What is different about building a fintech in Australia?

“Yeah. So, I sent to the government, said, all the banks have to do this. It rolled out. It's kind of been rolled out properly since July. I think it's 2020. So it's been out and about for, you know, 4 years or so now. But the— in this report from the Australian Banking Association that came out this week, they claim that the banks have invested over like $1.5 billion into kind of implementing the Consumer Data Right. And that's kind of probably, you know, all the people power that goes into changing their tech systems and managing this from a compliance perspective. But they're saying that only 0.3% of people with bank accounts in Australia are actually using this kind of new open banking system. So that's about— this is just on— just shy of 200,000 banking customers. So they think that it's kind of not living up to its expectations. There were these kind of principles around it has to be focused on the customer, has to promote competition in banking and encourage innovation and be efficient and fair. These are kind of the principles that they said open banking should be set up with, and they don't think it's living up to those expectations. So that's the report that they put out. And then I think as a day or couple of days later, this other report comes out from the peak body of the fintech industry, Fintech Australia, and they've teamed up with a company called BASIC. I think that's how you pronounce it, B-A-S-I-Q, who are Australia's leading open banking platform. So have obviously a vested interest in open banking working in Australia. And they've released this report that says that this 0.3% couldn't essentially possibly be correct because their platform alone has enabled over 900,000 open banking connections. And I guess generally it seems like the fintech industry is saying, look, it's been around for 4 years. This whole concept has actually only been fully rolled out for even less time than that because that's just from when the big banks started rolling it out. And, you know, we kind of need some more time for this, you know, huge innovation to come off the back of this new, um, system.”

“And that's really good for us because we do have a lot of banks, and banking and finance tends to be an area that is more widely accepted by the mainstream, which is a good thing. We also have this unique environment where we're, we're kind of a bubble enough into ourselves that Australia is a fantastic place as a sandbox to test things and to drive new innovations before they can be impacted by other factors that would make it really difficult to establish as whether this is viable or not. The fintech ecosystem growth is really quite phenomenal.”

“Definitely. Amazing. So, yeah, last week we also talked about this Future Made in Australia legislation. Speaking of the future, the legislation was introduced into Parliament this week. So, essentially it meant that we, you know, well, we were, I guess we were hoping we're going to get a little bit more data around kind of how it's going to work. It is not necessarily game-changing, like on a practical level for people in startups, but I think it's good for people to understand in general, the way that it's structured and the way that the government's thinking about making these, um, like investment decisions under the, under the Future Made in Australia policy. So I just thought I'd give people a bit of an overview of what it looks like. There's 3 pillars because everyone loves— you can never have 2, you always have to have 3 pillars at least for something like this. One of the pillars was already announced prior to the legislation being introduced into Parliament, and that is around what was being called a National Interest Framework. So it's a guide around how the government identifies the primary, um, or priority industries that the policy will support, and they fall into two streams. So the one stream is the net zero transformation stream, and that probably doesn't come as a surprise to people because the government's been talking a lot about how Future Made in Australia will support our net zero transition. So that's one stream of the two, and then the other one is called the economic resilience and security stream, which has kind of a bit of a defensey vibe about it, national interest vibe about it. But it is a pretty broad bucket, so I think a lot of things will fall into bucket two if they don't fit the net zero stream. So that's the National Interest Framework. That's pillar 1 of Future Made in Australia. And then pillar 2, which was one of the biggest things that was announced or introduced as part of this legislation this week, was the community benefits pillar. So these are kind of the 5 principles that the government's going to be looking at these different investments kind of meeting. They have to meet the standard of being a benefit to the community. So that's around promoting safe and secure jobs. It has to develop a more skilled and inclusive workforce. Mm-hmm. The companie”