Trent Daniel - Azupay’s Big Move with NAB

Speaker A: You're listening to a Day 1 FM show. Hi, it's Chris Titley here and on Today's episode of FinTech Fun, we're joined by Trent Daniel, chief customer officer at as you pay. Trent, great to catch up and looking forward to the podcast.

Speaker B: G' day Chris. Great to see you, great to be on here. Thank you mate.

Speaker A: Um, mate, uh, for the listeners out there that know nothing about as you pay, can you give us the elevator pitch on what you guys do?

Speaker B: Yeah, happy to. Uh, all right. As you pay. We are a Australian based fintech. Australian founder of fintech we the, I got to say we're the OGs of real time account payments. Um, when it comes down to things that. When it comes down to the launch of the new payments platform going back about seven years ago, Azupay were the first kind of startup to kick in and develop a business receivable solution utilizing the npp.

Speaker A: Excellent mate. Uh, and when it comes to what Azupay uh, does and the customers that you serve, can you give the listeners a bit of an understanding of that?

Speaker B: Yeah, of course mate. So as you pay we develop and deliver uh, real time payment solutions for large corporates and enterprises across Australia. Uh they can be globally based organizations but operating domestically. In Australia we're enabling companies to connect with real time account to account solutions from their consumers and business customers. When that solution suite, uh, our uh, flagship product was originally our dynamic pay id. So as you pay rewrote the book on the dynamic pay ID solution back in 2019 and that solution today generates uh, transactions for a range of airlines, travel partners, gaming platforms in wagering, uh, telcos, utilities. So customers like Optus for example JB hi Fi, uh, we've just had National Australia bank actually launch a white label of our product as well. Uh so we have a very broad range of customers and servicing different industries. So the second receivables product we brought to market was Pay2. We were first to market and we uh, delivered a whole range of Solutions for Pay 2 which is the real time replacement for direct debit. So pay to today is being utilized across a range of industries from financial remitters, money remitters through to superannuation insurance platforms, investment platforms, utilities. I do have a um, large property company going live as we speak, rolling out Pay2 for rental payments as an example. So it's a great solution. It takes direct debit from being a very bulky and cumbersome slow process to to digital real time environment. And the third part of our solution stack we have with Our customers is our real time disbursements. So we have a payout solution. Um, we're delivering that for a range of sporting organizations, membership organizations, financial organizations. So we can actually handle delivering uh, funds in real time to their customers. What we do different. So we're not just a stack of APIs that orchestrate payments. We actually provide a full end to end user experience journey. So we really host this stuff for merchants. What we found early on is that it's great to provide some dumb APIs and just get you into market but be able to provide a really capturing and unique customer. Uh, experience means that your customers, customers get a consistent experience whenever they choose to pay or receive payment via those channels. It also enables a really fast delivery time. So we have the ability to have customers go live in as little as three sprints. Uh so as an example we had four airlines that went live from first conversation to go live in an eight week window which is almost unheard of. That is consistent across our customer base.

Speaker A: Mate. I'm curious to know um, as the business was founded, what the initial problem was I suppose and you've already identified some of the solutions that you offer now, but what was the core I suppose principle or values around the problem that you're solving when it comes to payments, et cetera and how's that evolved? I suppose up to where we are now, where there are more I suppose techniques around receiving and sending payments, where

Speaker B: we came from a bit more of our history. So we were founded back in 2019 by five very seasoned engineers that were not your little startup with a bunch of 20 year olds come out of union trying to create a payments platform. These are seasoned engineers and architects, systems integrators and they've been delivering on a few different large projects across the industry. So around the time or before we launched they've been delivering on uh, the NPP connectivity for Costco who is a large fintech sponsoring top adi in the market today and they are the backbone behind credit unions and building societies. Um, and they also were working on and designed and delivered the New South Wales government service, New south Wales CPP NASDAT single payments platform inside service which 60 odd different agencies can utilize to receive payments from citizens from businesses, et cetera. So that was kind of where we started. These engineers were working in these different spaces and they had identified a problem in government with regards to reconciliation of uh, bpay and BPAY is a very cumbersome tool being used online. So the team went away and came up with the idea of the dynamic pay ID. So PayID had been in market for a couple of years at that point we're all used to making a transfer with our mobile phone number as an alias bank account. And one of the ideas that the guys identified is the ability to use the email format of the Pay ID to surface a real time dynamic solution that can be used for a single use in transaction flows. At the time it was not approved by government, wasn't approved by the Reserve bank or the industry to be able to use Payday in that way. PayID was originally just a peer to peer payment mechanism. Our team worked closely with the NPP and with the Reserve bank to design this flow and get that approved for purpose and they went ahead and built the pilot. The very first customer was new surveillance government. Our very first transaction was the liquor license for a large supermarket in Australia as well. So we came from some pretty solid routes.

Speaker A: Mate. Absolutely. There you go. A little bit of history about as you pay and the founding team, et cetera. When I hear payments sometimes is a bit overwhelming, uh, and people say what are you doing? You know in payments you're like oh another, another one, it's pretty crowded. Um, and then I hear people like real time payment providers, et cetera. I suppose what, what sets as you pay apart? What's the call offering the difference I suppose from, from other payment providers when I hear the word payments.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for that question. So as you pay's differentiation and where we come from is that we specialize specifically only in one thing, real time account to account payments domestically in Australia. So MPP Pay ID pay to pay out. We do that, we do that very, very well. And through that process, like I mentioned before about a hosted user experiences that became a core piece of differentiation, we first launched a product, we identified that need to make it simple for the government agency to integrate and to deliver with, with our solution for the payout. So we devised that user experience to be hosted to really enable that flow for the customer or for the merchant and the actual end user. Over time that became more important to our customers. We have a lot of customers using just APIs, yes, but we have a lot of smarts behind our system to orchestrate the transactions the way we do and validate transactions the way we do. But we also then have spent a lot of investment and time and research into our uh, hosted user experiences and that's become that core differentiator. More and more of our largest large corporate customers are ah, taking up that solution for the same reasons I mentioned before. Simplicity of integration, delivery, consistent user experience across the board. Add to the fact we are uh, consistently working on the solution, improving it, updating it, researching it, Our customers get access to those enhancements every other week. Every time we do a release they get access to those enhancements, not having to whole build themselves on their own front end. When we do a major release, yes, it's a bit more of a change management program behind that to make sure our customers are ready for it. We've just gone through a large change recently, changing our UX from our uh, second version to our third version. Um, and as that continues to evolve we put more capability behind that. So in that for example that most recent release we added on passkey functionality. So with our pay to user journey, you can now secure that journey with pass keys. That's a biometric, like a face or a fingerprint for example on your device which can transfer between your devices, between your MacBook and your iPhone for example. So that means that we're securing payments as well. So real time payments being very secure, uh, we knowing that it's the account holder that's approved the agreement in the first place in their phone and then they're choosing to use our uh, uh, the passkey and the user experience to repeat that journey. That's really what the sort of things we're doing is to keep on adding features. It's feature rich and drives that adoption and drives further use cases down the value chain.

Speaker A: You mentioned adoption there. Um, when we have new earthings, uh, I mean we've had bpay, we've had direct debit, we've had lots of things for a long time and we've had things like CDR come on in, et cetera. The adoption rate either comes from government, comes from consumers, comes from fintechs, comes from enterprise. I'm curious to know when it comes to PayID and pay to adoption, drive adoption and I suppose some endorsements from corporates.

Speaker B: Yeah, so adoption's a really great point to raise and there's a lot of challenge. You mentioned CDR before, which has been struggling with adoption more broadly. Um, but PayID and pay to have their own journeys to go through. Payid was a slow journey for adoption at the very start. Um, but as users as individuals became more experienced at using PowerD for their own personal methods that then created the ability, or I should say the appetite to when they see pay id they know it and trust it. So key piece when it comes to payments for adoption is trust. It's gotta be good experience. It's gotta work and they trust that secure and it can work every time. So we found that what's driven powerd adoption has been element of just that ubiquity coming through the customer experience through that journey, but then also the different use cases. So for example in our airline partners they have a situation where today we surcharge on credit card transactions and when you're booking a flight you might be paying a thousand dollar flight. A surcharge can add up pretty quickly. Under the regulations that they have in the air force industry in Australia they need to provide a fee free method. So that fee free method they choose to use is PayID. So we have a financial or an economic nudge for customers to use PayID. It is cheaper, it's a free payment option to use. That's been quite powerful. But there are other industries where the adoption curve has been driven by the merchant directly. So where we actually have clients want to move off Bpay, for example when they have the experience of well if you choose to pay with Bpay, we won't know about it and can't apply it to your account for three days. But if you use PayID you get the value instantly in your account. So these are the kinds of examples that start to drive that.

Speaker A: There's a lot of benefits of being paid instantly and as you mentioned, um, be paying on a Friday afternoon, it may hit the bank account on Monday or whatever it might be, or at least been reconciled on Monday. Can you talk about some of the benefits I suppose of um, PayID, uh, and the importance actually of the underlying um, instant payment, how that can affect the supply chain?

Speaker B: Well it's interesting when it comes down to working with large enterprises, the funds being in the physical account is not so important. The most important part is the real time notification of the transaction. And that's how system works. Kind of like pay for something with a credit card. If you buy with a credit card, you tap your phone, tap your card or your phone or you go through the E commerce site, that payment gets processed and there's a real time response to the merchant and they can apply that value of funds in their system. They can apply that that transaction has been received and they can give you the ticket to your flight or put the money into your wagering account, whatever it might be, be they don't get the money until the next day. So uh, it's the reporting that notification is a really powerful piece. And with you say Bpay, for example, many stories of people where they've paid their car Regio on 5pm on Friday afternoon and they get a fine on Sunday. Reconciliation hasn't occurred. The notification of the transaction hasn't occurred for the merchant on the other end until the Monday or Tuesday after that. So that's what's really powerful with pay, with a real time payment with PayID and pay to. I missed one step back there. We're talking about adoption. Pay to adoption is an interesting one. It's been a slower burn than we're expecting. We're all expecting much faster take up of pay to and I think that's driven by two things. One is really heavily around the merchant adoption and that comes down to the commerciality of it. It is a bit more expensive than traditional direct debit and some of these large billers focused less on that speediness of it as opposed to uh, the cost of processing. If you can imagine if you're processing 1 or 2 million transactions a month, a difference of $0.05 really adds up. There has been that bit lower burn for pay to uh, in the market, um, but also awareness. While Australian Payments plus been doing a really fantastic job with promotion advertising. Just in the weekend I was seeing pay to ads on my Instagram feed, um, and we've seen them on billboards and buses and so forth but the consumer awareness is still not quite there. But that is also a bit of a chicken and egg. So we have a situation where consumers don't know about it because billers aren't putting it in place and billers aren't putting in place because it's expensive or perceived to be expensive but there's no one using it yet. So there's always this chicken leg kind of pool. So how do we get this momentum happening? I think we're going to get there very quickly. Um, at this point in time it's been a slow ramp up so far. Like I mentioned before, we have a large property company going live as we speak. There are multiple other examples of those in market telcos that are going live with Pay2. Amazon went live um, a couple of months ago with Pay two. So there is that growing awareness as we get the next billers on board that major cycle that will actually start to drive that adoption much more quicker.

Speaker A: Trin, I'm curious on the pay to side of things when it comes to um, direct debit failures per se in Australia, whether that's a headache for customers and corporates, et cetera, um, and what happens in the instance of pay to potentially when there is no money to be taken.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question. It's interesting. So direct debit, you get a different experience per merchant and that really comes down to the size of the merchant and their relationship with their banking partner. Um, a very, very large merchant, for example, like a large telco, they'll run their direct debit file, they'll put their batch in overnight, say it's 30,000 transactions and they'll be credited that value of funds overnight by their bank. And uh, then over the next three to five days they'll get the dishonest come through and they'll be withdrawn out of the account, clawed back out of the account as dishonest. Now that creates friction for that merchant. They have to back out, transactions reversals in there, adjust their accounting flows. Um, and there's a fair bit of manual work that goes into doing that. And then they have to go ahead and chase the customer as well. There's a delay. And that's what happens in that kind of large institution merchant environment. They get the value of funds. Smaller ones, smaller companies and mid sized companies, they might have a paying processor who will do the direct debit, take the funds out of the consumer account, but then sit on them in their facility for three to five days before they sweep them to the merchant. So you have the flip side there where the merchant doesn't get the money either, so they're losing out, the customer's already paid. Um, and then you have, if there's a dishonor, there's often then a large feedback on the consumer as well. So it's a quite a negative experience across those flows. So you've got the reversal issues, you've got the dishonor of funds and delayed notification. Now how that compares to pay 2, well, it's real time. So if the funds aren't there, the funds aren't there. We know straight away and we can take action straight away. There's a few other key components of pay to that are really different to direct debit, which make it a much better experience for customers and merchants combined. Uh, one of the prominent examples for me is around authentication of the account holder. Today we do a direct debt perform. While the requirements for the sponsoring bank for the direct debit, say the merchant must authenticate that the account holder, uh, is the person signing on the direct debit authority. It is very, very rarely done. There was a time that was more people have to show their bank statement to compare, but that doesn't really happen anymore. And so out of that you have this issue of direct debit fraud. Pay 2, conversely when you set up your pay to agreement against your BSB account number or your pay id, your personal pay id, you actually approve that agreement within your banking app. So you get a notification from your bank log into your banking app and you approve it in the app itself. So we know that the account holder is a person that has actually approved that agreement. So you've got much more security in that model. Then also as a user, at any time, if you need to cancel your subscription, cancel membership, you can control that inside your banking app. A two agreement section, you can actually go in and pause or cancel your agreement. Now historically, if you close your bank account and moved on somewhere else, you had to go and change your direct debits. Now often you get to do something, you miss something, miss a bill and the biller wouldn't know until next month. They run that file and they find out their accounts closed and then they get hit with a fine, a fee for a failed payment for example, or late payment with pay to. As soon as you close your account, you close your pay ID or any action you take on that agreement, the merchant gets a real time notification so they can actually address it upfront before it becomes a problem. That's another great little tool. The other piece which is really fun with Pay2 is that we're now able to create a direct debit style product, a pull transaction out of bank accounts that is suitable for a real time E Com world today with direct debit it is not suitable for that environment. There's no point using direct debit on the airline ticket. You'll never get there in time. Whereas pay to really makes that an uh, experience that can be done in real time. So it can be using any channel. We can use a credit card as the same great user experience that you can achieve as opposed to just credit card only or not having direct debit in those environments.

Speaker A: Mate, there's a heap of problems, uh, and personal experiences there that I've had in the past in regards to changing bank accounts and signing up with a digital bank and going, oh, I wonder which direct debits were. Uh, I mean firstly you don't, you have to scale through your transactions to find them. And then you're like, I'm sure there's one once a year that happens in July that you've gone back for nine months and it's not there. And you're like, oh, well it's probably not there. And then you get a letter from them going, you know, your annual insurance thing has now been failed or something. Like oh I moved banks, I knew there was one. Right. So there's lots of different um, use cases there, uh, for pay too. And I suppose the prevention as you mentioned in terms of the direct debit reconciliation from accounting, from paperwork to um, staff time to reconcile that, you can say, hang on, you know, hang on a second, there's not enough money there. Um, can you please rectify this within whatever otherwise your subscription might be cancelled, whatever it might be, particularly in the subscription style economy. Now you did touch on Trent, um, a partnership with Nap that you did in the uh, earlier part of the podcast. I'm curious to know about partnerships and in particular this particular one sounded very big in the announcement that as you Pay did on LinkedIn. Do you want to talk about that partnership with NAB?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure, happy to look as you pay. Since we came to life we've had a bit of multi pronged strategy with how we do business. We have direct uh, merchant relationships. We work with software partners and work with payments partners. And the model we're doing with National Australia bank is a great advancement on that partner model for Azupay in that we're working at SaaS Environment. So we're really providing our solution as a software layer that helps payments organizations and banks to be able to provide solutions to their customers they don't necessarily have themselves yet. Um, this is a great example dynamic pay ID. When we launched with PayID back in 2019, first company doing Dynamics PID solutions, um, it was in government and it wasn't really, people weren't really aware of it in market. But over time it started to shift. Now every large corporate banking tender, every government tender coming out for banking and payments is requiring Dynamic PayID as an option. So went from being a peer to peer only solution to a business tool with some awareness and growing to now being mandated really across industry. And in that time frame though the banks were really hedging their bets on pay to pay to is seen to be the panacea for payments and that was going to be everything you need for real time is using Pay2. But what we've seen is that that hasn't quite gotten there yet and the demand for PayID has meant that we need to catch up. So now you see that the, the banks are becoming more aware of that and that's the work we've done with nab. So NAB realized that what Azupay could deliver is a fantastic product and solution and brought us in to help them to deliver that dynamic parity solution for their large Corporates and traditional customers.

Speaker A: Can you tell us what from a NAB point of view and from your point of view. I mean firstly a, it's huge from your point of view in terms of credibility and brand and dealing with one of the big four banks in Australia doing this significant partnership, but what it means for uh, their customers and consumers as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, look, that's a really good question there Chris. I think for nab, what it means to their customers, they can get access to a solution which they wouldn't otherwise normally have. Now one of the challenges as a fintech is we can get into progressive and early adopting organizations but when you come to the really large institutional clients and government there's often that fallback to oh, uh, we need to need this to come from our banking partner. So that's always been the kind of sticking point. So we do have some fantastic customers and we have fantastic large corporates we work with but we do have that gap a few times of not, not being their banking partner or maybe not quite being big enough for them to want to take that risk on. Uh, that's shifting. We've got a really good presence today and a great brand, brand presence in the market. But what we found with, by partnering with nab, what it means is for the customers we've been talking to that really want to work through their banking partner, if they're a NAB bank they work with, they can work with us. Fantastic solution with great synergy and we've done that. We've brought some of our pursuit customers who said oh we want to do it but we need a bank to do it with. We brought NAB in and that's where we've gone to and it's worked really, really well. Um, and for NAB then I can open up the door to a whole range of use cases that they couldn't really address before. So that Dynamics parody that we provide that solution and even our host user experience is now available to NAB's whole book of enterprise customers. Um, I've had some great conversations with them on various industries and use cases. I won't go into, into detail, they might be a bit upset if I do that. But uh, they're, they're really engaging with how we can work together and help them to solve problems for their customers from a range of different industries in

Speaker A: their book mate, uh, congratulations on this, um, significant partnership. Um, and partnerships are very um, I suppose important. We've seen a number of fintech awards around partnerships and testing and learning, et cetera from Your point of view, how important are uh, partnerships with not only banks, the big four that probably want and thrive upon new innovations and fintechs, but also regulators and other fintechs. And why you think it's important partnerships

Speaker B: are critical to our success. Uh, we are a small team. Um, you know in my sales team there's, there's five of us that are actively out there selling and it's great we can get across a number of customers with that. But having partnerships, we have that one to many approach and we work with a range of different organizations as partner models. So just focusing on the, on the sales and payment side of things from uh, other large payment service providers through to payment gateways to software platforms. We've got one for example um, in the higher education space. So Zeta, uh, have got pretty much dominance in the higher education uh, student fees space and as a student fees management platform and we're integrated in there and they helped us to get access to the university segments. Now individual universities are not really high volume in numbers of transactions. They're not that lucrative on their own. But having someone else to actually do half the sales work for you and a speed to delivery, it's a great partnership to have and we get traction to a range of customers very very quickly. We have other customer partners where when they turn us on they just make us available to 2000 of their sub merchants. So that's a great distribution tool to have. On the other side, you mentioned regulators. It's really important to be very close with your regulatory partners and the banking partners to be cross. What's happening in industry, the changes that are coming there is in our space in the NPP or in the real time captaccount space there's a lot of industry consultation ongoing right now and that requires partnerships to be really powerful to make sure that our voices are heard and that the voices of our customers are heard as well.

Speaker A: Mate, let's touch on the future now for a second. Um, post that significant partnership with nab, but I'm curious around innovations. Um, in real time payments We've talked about Paytm, PayID and account to account the space etc. What excites you about this sector? I suppose we um, talked about adoption firstly as well but other things that excite you around the technologies themselves.

Speaker B: There's a few things in there that really excite me. Um, one of them is really interesting piece and maybe it's a bit nerdy of me but when you look at um, Pay two and we think about the issues we Talked about before if you change banks. So right now it's early stage, the maturity isn't quite there. But I'm excited for the future of Pay2 when we introduce portability. Now one of the core tenants behind the development of the NPP was to increase the ability for consumers to be able to change their bank. So bank account portability and then one of those challenges was direct debits. So at the moment pay to agreements aren't quite portable between banking institutions. But the future is there that when you do move banks you can move your pay ID and your pay to go with you. And that's really powerful. I'm really excited for that to come.

Speaker A: Um, that's very interesting I suppose. And from a point of view of maybe if you move banks and there's that portability, there's an option to say would you like to continue with your Netflix, your stand and your rent payments and your origin energy or whatever it might be. And then you say actually no, I've changed providers or whatever and it'd just be easy, wouldn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I'm looking forward to that side of things. A portability framework. Um, on our side the innovation we've been doing, I mentioned before about passkeys and securing the pay to transactions but what that has also meant is that we're able to deliver uh, a true omnichannel pay to experience. So there's a lot of noise right now around how do we do pay to, how do we do NPP in retail and do it efficiently and securely. Our ah, passkey solution really helps deliver that. That's quite powerful and that's a piece of work I'm really excited to be working on right now with a range of organizations. So we're seeing that come to life. Um, we have also mold and adopted and adapted to the needs of our customers mentioned before that one of our core payment offerings is our disbursement platform and payouts. So we're now releasing out um, a disbursements application, a payout product that makes it easy for companies who need to utilize payouts. But also we're combining that with some tech around account checking and verification. So we all have heard about confirmation of payee is now available uh, in the banks when you make a transfer. It's coming more into market over this year. So we will be embedding confirmation pay into our flow and looking at other services that provide a similar powerful tool to verify that hey, you are the account holder, that's really important. So if you're getting money paid to you from a insurance claim, from a refund for something that happened years ago at your telco, that kind of thing. A payout type solution. We can verify that is your account. It works for the customer and it works for the merchant combined.

Speaker A: And mate, we're sitting here in 2025, um, and if we don't talk about AI in 2025 then it's not a podcast is it really? To be honest, everyone's talking about this as a sector. Um, your views on AI within the financial services segment, is there anything interesting popping up now in regards to that

Speaker B: M AI So look, I was a slow starter looking at AI and probably about four months ago I started getting really deep into AI off the back of uh, spending some time with a good friend of mine who's actually a management consultant expert out of the US uh on AI. She was out here to, to deliver on a conference about it. And I uh, see AI has been really powerful for business. Uh, so many things from tech to in development replit which is that uh, can build a website and an E commerce platform in minutes. Those are really powerful. And it's what you can do today in development it's not about cutting jobs, it's about improved delivery. And that's what, what's what we're seeing in the market in the financial service space. There's a discussion right now around agentic AI. Now that one I'm worried about. One is ultimately who's given the authentication for the payment. So if you're building a genic AI into a uh, payment flow, who's actually saying yes, I want to do that transaction? And does this open up merchants to a plethora of chargebacks for example? Uh, the other one is choice is it customers life often to choose to pay from different accounts and different methods depending what they're buying. And so I'm not really sure how they'll go with wanting to hand over that control to an agent. They want a bit more control themselves, mate.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, you're right. I mean look, the application use of AI in financial services is yet to be seen from my point of view, from a public point of view. But obviously some banks are spending a lot of money trying to work out whether it is customer service or whether it is actually on the transactional side or, or whatnot. It's yet to be seen. It's a very interesting space we can probably talk about.

Speaker B: I saw some really cool stuff. We had a roundtable with um, some companies involved with one of Our investors and we're talking through from the CROs and CCOs about what we're doing and uh, some discussion around AI tools like qualified, uh, um, which is a really interesting one that you put onto your website that helps you view a sales funnel. So it's an agent flow that can help capture the journey and really qualify those customers and move them through the pipeline much more seamlessly than today. And I know, I see on our website we look at our buyer's intent stuff in HubSpot and we see the traffic of companies pages that are seeing our website, but it's really hard to capture that funnel. They might go to the contact us page five or six times and not put a submission in. We're having an AI agent there to pick up on that activity and to continue that journey. I think that's really powerful from a sales point of view and that's coming to the financial services space. Um, but then also as you mentioned, banks and other organizations using AI to look at improving their assessment, the speed of assessment and things, for example lending credit, um, looking at risk modeling. There's a whole range of things we can pick up on with AI that I think we can do, do a better job than we can do manually. Um, but it helps us to, it's a tool, right? It helps us to get better at what we do not replace.

Speaker A: I agree. The, the tools out there to speed things up, to make people more efficient. I remember interestingly 0 when they first came out to the many years ago, probably a decade ago, and it was the accountants and the accountants were like, oh, is this going to replace us? And then once the account started using Xero with their clients and it became a fast and easy process to collect information, to reconcile information, provide information. It was like, hey, this is good for us and it's good for the consumer and it's good for everyone. I was like, oh, right, so it's not actually a competitor. And I think AI would be similar in terms of some of the functionality around, like, well, this is a good experience. So this is fast, this is easy and this works three times faster than it used to. So anyway, we'll wait and see. We've digressed a little bit. Trent. Um, if we talk, uh, about as you pay and we repeat this podcast in 2028, maybe where would you like the company to be?

Speaker B: 2028. I'd see as you pay in being ubiquitous for payments in Australia. We are growing strong. We have a fantastic team and culture is really important to our team. We are growing really well, really well, really strong. That culture environment that we're in. But, uh, 2028 for us is about large businesses and small business. We know our name and they think of us as a comparative to a PayPal. Even, you know, ambitious.

Speaker A: But yeah, might as well have that big, hairy, audacious goal, mate. I'm just. Well, before we get onto the fun part of Trent, um, you know, just want to touch on how important that NAB partnership is for you and I suppose validation of your company and, and you know, the work that went in and I suppose, you know, the moving forward, the execution of that.

Speaker B: Yeah, look, that is coming back to that one. That's a really important, uh, partnership for us. Uh, it does give this advice, it does provide that validation in industry. We have had a lot more attention in market since that announcement came out. A lot more companies who previously we would struggle to get a meeting with all of a sudden been getting meetings locked in and proactive reach out. Um, so it's been very powerful for us so far and I'm excited to see more of it happen. And hopefully in 2028 you'll see not just one bank that we're partnered with, but multiple. I should say that actually we do have another bank partnership. We do are partnered with HSBC as well, and we have been for a very long time a different model of partnership with them. They actually work with us into their Omni Collect platform and by that element, HSBC were the first bank in Australia to be offering a Pay ID or pay to solution to their customers, um, via this punishment with as you pay. But it wasn't as, um, deeply integrated as we are in the National Australia Bank.

Speaker A: 1. Brilliant, mate. Um, now when we're not talking PayID and pay 2 and all the jargon that goes with payment, Trent, um, is there a secret hobby do you switch off? What do people know about Trent Daniel that, ah, they don't. May not know already. And this is the fun part of

Speaker B: the podcast and my, uh, my previous answer, maybe, maybe prior to Covid was probably more fun to answer that one as, um, I used to be a competitive extra.

Speaker A: Right. That's the first time we've ever had that on the podcast. So let's delve into that.

Speaker B: So throwing axes is definitely a sport and it's not just for Vikings. Uh, look, I was, it was a farm I got into around, I think it was around 2017 or something. Um, Axram venue in Sydney. Went there for the boys day and found I had a knack for it and uh, they had a league competition weekly, one night a week for a couple of hours for eight weeks. I joined up. And I didn't just have a knack for it, I had a very strong skill at it. And I won my first season, which really upset people who've been playing for years. Won the second season. I was invited to the world Championships the, uh, I think it was for 2019, but didn't get over there. Uh, but then we formed a team to get across and I was in the, uh, the first Australian cohort of Axros represent over in the World Championships in February 2020, just when the world was shutting down with COVID Uh, but these days my hobby is mainly hanging out with my kids and spearfishing. So I live down on the beach of Cronulla and spend a large amount of time under the water hunting fish, free diving.

Speaker A: So, mate, excellent. Trent, Daniel, thank you so much for being on the Fintech fun podcast today. I really do appreciate, uh, taking your time to give us the backstory of as you pay, the history, the values, the growth of the business, uh, the areas of focus, uh, right now, as well as that significant, uh, partnership announcement with nab and a little bit about your axe throwing, uh, in a previous life. I really do appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show and, uh, look forward to catching up.

Speaker B: Thanks Chris. Been a pleasure.