00:00 Introduction and welcome

Alex, welcome to the show. Very, very happy to finally get you on the show. You and I have known each other for a very long time and you are one of Nudge’s oldest customers. So it’s good to finally get you on here. I know you’ve been busy but you’ve also had a fascinating story to tell and a fascinating time over the last few years which obviously I know quite a lot about and I’m excited to tell everyone else about it.

You know we have a lot of different founders on here, we have a lot of early stage startups. I don’t think we’ve had anyone that’s had quite the journey you’ve had. So which is good, right? And that’s why you’re here and I think our audience will love it. So why don’t we start off by you explaining Mint Payments and the sort of story behind it. Kind of why it came about, how and why you founded it with your brother, and where you are now as a business.

01:05 What Mint Payments does

Thanks Steve, thanks for the invite on the show. Pleasure. Well, Mint. We’re a payments company, a payments business that essentially helps businesses to accept payments and then also to help them facilitate end-to-end payment transactions. From receiving payments from their customers and also paying out to their suppliers as well.

So it didn’t start off that way. We started off about 11, 12 years ago. Long time. Long time ago. One of the probably more experienced fintechs in the market right now.

01:30 The origin story: consulting at Telstra in the Blackberry era

Essentially we started off the business really, my brother and I were both working in our corporate lives. Myself, I was a management consultant prior to founding Mint. Thought, you know, starting a business, how hard could it be? That’s what I first thought. Andrew is my brother and co-founder. Also, how hard could it be working with a brother, as well, with a family member?

And he was working for a telco at that stage. So the idea came about largely, something quite simple. The penny dropped when I was consulting for Telstra at that time and we were implementing a mobile payment solution. And you would think that back in, I guess, 2009, it was the era of the Windows devices. Apple wasn’t known for smartphones back then. That’ll scare half our audience who don’t know life without Apple.

And Blackberries, you remember Blackberry? The keys! And telcos were there trying to build applications. Telstra wanted to build an application for their field service people to essentially record what they were doing and in order to take payment they had an EFTPOS terminal and they were basically carrying two devices. So we were figuring out, this doesn’t really solve the problem. Which is how do you get an application that records what they actually do and then take a payment on the same device rather than paying for two devices.

04:10 No tech background, building a prototype anyway

So that was the problem we were trying to solve and then when we looked more into it, small businesses, there was just a big issue about 12 years ago for businesses essentially trying to get a payment solution or payment device from a bank. You had to go through writing business plans and giving your first born to essentially… Ages. Ages. Yeah.

So the way things were, it was just a big problem for small businesses with payments. So my brother and I said, look, there’s something in this. How do we build an application on a mobile phone to accept credit card payments? And you had no tech background, right? Not really. No, not much. Games does not count. Not exactly.

So actually my wife asked me the same question last night and said, like, didn’t you do engineering? I said, yeah, pretty badly. But I know enough to be dangerous. So no background in tech but we said look, why don’t we look into it. We raised a bit of capital from family and friends and built a prototype for it.

05:40 Listing on the ASX after two years

It got quite a bit of interest from some of the telcos. And we basically raised some capital on the ASX. And so you floated straight away, is that right? Probably a couple of years before we listed on the ASX. I mean, payments is a very capital intensive business. And highly regulated. You’ve got to certify everything, make sure you’re handling people’s money essentially.

So you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got significant amounts of capital to ensure you build the product in a compliant way. Compliance is always the word people use to scare other startups away from that. So, long story short, Mint started off with an idea to help businesses to accept payments on a mobile phone and that’s where the journey started.

08:20 Three phases of Mint: build, license, go direct

I sort of split Mint’s history in three parts. The first part is the build. And essentially also the market, we were probably too early for market acceptance. Just remember, Blackberry and Windows days. So we were too early. You were obviously the first fintech, right? Yeah. We were the fintechs before fintech became cool. The first fintech.

And the second iteration, the pivot, was essentially, now the product was built and certified, how do we get the product out there? So we went through a licensing, a distribution model where we were licensing our tech to banks, large accounting software systems, big distribution partners. And in the third iteration where we are right now is essentially going out on our own, acquiring merchants, getting to know our customers, going straight to the end customer and letting them use the technology that we’ve built over the last 11, 12 years.

10:30 White-labelling tech to banks in New Zealand and Australia

We still have customers that still use this today, eleven, twelve years on. Amazing. Which is, you know, we’re very thankful for our customers. But what we’ve learned a lot along the way was that getting closer to the customer was really important. And I think more important these days, especially with a lot of technology companies cutting out different channel partners or essentially different barriers to getting to your end customer that uses your product.

So that’s where we are now. We’re very focused on verticals, very focused on going direct to the customer and solving all their payment needs. Paying in and paying out as well. About now 40 to 50% of our business is largely servicing those enterprise, big corporate brands that are using our tech. So if a business in New Zealand for example wouldn’t know that they’re using Mint’s technology. They’re a customer of ours and they’ve rolled out ten thousand terminals using our technology. Our branding’s not on that. So we sort of sit behind the scenes.

12:30 Differentiating in a crowded payments market

We had a really good look at ourselves two years ago and said, look, we’ve got the technology like any large global payments company. But how do we differentiate ourselves from a very cluttered, crowded market where essentially a lot of the well-known brands provide the same sort of service?

We spoke to our customers. We said, why did you pick Mint? And a lot of it was the service elements, the fact that we cared about what their business was about. Whereas if you went to a much bigger payments business, you’re sort of on the phone for a lot of time. And a lot of our customers said, look, if we had a payments provider that actually rewarded us for transacting, then we would definitely move from our current incumbent to you.

15:00 Travel and tourism: the $20 billion underserved vertical

The verticals that we’re focused on right now has been the source of our growth. Our largest growth has been the travel and tourism industry. The last two, three years the growth has been pretty explosive. It’s been amazing. We’ve got some of the biggest brands as our customer. Flight Centre, Helloworld, lots of independent travel agents using and loving our system. And it’s a 20 billion dollar market in Australia. So it’s largely underserved by the banks, by the large acquirers. That vertical has been pretty much our focus.

17:00 Growing through COVID: 400 to 550-600 travel agents

As we all can see, no one’s travelling right now. As of yesterday, yes. I had a plane fly over earlier which was quite strange because I think I’ve heard one in six months. So life’s coming back. It is. It’s been the source of our growth but the last six months has been challenging.

We started looking at other verticals. Because our technology applies across both online and e-commerce and mobile and also face-to-face in-store. Other than travel, where we’re seeing strong pickup in growth has been in our online digital vertical. Online e-com stores, businesses that want to sell their wares on a website. That market has been growing by 15% year-on-year. But what we’re seeing, probably about 40 to 50% growth in that vertical.

18:20 End-to-end payments: the real point of difference

Our real point of difference is really more about not just helping them take payments from their customers through their website but also helping them pay out to their suppliers through a foreign exchange payment or through a virtual card. So one provider like Mint can provide a whole end-to-end solution. And I believe no one in the marketplace currently does that.

19:40 The real cost of being ASX-listed

There’s a lot of stuff in the press where people say, did you IPO too early? The ASX is sort of littered with a lot of pre-revenue type businesses. Look, the ASX, the listing has been good for me. It gave us a lot of credibility, governance framework, access to capital, all the good things. But there’s obviously additional overheads around management and it just does take you away from the main game which is growing your business.

I think it costs anything between 300 to half a million dollars a year. A year. Yeah. A lot of money. Whether you talk about directors’ fees, listing fees, all those sort of fees that all add up. I think it’s not just the hard costs. It’s more around where you’re potentially as a business thinking about how do you execute the strategy for the long-term value of shareholders, whereas potentially making decisions that are more short-term. Unfortunately that plays in because you’re always in the spotlight.

21:00 Why they delisted and what comes next

Whether you’re a business that’s listed or not listed, you’ve just got to have a good underlying business. If you have a good underlying business, whether you’re listed or unlisted, it’ll work either way. Do I regret listing? No, I don’t regret it. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve met a lot of great people out of it. Did I list too early? Yeah, but if I didn’t list, Mint probably wouldn’t be around.

We were probably in a period where it was pre a lot of the venture capital industry in Australia. We de-listed largely because we just felt that the listing wasn’t giving us the right value for the business moving forward and we’ve got some really great plans over the next couple of years. And I think COVID definitely drove and accelerated that decision point as well.

24:00 Capital raises after delisting

Fortunately for us, getting your shareholders engaged is just critical whether you’re listed or unlisted. They know that businesses have got challenges. It’s not just a straight line all the way and the straight line doesn’t come without blood, sweat and tears. As long as the shareholders are transparent, aware of that and they support you and they see the underlying goal at the end of it, more often than not they’ll support you.

The delisting came at a point where we wanted to save some costs but also do things in the background and then in the next 18 to 24 months come back as a much stronger and bigger company.

25:00 The biggest lesson: people are 70% of your costs

Not just because I’m sitting here talking to you, but about how good recruiters could be. No, but I think in the end, a business like Mint, we’re a payments business, we’re a tech business. But when you look at it as a payments or tech business, people get obsessed about what’s your recurring revenue look like, what’s your gross margin, what’s your LTV, cost of acquisition. All those metrics that determine whether you’re a good viable long-term business from a tech perspective.

But what I don’t see sometimes is what happens below the line which is the cost side. And I think the biggest lesson I learned is, my biggest cost line is people. 70% of my cost is people. Getting the wrong people on board may cost you a lot of money in the longer term because it affects the top line. We’re essentially a tech business but we’re a people business. Our balance sheet is not full of machines and factories and assets like warehouses. It’s all about people.

27:00 Belief in family culture and trust

One of the strong beliefs for me is that you’re all part of it. We’re all working for the company. We’re a family essentially. Has that changed? No, it hasn’t changed because despite some of the challenges I’ve had with people, I trust. I want to give everything to the people that work with us and hopefully vice versa as well.

I founded a business with my brother. Some people say family businesses are not great businesses to work under, but sometimes working for families are great environments as long as you’ve got a fair and honest and trusting system across both sides. So that hasn’t changed from my belief.

29:00 COVID changed his belief about flexible working

One thing has changed. I was of the belief that because we’re a small business, we had a team of about 40 people, we needed to be in the office all the time. Because that’s the way we encourage collaboration and working with each other and getting to know each other as a group, as a family group.

But obviously with COVID that blew everything up. We had to go from pretty much everyone working together five days a week to basically not working together at all. But it actually helped. The fundamental core of trust, in the end what changed for me was that we can actually still grow and be a family and be collaborative but in a very flexible working environment. We don’t have to be on top of each other all the time. As long as everyone communicates. Communication is the key to do that.

31:00 The next 12 months: world domination

World domination, Steve. Definitely. We’ve got a lot on. In terms of really delivering on the vision of the business, we want to be the chosen payments provider that SMEs go to for how they get paid and how they pay out. We’ve got the get paid element sorted out but the next 12 months it’s all about delivering more value to our merchants by delivering better products in things like foreign exchange products, virtual card products, direct debit.

Travel, although how decimated that industry is, it will recover. We really want to look after our customers as well. We’re talking with these travel agents and they’re hurting but they’re looking at how to save costs and improve their business. This is a really great opportunity for me to get more of these guys on board. We had 400 travel agents pre-COVID. Now we’ve got about 550, 600. They will remember who helps them during this time.

32:30 Book recommendation: Winning by Jack Welch

I prefer non-fiction books. Business is a large part of my life. Becoming a better business person and helping run a better business because there’s a lot of responsibility running a business. You’ve got lots of people that depend on the business being successful. People forget that business owners are responsible for not just their staff but often their staff’s families.

One of the best books I’ve read is actually a book by Jack Welch called Winning. It’s an old book. When he tells you about his experiences it’s very conversational. It’s like you’re in the head of one of probably the best CEOs in history. When he talks to you about how he started and the mistakes he made and the tough decisions, you sort of try to relate to it in a small way in your little world. The challenges and the problems that he’s solving are similar to yours but in a very different scale.

33:30 Why work at Mint Payments

If you like to work for a business that is still evolving and growing and trying to find its hedgehog moment essentially. If you’re looking for a business that’s still establishing itself and becoming a very strong global payments player, then Mint’s the one for you. And you want to be global, right? Oh absolutely.

We work in a very flat structured organisation. Access to everyone is there. People are important. The business was co-founded by Andrew and myself. No one else in the business is family but we want to treat everyone as part of a family. We all work hard together. We get rewarded together.

35:00 The sales pitch to merchants

You just get a better experience. Everything’s better with Mint. If you want a much simpler, better experience. Something that can take you across multiple markets, across multiple payment channels. Because right now as we’ve all experienced, just because you have a bricks and mortar store doesn’t mean that’s the only way you’re going to get paid. Because now bricks and mortar stores are reinventing themselves online. So Mint can basically help businesses to take payments however they want, wherever they want.

Alex, thank you so much for coming on, man. No problem. As you know, we’ve known each other a long time. I’ve really enjoyed working with you guys and I do believe your team right now is so awesome and I think you’re just finally on this trajectory that is so clear. It’s great. And thank you Steve, you’ve been great. I think two or three years from here, when we hit our goals, I think a lot of that has to do with the people. I hope so. Thanks Steve. Thanks. Cheers.