Emerge Fintech Innovation + Google’s Honomoana, How Exposed Am I?

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and real privilege to have Jovan Pavlichevic with us for this episode from Emerge and SquareOne. How are you, Jovan?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Great, thank you, mate. Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you in the studio here for the first time. Maybe you can just give a quick intro to listeners on where you fit into this big wide world of tech and startups in New Zealand.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Thank you. Where do I fit in? So, yeah, co founder of Emerge in SquareOne. And look, we’re here to build New Zealand’s first digital challenger bank. We think the Aussies deserve a good run for their money and something built with a fierce local mindset. So we’re actually just across the road from you here on Symond Street. And yeah, we’re not a bank yet, but we’re taking some strides in that direction. We started with a product called SquareOne, which is now probably close to becoming the incumbent for youth accounts in New Zealand. We’ve onboarded quarter of a million customers onto that.

Paul Spain:
That’s incredible.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, thank you. Square one turns four in about a month and then about 18 months ago we added a merge to that and so we started there. The next biggest pain point or the next biggest group of underserved customers that we could see in banking is actually SME. So companies like yourselves, thanks for being a customer as well. Yeah, so we’re sort of trying to find those white spaces where the banks either don’t play or where they’re not doing a very good job and where customers are underserved. And, yeah, we’re on that path to building something to hopefully challenge those Big four Aussies.

Paul Spain:
That’s really, really exciting. Well, great to have you here for the first time and of course also a big thank you to our show partners to One NZ, 2degrees, Spark, Workday, HP and Gorilla Technology. Well, let’s jump into it. There’s a bit that’s New Zealand sort of focused news and then we’ll dive into the global stories. And of course, very keen to hear more about Emerge and SquareOne also. So first up, we’ve got news through last week that Google’s new Pacific undersea cable called the Honomoana, due to land what they’re describing as north auckland in early 2026. So I guess somewhere north of the. The Harbour Bridge and south of Whangarei.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I don’t know quite exactly where that one’s coming in, but look, I think for New Zealand, having that diversity of Connectivity to New Zealand is always, I guess, just gives us a little bit more peace of mind that if things were to go haywire in the future, every extra link up we’ve got with the outside world kind of puts us in a better position. And for those who maybe think, look, this could never, ever happen, we have seen places that have been hit with connectivity issues in the past. I’m not sure that we’ve seen anywhere with New Zealand’s population. But, you know, because we are so far away from, you know, from everywhere else, there are some complexities and we certainly saw, you know, Tonga were massively impacted when, you know, the one fibre optic cable that linked Tonga to the rest of the world was disrupted, you know, when they had a volcano there. So, yeah, these things can happen, right? So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Any sort of addition to infrastructure like that is going to be great. I was actually in. I’ve just remembered I was in Cable Bay a few months back and there’s a little plaque there explaining why it’s called Cable Bay, which I only just learned, having known about Cable Bay since I was a kid. Yeah, it’s actually called Cable Bay because that’s where the first telecommunications cable, which.

Paul Spain:
Was 1800 and that was not a.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Bonus point for anyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
And, yeah, I mean, it is quite incredible. Kind of looking back on, you know, the technological history even of New Zealand, we’ve been reliant on cables for a really, really long time. And, you know, how incredible is it that they’re able to run these things under the ocean and that they largely work pretty well. I’ve had the privilege of being invited onto a couple of the cable ships that have come really, through Auckland and got to have a look at the curled up, you know, cables. And did you get to write your.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Name on it anywhere or anything like that?

Paul Spain:
No, we didn’t get offered that option, but I guess you could go for a swim and go and etch your name into the. I don’t know at what point you start getting in trouble for felony. Yeah, for these sorts of things. National scenery drama. So, yeah, probably not recommended to go digging them up. Right?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And at one of the landings, actually, Takapuna Beach. I think that might have been the Southern Cross next cable that they did. Yeah, just right there in Takapuna Beach. So, yeah, these things are around the place. Joe Allen, our esteemed producer, alerts me first or international cable linking New Zealand up 1876. How cool is that? So what was it carrying?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Just kind of Morse code.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. I think the sort of comms back then were a little bit simpler. So those were telegraph cables that they called back then. Moving on, there’s been a bit of media coverage around supermarket car park fines and listeners might be wondering, what’s the tech angle here about people being upset about being fined in there for how they park at their local supermarket? Well, I guess this is. As we move to a more digitised world, the capability to sort of automate these types of things increases. And so, look, it used to be you go and park in your supermarket and if you wandered next door to the cafe afterwards for a coffee or.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Something else, surely that can’t be a crime as well.

Paul Spain:
That wouldn’t be a problem. But we’re now in this sort of world where the supermarkets are outsourcing how their car parks are managed. And so if you’ve got a company there that’s looking at, well, how do we monetise this function? And they realise, oh, as soon as somebody walks outside the border of the car park, and if we have the right sort of cameras, we can effectively geo fence it. We can tell every vehicle that comes in, every person that gets out and we can track where they walk. And if they walk beyond the boundaries, we can give them electric. No, they don’t do electric shock treatment. We can give them a ticket.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
I was just wondering whether, like the halter collars could be adapted for, you know, from cows to shoppers. But New World gets about half of my paycheck. So, look, I’m as guilty as the next person of borrowing a very occasional park on a, I would have to say a fair use basis. Yeah. But I think, you know, more, a more productive use of the fines would be for people who don’t park their trolleys back. I think that should be looked into. And I’m a bit of a dead eye. From about 20 metres now, I can slot a trolley straight back into the bay.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Trolley bowling.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So I think that’s where they should direct their energies.

Paul Spain:
That could be a sport, actually. Trolley bowling, I believe 20 metres.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
I believe it actually is.

Paul Spain:
That’s impressive. You hit it here first.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
I’ll take the challenge.

Paul Spain:
Well, you could see this is where you could put the AI cameras to good use. Right. You recognise the participants and the players and then, you know, those that have played the best, then they maybe get a discount on future groceries or something.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
That’s it. And you’ve got to hope you don’t get the trolley with the wonky wheel, like a non regulation trolley, or from.

Paul Spain:
20 metres you’ve left it go too far and then the wheel comes off or something and it veers towards the supercar that happens to be sitting in the car park. Yeah. So, anyway, I just think it’s important we keep some discussion going around technology and digitization, because there’s a lot of good that technology brings us. But at times there’s that temptation to maybe leverage technology a little bit far. There are the challenges that technology in and of itself isn’t good. It’s not bad. You know, it’s all zeros and ones. Right.

Paul Spain:
And that means that the technology itself doesn’t have any inherent humanity to it. And so if we’re not really smart around how we utilise it, we can end up with situations that aren’t very nice. Right, yeah. Also in the news, this was probably before I headed to Christchurch for the aerospace summit last week. We heard about IT Professionals NZ entering liquidation. They’ve had some ongoing financial issues and those seem to have come to the fore. They’ve been an important part of shaping New Zealand’s tech sector and being a real support for the tech community over many decades. And so it’s been announced they’re expecting to cease operations following a special meeting coming up later this month, October 23rd.

Paul Spain:
There are some discussions sort of underway as to sort of how to preserve some of the things that they’ve done. Yeah, it’s sad to see this sort of thing happen. However, I guess there’s an element, you know, times change and for varying reasons, we don’t always have in the future what we’ve had in the past. Some of that is because, I guess, some of the sort of services and functions of a community like IT Professionals NZ have moved into an online context. There’s, I guess, a lot more content and access to things, you know, globally online. Now that certainly wouldn’t have been in the earlier days. And of course there’s. I mean, there’s so many events and different sort of community things that are going on within the broader tech space.

Paul Spain:
But I think this will certainly, certainly leave a bit of a hole for the community.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah. Hopefully someone can pick it up and, like you say, take the salvageable parts out of it and keep something going there, at least the domain, and move it to a discord. I don’t know.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Now, I often encourage people to have a look at a website called have I Been Pwned? And a lot of our listeners will be familiar with the have I Been Pwned? Website, where you can go and you can put your email address and it will highlight how many data breaches or known data breaches that your email address has been linked to. And it can be quite a good sort of wake up call for people. I was in Queenstown last week and speaking to a group of business owners there, in this case from Australia. And when I asked, you know, asked around the room who was familiar with the website, none of them were, were familiar with it. So it’s quite encouraging to see what is happening from a government perspective where they’ve made some sort of arrangement with have I been pwned to make a local government endorsed website which is called howexposedami Co nz. And it’s quite a slick site and, and you go in, you use it in the same way as the have I been pwned site. You put in your email address and it will come back and highlight data breaches and down to sort of specific aspects of what data might have been breached.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Well, I know what I’m doing. As soon as I leave here, okay, straight on the to do list, go.

Paul Spain:
And have a check. And yeah, a lot of us have done these sort of things in the past, but yeah, it’s worth having a look if you’re not sort of signed up to one of these types of things, you can sign up with have I been pwned to be sort of alerted to new breaches. And an interesting lesson that’s, I guess in there for all of us is that at certain points in time all of us are susceptible. And we know this because the founder of have I been pwned? He got hit with an email last year. This is Troy Hunt. And it came to him at a sort of particular time, maybe he’d been sick or something or other. And it was a strange, strange hour when he was looking at his phone. And it did the thing that often these sorts of sort of, you know, I guess cyber criminals do and it put some pressure on him around timing.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, he was, I think maybe being alerted that his account for his email provider was maybe, you know, overdue and bill to pay. Oh no, clicked through, didn’t check the domain name and he put in his username and password and instantly they took that and took a copy of his database. So here’s a guy who completely lives and breathes this stuff. He’s an absolute legend in the cyber security community and he fell for it. So, you know, good reminder to all of us that none of us are going to be 100% perfect all the time when it comes to cyber things. And yeah, really good to be aware, making sure we’re following all the best practices and great to see New Zealand government really getting behind this because I think as a country and particularly when we look at our smaller businesses and our private individuals, I think there’s a lack of realisation for how at risk we are. So this new website, how exposed am I? I think we’ll do good things for raising awareness and alerting us to some of the challenges.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, such a good reminder. I’ve seen, even in the last few weeks I’ve seen two or three new tactics that I’ve never seen before. Just different mechanisms to try and get you to click the link in the email and always accompanied with that kind of a bit of time based pressure or something financial that you’re either missing out on or that you owe or something like that to create that little bit of pressure and uncertainty and sort of urge you over the line and yeah, they’re just never going to stop evolving. Right. There’s such a big prize on offer. It’s a pretty, just fascinating endless cat and mouse game. Really.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, really, really is. Can you remember the specifics? Is it easy to. They easy to explain or.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
One of the, one of the more interesting exploits was for those using the likes of a ChatGPT MCP, like a model context protocol, which as I understand it, is allowing your, your LLM of choice to interact with different applications. So allowing your Chat GPT AI to access your Gmail and your Google Calendar, for example. And then the exploit was a calendar invite that’s sent in and if you accept that calendar invite, actually buried in that calendar invite is a massive prompt to ChatGPT to dump the entire contents of your Gmail history, everything in your drive, everything that it’s got access to strip that out and dump it and send it back to the, to the hacker.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So that was a, you know, that’s a pretty new one I’d never heard of before.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, we’ve been hearing about a few of those. Clicking things, right?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Clicking Accept on a calendar invite, which if you get a few of those, if you’ve got a busy calendar. So yeah, it’s just there’s so much.

Paul Spain:
To watch out for and it highlights that. Now our LLMs, whether it’s a chat GPT or a copilot or Grok or Anthropic, all of these different platforms and tools and then the varying ones on the edge that kind of leverage those via API, we’re gonna have to see some confidence that they’re really Taking those sorts of threats seriously because there’s a bit of a shared responsibility there. Right. So part of that comes with your email vendor to be sort of scanning. Scanning the emails that are coming to you, knowing that those are gonna get somewhat indexed by an LLM. So they need to look. Is the info. Right.

Paul Spain:
The LLM itself needs to be looking and going, is there something in here to kind of suck us in and try and trick us? So, you know, there’s a whole new level of threats that need to be protected against. And then there’s, of course, the responsibility on you and I as the.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, that doesn’t go away with the.

Paul Spain:
Technology and that’s always there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well done on picking that up. That’s good. But yeah, you can imagine that there will be a bunch of people who have been, you know, take. Taken advantage of.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yep, yep.

Paul Spain:
And you hear about it also with. I think it’s with resumes. Right. So there’s a suggestion that you can, you know, you embed something into your resume, maybe hidden text into the PDF.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Or for the LLM, the recruiter’s LLM, to read.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Put the CV to the top of the pile.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, you want to give it extra, you know, so there’s all sorts of mechanisms that will be. That people will try out to see what they can do. You know, I don’t. I haven’t seen that myself, but I do wonder. Yeah. If you received a resume that way, then. Yeah. What would be the right response? What should you do with that? There’s a bit of thinking to consider there.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
It depends if you give extra points for sort of. For creativity and commercial thrust.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, yes, really interesting onto international matters. Interesting reading about Asahi and you know, the huge impact that cyber attack on their operations has had and you know, for, I guess what is a really, really large entity, particularly in Japan, but known globally, they were forced to shut production down across their 30 factories across the country. I mean, that’s the scale of their operation.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
It went back to pen and paper. Right.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I even was reading around fax machines being part of the.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Oh, really?

Paul Spain:
So, you know, local bars wanting to get their orders in or confirm their orders, were communicating with Hasahi over. Over fax machines. And yeah, I saw a BBC report, was referring to someone with a liquor store in Tokyo and yeah, was very concerned because, yeah, the availability of product just dried up virtually overnight because this sort of product that gets manufactured somewhat on demand, so there’s not months of stock sitting around or anything. And so There was very, very limited availability and they’ve got other, not just the Asahi beer but other drinks, water and food products they sell as well. So I do think the fact that the bigger companies like Asahi, when something like this happens, that it makes the news is really important because for the smaller entities most often it doesn’t. And this is one of the challenges I think we have in New Zealand and further afield when it comes to smaller organisations that there is just a thinking of, well I haven’t seen, you know, I haven’t seen anything major happen on this front. So you know, she’ll be right mate, sort of thing, you know, Kiwi attitude. And yeah, we actually had this discussion, discussion in Queenstown last week, you know, amongst these business owners and yeah, I raised the point that you know, often, you know, folks are too embarrassed, ashamed to mention it from their business.

Paul Spain:
But you know what we did get and it wasn’t a huge group of people, I don’t know, you know, 30, 40 people, certainly under 50. There was a fair bit of feedback from across the room of more personal types of incidents where people had been scammed or lost, you know, money on, on, on, on, you know, on varying things. You know, one of them was like oh, my brother just got scammed on tickets that he bought for the, you know, grand final, et cetera, et cetera. Eleven hundred dollars. He’s bought tickets on this platform before but this time it didn’t play out very well. So these things are going on around us all the time. Takeaways, you just don’t hear most of them.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Right, yeah, takeaways, get your tickets faxed. I’m just imagining the scene in Japan. There in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. And that guy, you know, he’s held onto his fax machine for 30 years. How vindicated he suddenly feels when he can, yeah, fax office order.

Paul Spain:
He’s the one, one guy in the neighborhood that’s, that’s able to get beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also on the, on the cyber front we, we read a third party breach linked to Discord through their support vendor exposed 70000 users ID photos which, you know, including you know, pretty critical information, passports and, and, and, and driver’s licenses. So yeah, these sort of issues kind of keep going on and I think, you know, partly become part of a section of the debate and you can probably look at it from two perspectives but when we’re looking at digital id I think, you know, there’s an element there we’re moving to digital id, where it verifies somebody without having to expose a whole passport or a driver’s license, would mean that this type of scenario was maybe a thing of the past. But then there’s the other side of the coin, which is, well, what is the appropriate level of digitisation and what are the downside sort of consequences? So, yeah, it’s interesting as these things come through to, you know, to have a look at them and think around, well, how could we and should we solve these things? I’ve tended to think that in most cases, when you get these scenarios of, you know, passports and driver’s licenses being exposed, that the issue isn’t necessarily the fact that someone has to show a driver’s license or a passport. And I imagine there’s an element of this. I can’t quite remember what the process was with emerge, but there’s usually an element where you have to share something from your customer perspective. You’ve got to do some verification.

Paul Spain:
But if you’re following the right best practices, there’s not data sitting around that’s easy to get exposed to a leak. Right. And the scenarios where we’ve seen it, it’s usually pretty easy to look at the behaviour that’s gone on with the organisation that’s taking the data. You know, similar thing was the Ministry of Culture and Heritage in New Zealand who were. It was an absolute, you know, shock of what happened there and, you know, it got signed off internally that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all good and all safe. Even though there had been questions around what they were doing and they were taking people’s idea and just storing them on a WordPress environment. Right.

Paul Spain:
Really? That one.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Like my radar.

Paul Spain:
Come on.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Oh, wow.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, we. Yeah, so these things are usually down to sort of poor, poor practice. And I think reality is that, you know, as we digitize more and more, we need to be improving and reducing that poor practice because you just move to new mechanisms and you’re still gonna expose things that you probably shouldn’t be exposing. So, I don’t know. Challenging area. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you share a little bit without sort of, you know, giving too, too much away and exposing a merge, but you’ve got to be able to get some information and clarity on. On who people are when they sign up to the platform.

Paul Spain:
But I’m presuming you probably take that pretty seriously in terms of the data that you have to collect and how you store things.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, we do indeed. So we’re a DIA reporting entity. We have to follow to the letter of the law around kyc, know your customer aml anti money laundering. And yeah, it’s a pretty, pretty key area for us when you’re. And so you’ll remember onboarding to emerge, you would have been asked for a driver’s licence or passport at that stage. And we do various things to, again, as you say, without going too deep into it, we do various things to verify that you are who you say you are and that you know you exist in other places as well, to give us a risk weighting effectively against you or a confidence score that you know you are who you say you are. Your physical face matches what the documentation is. There’s a whole range of checks, there’s a lot of technology that sits behind it and we’ve got a great compliance team.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So. Yeah, but yeah, it’s a never won game that one. It’s one that we’re always going to be working on and improving. It just never sits still.

Paul Spain:
Lastly, on the general news front, Trump has threatened China with massive increase in tariffs following China making some what are being referred to as very hostile trade moves, including aggressive export restrictions on rare earths. Yes, there’s some pretty challenging things going on there geopolitically now and look, there has been for some time, but of course things can be, you know, turned up very, very quickly and things can get out of hand pretty quickly. And I guess, you know, for those of us, well, wherever you are in the world, actually, yeah, we’re very reliant on at times a small number of countries to, you know, to ensure we get access to technology, to get access to food and data and so on. And yeah, if China or the US decide to make things difficult or mess around with tariffs, then the whole world gets impacted pretty quickly. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Interesting to see how that’s gonna play out. But increasingly, those things are kind of the backbone of everything. Those sort of minerals. Pretty big deal.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, there’s just so much reliance on them when it comes to computers, batteries, cars, you know, all manner of. Of tech that. Yeah, we’re just, we’re, we’re so, we’re so reliant on today.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You reckon it’s a bluff or do you think it’s going to go through?

Paul Spain:
Well, I, yeah, I, after I just.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Said I don’t want to comment on it, I’m going to draw it from you.

Paul Spain:
Look, I mean we’ve got this sort of future date of, I think, you know, 1, 1 December that’s mentioned as part of it. And look, this is Always part, you know, part of the picture as a level of. Yeah. Trying to spread fear. It’s part of the negotiating tactics and then how it actually plays out. Yeah, you never quite know, right, what’s going to be real and. And what’s not. And so, yeah, you sit on the sidelines, you know, really unable to do anything other than, you know, hope things turn out in a good direction.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Popcorn out. So, yeah, yeah. Now onto emerge and square one. Yeah, really, really keen to hear a bit more of the story. Maybe, you know, you can tell us what was the, you know, what was the. What did the beginning look like for yourself and your co founder and how, you know, how things kicked off.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
How many hours have we got?

Paul Spain:
I’ll start the timer. We’re gonna limit this episode. No more than four hours.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Oh, perfect. Thanks, mate. That gives me a start on the first chapter. Yeah. So if you want to go kind of. Kind of right back to the genesis of it, I guess it was. Yeah. Jamie and myself, as two co founders and old mates, our kids each started getting to that sort of pocket money, school age.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So he’s got three kids, I’ve got two. And yeah, they started getting to this sort of age around between kind of five to eight where you’re starting to have those conversations around. Sounds like, you know, those conversations well as well. How are we gonna get you a bank account? How are we gonna, you know, see about doing some jobs and earning some pocket money and saving towards a goal and understanding how it all works? Because all they had seen from the. Right, from the pram really, is just, mum or dad tap a card wherever you go. You know, the only financial lesson they had had was wherever you go, Mum or Dad just has this magic wand, ostensibly, which is what it looks like to a kid, it kind of does to an adult as well. Right? You just go wherever you want and pew, pew. And you just buy what you want whenever you want, anytime, day or night, anywhere in the world.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Easy as that. And starting to realize that that was a pretty. That’s probably about the worst financial lesson you can give anyone, let alone your own kids. And my oldest daughter was eight at the time. And I said, I mentioned the word cash, and I straight away got back, what’s cash, dad? And that was kind of a real light bulb moment for me. You know, here you’ve got a kid who’s 8 and yeah, has never seen cash, doesn’t know what it is, rightly or wrongly. That’s a whole other debate and discussion, you know, but that was the case. And so I, yeah, that was a big light bulb moment.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And then so I went, okay, we better sort this out and go into the branch and get you a bank account. So went to the bank where I’ve been a customer for three and a half decades and said, hey, I’ve been, I think, a pretty loyal, fantastic customer, actually. You’ve got my entire financial life, thanks very much. And I’ve got a brand new customer here to bring you. And they said, well, come back on the 39th of November at half past nine o’ clock and make an appointment to see someone and then we’ll give you a bunch of paperwork that looks like it’s been through a fax machine a hundred times. It was all faded. They literally had to like blow the dust off this stack of paperwork. And then it was, go home, get your passport now, take a trip to a justice of the peace to have an original birth certificate witnessed.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And those. This journey just went on and on with all of this friction and pain. And I was just staggered, like beyond belief that this is how it still goes.

Paul Spain:
So it’s not just me that’s felt that pain. It must be happening right across the country.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
I’d say, yeah, people are in their hundreds of thousands because they’ve turned to square one. So, yeah, we realised, we started to realise, Jamie and I, in discussions, that this was a significant pain point and that it was an area where the banks by and large were doing quite a disservice to a large number of people. And so that was like a clear lane that we could get in and make a real difference. And at the same time, there’s a really big purpose upside as well in terms of lifting our financial capability as a nation. Like, we’re in a pretty financially fragile state as a country. I think I don’t have the exact stats to hand, but we can look it up and maybe through the magic of television, Joe Allen can make it appear somewhere up there. But is it something like 40% of people have less than $1,000 saved, which is just pretty, pretty wild. Like, we’re perilously close to the edge as a country.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And so the chance to have a really big opportunity on the commercial side, like, could you build a bank? Was where the question that we got to. And then on the purpose upside, you know, can you uplift the country through better financial capability, better financial literacy, helping people understand and right from a young age, how to connect the dots with money? How do I earn some, how do I spend some? How do I Save some. How do I give invest. That’s achieving capability in all of those areas. Your outcome is better financial well being. And so, yeah, I could talk for hours on that, on that bit alone, but yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s where we started. We want every Kiwi to be much more financially capable.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So there have been amazing efforts made in financial literacy for decades now. And the data is in through global kind of meta studies, studies of all the studies of these financial literacy efforts that have been made for a few decades. And it’s unfortunately, it’s not really shifting the dial. Going into a classroom and saying, hey, kids, $1 plus $1 is $2. This is a check account, this is a savings account. Now you understand some bank terminology, therefore you’ve had financial literacy delivered to you. You know, we’ll give you a piece of merchandise and then a form. Were you happy with this? And you tick.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yes. And so now you’re financially literate and it’s just really not the case. It doesn’t shift the dial for anyone’s financial literacy, let alone their capability or their well being long term. So square one, as a product, solves all of those pain points. Parents or guardians set the parameters of that sandbox. Kids get a real life experience, they’re using real money in the real world. They can do jobs, they can tick them off, parents approve them, they see the money come in, they can set goals that they then save towards. And so as a kid, you’re starting to get that sense of having some direction over your own life.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Okay, wow. I can understand how to get some money and then I can understand how to choose, like, make my own decisions about needs versus wants. And the conversations just go on and on and on and on as a parent. And square one gives you that platform and the toolkit to have all those conversations. And yeah, the results are looking really positive. The feedback from mostly from parents, but from kids as well. The big one from parents is they can’t believe that their kids are this capable. At age 8, they were thinking that their kids were gonna have to wait till they were 18 to start being this capable around discerning the difference between needs and wants and setting some, you know, goals and direction for themselves.

Paul Spain:
Yep. So in simple terms, square one is what? Bank account, debit card, but then you’ve got extra pieces around that so that a parent can be involved and, you know, and so on. You’ve got apps on the, on the phone. You have one for the physical debt as well.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
Right. So parent and child can kind of see things. See, this is interesting. Cause when I went through this with my bank and yeah, all the dramas of trying to get the bank account set up, and then it’s like, oh, you can’t do that on a Saturday, or this or that. It’s like, well, actually that’s when it’s easy for a parent and a child.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
To take a day off school, to.

Paul Spain:
Wander out, to do these things. And there was all sorts with sort of multiple banks being. Being pretty challenging until I, you know, I found a branch that was. I don’t know, they seem to care about their customer, which. Yeah, what didn’t seem to be the case with my local branch or local branches. And when we eventually did get an account set up in this case with an EFTPOS card, and I said, well, how can I sort of see that from my phone? No, no, this is your child’s account. You can’t see it. Well, how do I see an account that I can get access to? Oh, we can set up.

Paul Spain:
You could set up a shared account that you’ll be able to see through your app, and then you could do a transfer of funds from that to your child’s account, but you won’t be able to actually see what the balances in your child’s account or any of the other information. So that would help from a savings perspective because it would be all right, why do you need the money? Okay, yep. You want the money? Sure. I’ll transfer it so you can spend it. And so we end up there with a little bit of a, you know, a wall that helps encourage saving, but in a really haphazard way. So maybe just run me through how this, how this would work in the square one world.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, it was all of those things as well. Right. For us where I was trying to. Yeah. But the bit that really blew me away on top of it all was, okay, we’ve got you an account and now we’ve put some money in there for my child. How does that customer view their own balance? Oh, that’s not possible. And it’s like I had to go and get the manager and finally get access to Internet banking. And then it’s like, manage your payees, apply for a mortgage and you want a card connected to that.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Like, no way. It was really like I was asking for sorcery. So, yeah, it was all of that that led us to it. And so in square one, the child view looks like earn, spend, save. And so those are the sort of three Core pillars. EARN gives you the dignity of actually working for some money. And this is all stuff, I think, as old as time. I’m sure you would have had the similar lessons imparted to you in your youth.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
There’s some money that can come for free, so you can set up automated pocket money, you can have free jobs and you can have paid jobs. And I guess that echoes a theme that right the way through the design of the whole product, we were really careful, Jamie and I, as co founders, to not just kind of stamp our beliefs on how it should be done. Because how you manage money in your home is gonna be different from mine, from everyone’s got their own firmly, like really firmly held beliefs about my kids shouldn’t get paid to make their bed, or actually you should pay them because otherwise how are they going to learn to work for money? So everyone’s got their own view. So we’ve built this whole thing to cover every scenario for different family values and how people think money should work. So you can have automatic pocket, you can have free jobs, you can have paid jobs. And that again, just is the platform that fosters all those great conversations. How is value created? And then, so that’s the EARN side. Kids can tick off jobs and then it comes to a parent to approve so that the kids can’t work the system again.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
We’ve also been super careful to make sure it’s massively inclusive. So it’s not just for the family that can afford the latest iPhone for the 10 year old. It also works for like a family that’s sharing one $50 Android handset across the entire family. Right. So we built a family mode where, you know, everyone can access their accounts with their own passcodes through one device. That’s awesome. It can work on Mum or Dad’s device.

Paul Spain:
It’s pretty unusual actually, to see that sort of foresight go into building this type of app. Have you come across others doing that before?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Thank you. No, not necessarily. But I guess it just came out a good robust debate between Jamie and I. We’ve got our own views as well about how it should work. And then we started to go, oh, actually there’s not just one way, there’s a thousand ways. And so we needed to make something that would work for everyone and, and we really, I talked about that purpose element and enabling Kiwi to be better with money is at the heart of everything we’re doing and we didn’t want anyone to be left behind in that journey. Like, it really is like trying to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. So that’s the earn side.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
They can tick off jobs and see it come in the pocket. Money can be automated or not. On the spend, spend column, I guess if you think of the three columns, Earn, spend, save in the spend area, that’s where you kind of manage all of your card controls. So that’s kind of really cool. We were the first issuer in Asia Pacific card issuer to take the physical details off the. Take the sensitive card details off the physical card. So if you look at your bank card, do you know why the embossing is on there? The numbers are embossed.

Paul Spain:
I mean, back in the day you used to use the physical machine.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yep. That’s the only reason those numbers are embossed. And the last time we saw one of those was after an Asahi hack. So that sort of. It’s a small detail, but it says an awful lot about the state of innovation in this country in banking and financial services. At least when, you know, the banks would rather wear that annual fraud cost, which is in the. I don’t know how many tens or hundreds of millions would have to look it up.

Paul Spain:
Well, having what’s effectively a PIN number on the back of the card as well. Right.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So having all that on the physical.

Paul Spain:
Card, you’re just like, it’s wild. And yeah, I had this in the States a couple of weeks ago in a restaurant. They’re like, oh, can we take your card? And we’ll get. And I’m like, no, you can’t take my card. You’ve got to be joking. Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, my card’s the. The number on the back’s kind of covered up, but, you know, you can tear something off and get to it.

Paul Spain:
I haven’t completely destroyed it, but that’s all debatable. But yeah, there’s no reason in most cases for that to be physically there when we’re carrying a device or there’s another way to hold that info. So, yeah, that’s a great move.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Well, it says thank you. I just think it’s a really interesting illustration of that, the state of innovation in banking where it’s preferable to leave that as it is because we can’t be bothered and we’ll just wear the fraud losses. We’ll wear all of that customer angst and heartbreak that’s attached to it.

Paul Spain:
Although banks are starting to step back from wearing the fraud cost. Right. So I’m certainly seeing sort of less and less if something has happened. There’s been a dramatic Reduction in how willing banks are to sort of wear the costs related to cybercrime.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
I think that goes through sort of cycles depending on regulator pressure as well. But as for context, we were a team of five people and we were the first card ashore in Asia Pacific to to make the physical cards or to remove those details off the physical cards and provision them instantly in app. So not only are you removing all of that fraud risk and putting it behind biometrics, you are also like instant issuance capability so that you can onboard in the app. You go through that and then as soon as you’ve done that two, three minute onboarding, all of those card details are provisioned in the app for all of your kids. You don’t have to wait for the physical card to come in the post ready to go with Apple and Google Pay ready to use online instantly.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, doesn’t get lost in the mail, et cetera, it’s just there.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So we did that with a team of five people. The physical card still comes in the post a few days later. But yeah, doing that with a team of five people versus if you look at the majority of bank cards still, they’ve got all those sensitive details on them and that really throws into sharp relief, I think, how we think about things versus how it’s being done and what New Zealanders are forced to put up with. So yeah, that’s.

Paul Spain:
Now we’ve heard about the sort of square one side of the business, which is more that family side. Tell us about Emerge, which is I guess sort of the bigger brand, as it were. And this is where you’ve started with quite a big focus on serving the small to medium business market, right?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, 100%. And again, thanks for being customer. It’s absolutely awesome. I really appreciate it.

Paul Spain:
Well, I always like, you know, listeners will know this. I like to try out any technology. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first Apple Watch. I was there in LA to get it when it was launched.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Oh, really?

Paul Spain:
First whatever. You know, I enjoy trying out the technology and understanding sort of where it fits, is it, is it helpful to Kiwis or not? And so yeah, I like to try these things out and Emerge was part of that. So yeah, keen to hear a little bit more. But yeah, certainly feeling pretty positive at this stage with the experience.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Oh, outstanding, thank you. So, yeah, I guess it starts with that bigger vision and ultimately helping every Kiwi to be great with money. Square one. There’s kind of a cheeky clue in the name as well. We always knew that that was just going to be the starting point. The bigger vision was always, could you build New Zealand’s first digital challenger bank? So we’re not a bank yet, but we are making good strides in that direction. Emerge is the, I guess the second phase of that vision coming to life. So square One still there and still doing amazing things.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And Emerge is now the parent brand that sits over top of that. So SquareOne you can think of as kind of the on ramp to the world of money. And then the next biggest and most drastically underserved customer vertical we could see was the SME space. Businesses are just shockingly underserved.

Paul Spain:
But you’re also doing personal cards as well now. Personal accounts as well as the business.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah. So we’ve had square one and market four years or just about four years now. Emerge and market around 18 months now. So on the face of it, a couple of people said to me, that’s like a really weird pivot to go from like kids accounts to business accounts. Like, it’s a weird pivot, but actually if you zoom out a little bit and look at the longer term strategy, it’s just about finding those lanes in that clear area where the banks aren’t doing a good job. And so first it was youth accounts, then business, and now we’re bridging that gap with personal. So that gives our square One teens something to emerge into or to graduate out of square one and to emerge personally. And personal is also a great place where people can get the experience and build trust and then move their business accounts over as well.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So, yeah, personal accounts live in market as of now. So yeah, that’s great.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, tell us a little bit around what you’ve built for the business market and how that’s kind of different to what folks might have been getting from their banks. It’s probably better coming from you than me and I may jump in with our experience.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
You can hold me to account, good or bad, but no pressure. With a live demo, you start with identifying the problem yourself. In a way, that’s what we did with SquareOne when we were just tearing our hair out, going like the classic American infomercial, like, there must be a better way. We were really at that stage with it. And then again, as business owners going through all of the rigmarole, the hassle and Getting this real 1980s tech and product experience and it was just blowing us away that this is where New Zealand is in 2025, like, are we really still doing things this way? You’re going to expect an Employee to bankroll the company and for them to have to come in like a. With a receipt, God forbid you lose it, because it needs to be stapled to a claim form and then someone’s got to look at that and then type it into a spreadsheet and then it’s got to be, you know, processed by someone else. Six sets of hands looking at all of this data and it just, wow, it was just mind blowing that this is how we expect it to operate. You’ve got businesses that we were hearing constant horror stories of.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
It could be six and seven months even just to open an account, even if you’ve been with that bank for decades as a personal customer. Then businesses we were talking to, we spend so much time talking to customers. So businesses we were talking to and really like tech forward, financially savvy businesses, proper operators, 50, 60 people in the team, well established and technologically enabled people and companies, they would have one card shared between 60 people in the office. And it’s like, who’s got the card today? Well, someone’s taken it on a trip to Christchurch, so no one has the card today. And then this subscription fails or that card gets compromised and all of our subscriptions are now failing because we can’t get the, you know, someone into branch to sign the paper, to remove whatever like to make a change on that card. Just all of that is so utterly unacceptable and we wanted to do something really different and drag us into 20, 25. So that’s what we’ve built with Emerge. We set out to solve all those pain points.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And it’s an honour to sit in the same chair Rod Drury sat in a couple of weeks ago, I think. I think we’ve built one of the most comprehensive zero connections in the world. Maybe we’ll have to cross check that with Rod. But just trying to remove all of the friction points right through that process, from someone actually being able to make a transaction through to. All the way right through to the accountant reconciling those accounts.

Paul Spain:
So tell us about that Xero integration. Because so many of our Kiwi businesses are using Xero, there’s a capability within the Emerge app to also basically tag a receipt in, right. Scan a receipt and link that to the transaction.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
You’ve got it.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah. How does that work?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, so I guess it starts at the transaction and you’re able to. After you make that transaction, you will also get pinged with a notification if you haven’t uploaded your receipt. So you can either take a photo or document scan or search Your files however you want. Again, a big part of our ethos is around.

Paul Spain:
Can you email it?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Email it to.

Paul Spain:
Let’s say you’ve got the receipt via email because it’s some sort of online transaction but you, you want to be able to link it back or is that.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, you can grab it. No, no, you can grab it straight out of your files. So that’s one of the options in there. If you’ve got. Yeah, if it’s been emailed to you, that’s no problem.

Paul Spain:
So you’d go in and attach it.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yep. So attach the receipt to the transaction. You can. Then we’ve built GL coding into the app as well. Transactions are categorized. We’ve got a pretty fantastic long tail of merchants now because we’ve got, I don’t know how many tens of millions of transactions have been done on square one now. I should look it up, but it’s a lot.

Paul Spain:
So you get a lot of data.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yes, a lot of data about all of those merchants. And we categorize them all, we pull in their logo, we pull in their address and contact details. We have a pin drop on the map. So you would have seen when you opened that transaction. It’s an extremely rich page with everything categorized, all detailed. And so having all of that like first party data as a starting point just enables us to do so many things and make all these incredibly rich experiences and just save time, cut out all of that hassle and admin right through to the accountant. So yeah, those receipts flow through into Xero and really like we’ve had a lot of feedback from accountants that this is just like a dream. I believe again we’ll have to check but I’m not sure if anyone else is doing this but being able to approve batch payments as a, as an example without getting too much into the weeds here.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
But pretty sure we’re the only one doing that. Pretty sure we’re the only one that’s doing it paper free and then batch payments. So it’s like you can, you can load them in Xero and it’s just a one tap, approve and emerge versus sort of file uploads and multi stage approvals and things. So we’ve gone pretty in depth with that zero partnership.

Paul Spain:
It’s pretty cool. Yeah. I imagine there’s probably a bunch more kind of edge cases that’ll come up over time. Right. And opportunities to make that even smoother. Think of some. Yeah, some entities even, even you know, retail, especially in the US Actually I haven’t noticed as much here but you go to retail in the US and they just. They’ll just email you the, you know, the.

Paul Spain:
The receipt. Right?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
And so a way that. That would automatically happen and automatically, you know, flow through into the system without even. Without even having to kind of, you know, think about it. So I’m sure there’s very cool stuff. There’s always going to be more. More to keep you busy, right?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. But our experience has been. Yeah, it was really easy, I think, you know, little bit of complexity with our business with. With there being a family trust, you know, owning, you know, owning shares. So that made some extra hoops to jump through. But it was still, overall was a. Was a quick, you know, a quick process.

Paul Spain:
Low, low stress, and then, you know, inviting staff so that we could issue them with. With cards. Yeah, I was. I was really surprised just how quickly and I needed to do it for someone. The other day I was like, oh, I’m gonna set you up with a, you know, a virtual, you know, card that you can have access to on your phone, your, you know, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, et cetera, and so on, you know, and it would have been, yeah, five minutes later, it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s all done. I’m like, what? Yeah, I’d, you know, had forgotten how. Just how quick it was because I remember, you know, there are those steps that you have to go through to, you know, prove who you are and so on. But it was pretty snappy.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
So, yeah, stoked to hear that. And the whole team will be. And really, I’m just lucky to. To sit here and talk about it. But, yes, so much thought and diligence and heart and passion and research and brains has gone into making it such a simple thing for the customer. And there’s a team of very passionate people behind doing all that and making it work.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, being able to issue or generate sort of virtual cards so you can have a card for, you know, subscriptions and varying things. Pretty, you know, pretty helpful. I came across a situation with my. I’ll call it Legacy bank recently, where, I don’t know, at some point I’d signed up for, I think it was some Xbox Live subscriptions, maybe. We were having a bit of an event and we needed sort of multiple logins and so on. And I was like, oh, yeah, we’ll sign these up and. And pay for them. And somewhere along the way, in the rush, I hadn’t kind of captured all of the details.

Paul Spain:
So call out the bank, say, I’m getting billed here. For multiple Xbox Live subscriptions. We don’t actually need that in our family. I only need one. But I can’t work out what the login is it’s calling it or that it’s linking back to. Look, can you guys just kind of sort that out at your end? And they’re like cancel your credit card and start everything all over again. And I’m like, oh, I’ve got a whole lot of things linked back. And I’m like, so what would that look like? Oh well, we’ll cancel your credit card immediately today and we’ll get a new one in the mail that you’ll get in a few days time.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, we can give you a number you can use in between. I’m like, oh, but I got a transition everything. Oh no, that’s, that’s, that’s too painful. Right. And so the idea of being able to have these virtual cards and you know, have a card just for, you know, say gaming subscriptions or whatever you want to. Well, I mean in the business world it’s mostly going to be for different things but we had one with a software vendor recently actually where they were, I don’t think ever got a good explanation out of them, but we were adjusting a subscription and they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t allow us to kind of adjust it how we wanted in terms of the number of users and the subscription through the user interface. And there apparently we had an account manager somewhere in the world. And I was like, well we’re changing this.

Paul Spain:
The renewal comes up in X days time. Can you just take care of it? Anyway, the account manager didn’t come back and I was kind of feeling like so we just jumped in and changed it to a virtual card. So if they over build we just were able to set a credit limit at the correct rate so we didn’t have to try and get money back later. And that of course kicked them into action. Account manager, whatever. And then they’re like oh, how can we help you and sort it out. So yeah, quite handy. I see on the flip side some businesses may be getting burnt by how prolific, you know, debit cards can be and so on.

Paul Spain:
Was staying at a hotel in the, in the US who were like, oh, we only accept cards from major, major banks or something like that. Interesting. Okay, so I, I’m guessing it’s something like that. So. But yeah, I certainly haven’t, haven’t had any problems with the, with the cards being able to be used, put it that way. Yeah.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Awesome. No, look, they’re a full fat MasterCard work anywhere in the world. MasterCard’s accepted online in person and all the rest. Just stoked, genuinely stoked to hear that it’s working well for you.

Paul Spain:
Well, we look forward to sort of following what’s next in the journey and we’d love to have you back in the future as things progress. You mentioned sort of the personal cards. Presumably that’s just as easy to get up and running on if somebody wants to try that out. I guess the capabilities are not going to be as developed as in the other areas because it’s a new thing.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
You got it in one. Yeah, Actually even quicker, like you’re talking a couple of minutes from downloading the app to being up and running completely. So really excited about what that means because as I say, that’s that, that’s that graduation pathway from square one into, into the rest of your life, effectively. That was always the vision to serve customers for life. And there’s some serious innovation that we’re launching with. I think I can probably talk about it here. When will this go? Oh, this is live stream now, isn’t it?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The founder. You can make these decisions on the fly.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah. There’s a massive topic around fair access and financial inclusion and this is coming from government, this is coming from the regulators, rbnz, fma. It’s a really big topic. People that are either underbanked or unbanked and it’s not the case that everyone can walk into a branch and produce suitable forms of id. And, you know, here’s my last three pay slips and here are two utility bills in my name and there’s a ton of reasons why you might be in that situation. It might be that you’re like leaving home, leaving school for the first time, maybe. There’s, we’ve, we’ve talked to people in foster homes, people with disabilities, elderly, parent. There’s, there’s so many reasons why you might, why you might be in that position.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
And so, you know, we believe, as does, you know, various political parties and various regulators, that access to something as fundamental as banking is more or less a human right. Like everyone needs to be able to access these facilities. So we’ve built something that caters to those people as well, which is like a serious first for New Zealand and something we’re super excited about enabling goes right back to that idea of helping every Kiwi to be great with money. Starts with, you know, fundamentally it starts with just access to the system. It goes right back to the ethos that underpins square one, helping people to be great with money. So, yeah, really excited about what that’s going to mean. And, yeah, we’re just in the process of going live with that now. So if you’re in your app store, you can download a merge and you can set up with a personal account in a couple of minutes.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
There’s some beautiful design touches throughout. Hopefully that’s shown through in your business experience as well. The UI and the design and the brand, we put a lot of attention and care into those areas as well. And with Personal, we’ve got license, I think, to be a bit more fun, a bit more interesting with the design and stuff. So there’s some really cool, unique kiwi touches as well. I won’t give away too much, we’ll have to have some Easter eggs. But once you’re in the app and selecting card colors and things like that, there’s some seriously nice finishing touches put on it. So, yeah, really excited to see how that goes.

Paul Spain:
Great. Well, I’d love to hear from many listeners who give this a try. I know a lot of our listeners are always very keen to try out new technology, so since you’ve now got the personal accounts available, I’m sure that will nudge a few people who maybe are curious or it’s what they’re looking for to try that out. It’d be interesting to know how smooth that is. What are your thoughts? Because yours is very much a digital service. What are your thoughts on how do we cater to those people who aren’t so techy? There are people that don’t carry a smartphone. Is that gonna be the role of the traditional banks at this stage for the next few years ahead? Or is this something over time that you can imagine gets addressed because we’re all born with a smartphone in our hand in the years ahead, or, you know, is that something you think about at all?

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Yeah, it is. I tend towards the latter. And again, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, right or wrong, is a whole philosophical debate. And we can maybe solve that one over something stronger than a water. But, yeah, I think the level of smartphone access now is just. I imagine it’s just pushing closer and closer to 100%.

Paul Spain:
Well, yeah, I think usually the number of connections in most countries is more than 100%, because people end up with multiple connections for varying reasons. I don’t know what the current stats are in New Zealand, but I know.

Jovan Pavlicevic:
Traditional banks are also pulling back on physical branches. They’re big cost centres, so that is happening. It started happening first and foremost kind of in the regions and rural areas which again is where access is an issue. So it’s difficult to solve every single edge case down to someone not having a phone. I mean we are definitely digitally enabled. We don’t have any physical branches.

Paul Spain:
But you will reach out to people on the phone, right? If you need to. Okay. Well it’s been great to have you on the show. Thank you Jovan, thank you. Really, really good and yeah look forward to following progress. Big thank you to our show partners as well. Workday, Spark 2,degrees, One NZ, Gorilla Technology and HP. And we’ll look forward to catching everyone on the next episode.

Paul Spain:
If you have been listening to the audio then track us down on those video platforms or follow myself on LinkedIn. And yeah that’s us for this week. So thanks everyone. We’ll catch you again next week. See ya.