs until you need it, right? And so as a service provider, if you need data from Westpack, for example, then call for it from Westpack, don't pull it down, stick it in your warehouse, and expect it to be useful for the rest of eternity.

So the idea is it becomes a real-time data interaction across the ecosystem that reduces the risk on that uh business that's offering a services side that introduces uh reduces the risk on uh Westpak side for the data sharing because they know it's been read out it's been used and it's been forgotten. Now there's scenarios where you do need to keep it. If you lend to somebody you need to hold it for seven years to prove that you did your due diligence and all those pieces but that's a legitimate use case where it goes into a system for for maintenance. Generally speaking, if you're doing somebody's personal financial management, you could refresh that every hour and forget what you had before and still be really uh responsive to the user's interaction. So those are the kind of pieces.

The other side of it obviously then means that a customer can choose to revoke their access and that PFM's data disappears, right? Cuz it's it's gone out the other side. They don't have a warehouse. There's nothing to lose if you don't have it. That's that's the way I like to look at this. You know, if you had a vault and you were trying to protect it, it's easier just not to have a vault with things to protect than it is to have a vault that needs to be protected, right? And so the financial institutions, the banks and all those are already building big infrastructure to do those pieces. The rest of us should be really smart and rely on them having done it.

And now something as we mentioned before with Kiwi Bank for example coming out and saying they're not going to charge for access to API calls and payment initiation puts pressure on the other banks because it goes back to that core piece of it's your information. Why are they charging for access to it? They don't charge you for mobile app. They don't charge you for a internet banking. Why do they charge when it comes over an API? Right? And so that's a real kind of driver driven by a competitive advantage. And I'd hope that competitive advantages because they picked us as a platform and so their cost to serve is better and so that the other banks look at that in the same light and say maybe there's a better way to do that a way that isn't going to be so costly that requires us to charge what they originally planned. $5 per user per month, right? That is colossal.

You know, nobody nobody's going to pay $5 per per account essentially to to access data,

right?

Um those kind of pieces are are are going to be a big change for customers.

Yeah. And maybe pivoting to kind of like the personal the personal side. You know, you mentioned that you've done this for seven, eight years now and you've gotten the startup body and you've gone through the highs and the lows and you know exactly what this what this is about. And that story that you mentioned when Australia called you and you coded the thing over the weekend. A lot of times you have to do that, right? You have to sort of just figure it out on on the spot and then maybe pretend you have something when you don't fully have it. Where do you feel like a fraud? Maybe. Is there a part of this where you look at the Kiwi Bank partnership and the funding round and think they're going to figure out figure out that I'm making this up as I go?

It's we say I am a tech founder. I am what I like to think of as a a cave dweller, right? That's it's where I'm I'm most comfortable, right? Leave me alone in the back with the code. I'll make it work always. where I feel we say like like the fraud is that kind of out on front the face this this um conversations the the sales pieces that I I never feel comfortable I always talk about putting on my mask I I'm going to go put on my mask and go do those pieces uh you know getting up on stage you know doing that is a is a big is is a big change for me that is putting myself in front of a lot of people I always say I I I'm not even an expert on myself let alone anything else. So, you know, when people start asking me questions, it's like, look, this is my opinion. You know, I I I want to be very clear, don't quote me on this, don't buy stock, don't do anything. This is not financial advice.

You know, it's a case of uh I want to make sure that um people understand that, you know, I I am still growing in this space. So, I've found um I didn't I have enjoyed sales. I've enjoyed getting on stage. have enjoyed doing podcasts and talking to people that is actually um a surprise for me given how much I love the tech side but I think the difference is the tech side for me is semi immediate uh reward right something doesn't work then it does you can go okay I've done something meaningful whereas when you go in and you go into a sales conversation and 6 months later you're still talking about contracts from a tech perspective that could feel like the words haven't changed changed literally we we we've just moved bullet point 4 to bullet point 3. We should be good. We should be we should be okay here. Why haven't we signed this? Right?

So um there is that that kind of piece where you don't have that same immediate uh responsiveness on it. That's that's kind of piece. And so I'm still learning. I say I you know I'm learning and I have learned marketing and sales and all those pieces. That's where I feel like uh I'm turning up these pieces going. I'm just going to have to see how this goes cuz I I I I still don't know. Whereas with tech, you can describe it to me. I can see it in my head. I can fix it in my head and then I touch the keys twice and away it's working. You know, it's like tap tap tap tap. That's done. I can walk away. And I still even now um in in my we say CEO role, I still when I feel overwhelmed or stressed, I'll go find a bug. I'll go fix it. I'll send it to people say done. They will send me back a message. stop writing code and then I will still feel happy that I accomplished something.

It's like that's what we're here for. You go make sure we get paid, but it's just like I needed that today. I needed that kind of piece to be able to say, hey, look, you know, that almost tactile interaction with with the pieces. We've continued to grow. So, because of the the round last year, I've I've been able to put in place managers. And by that, I mean, we've got a general manager who started with us, now we've got a an engineering manager. So rather than 22 people reporting to me, I now have uh senior leadership which is way better, way more um organized and it reduces the risk on me like like anybody you know I am a single point of failure when it comes to businesses and and those companies. So you want to remove those. So I I've been able to start to delegate actions.

I've been able to step more into my role as CEO which is both terrifying and exciting because as I see the the CEO role is about vision, right? It's about driving the business to a location and it's doing it differently to driving it to the pieces being the driver. When I'm in the code, I actually I'm doing it. Whereas when you're in the CEO role, you're trying to communicate that effectively outside and effectively inside. And so that that's been a a real a real big kind of change. I've loved it. But equally, am I am I the best at it? Time will tell. But I what I wanted one piece to say is what I don't want this to be is a business of personality. That's that's the one thing I don't want this to be. and I can't even remember his name. Open AI, you know, where people aren't talking about the product or the service, they're talking about me.

That's if we're doing that, then I'm doing something wrong. The idea is our product is what the focus on. This is what we're building. This is what we're growing. And so I'm just a means to an end in that space. Whereas um you know, sometimes when you're you're doing those pieces, you find that a startup is built around a person and around a person's personality. I I want to try and avoid that.

Makes sense. We got three rapidfire questions for you to wrap up. Is that all right?

Okay,

great. Number one, who is Tom Red?

Uh, that's Dermit spelled backwards. So, that is kind of my pen name. Tom Red is my So, when I when I uh do and have done um publishing before, you know, for articles and and web and those kind of pieces, I did it under the name of uh Tom Red. Dermit Butterfield is a bloody long name and and I would guarantee you nobody spells it right. So, it's much easier to uh to flip it over and and make it Tom Red. Comes from primary school. I had a friend who spoke backwards for for a long time. And uh he called me Tom Red.

That's cool. What does witch stand for?

Which is kind of a reference to an alternative witch doctor. The kind of alternative to what's out there, which was a bunch of static onrem solutions and all of those types of pieces. Screen scraping. I wanted to say look that's the existing piece. There is an alternative. come to come to the dark side as such. And the second part was around the idea of witch hazel which is about flexibility right that idea of something that can be used and and molded and manipulated into a form and that's what what I wanted to build a company around the idea that our APIs solve many problems from one place and we can enable those pieces in in a single spot. So about flexibility.

Do you still talk to your mentor in Ireland?

Not for 17 years and that's how long I've been out of the country. When I left, it was fully cut off, disconnected. In fairness, in those days, I had a Nokia smartphone, which required you to stand on the top of buildings to send messages. So, as smart as things were all those years ago, there wasn't there wasn't much in that space. So, once we left Ireland and got into central and South America anyway, there was very little true internet coverage. And once I got here, it was a case of, well, I have a plan. Let's do it.

Dermat, one last question. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you were coding while the twins napped? And honestly, would you have listened to your yourself if you had known that?

I'd have given myself a stern talking to right. This in the easiest way of putting it has been exhausting. I knew this was going to be a lot of effort. I did not realize just how much a lot of effort really was going to be at the same time as as being a parent and and starting all those pieces. So, I would I'd give myself a real stern talking to explain that enterprise sales does not happen overnight. that would have helped with my would say resilience early on. I am a go go go go kind of person and our customers are a sure almost there kind of organizations and so I would have paced myself a little better. I would have made sure that I was really thinking about the customer's journey for this as opposed to my drive for this because the customers have always been eager. They've always been engaged.

The challenge was trying to move a large beast is not something you can do alone and I I definitely tried to do that.

Awesome. Thank you, Dermit. Um, this was such a great conversation. Thank you for going so deep. Where can people follow you, find you, and what should they be watching out for um on May 30th and after?

Yeah. So, you can find me on LinkedIn, German Butterfield. You can find Witch on Witch.it. Otherwise, I don't do the socials. You can you can follow us there. I do post on LinkedIn quite regularly and you can keep up to date with what's happening. That's a that's a really a good spot for us sharing updates around industry and pieces like that.

Amazing. Thanks so much.

No worries.

Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you.

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