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Raiz CEO: 10 Years – $2.1 Billion FUM and What Comes Next.

April 13, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

When Brendan Malone brought the Acorns micro-investing concept from the US to Australia in February 2016, the idea was straightforward: break down the barriers to investing so that every Australian could get into the stock market for as little as $5. A decade on, that idea has compounded into $2.1 billion in funds under management, 340,000 active monthly users and over $5.5 billion invested in total.

Brendan joined Dexter Cousins on Fintech Chatter to mark the 10-year milestone and talk through what it actually takes to build a durable fintech in Australia.

From Acorns to Raiz: the first 10 months

The business started as a joint venture with US-based Acorns Grow. The deal was straightforward: Acorns provided the technology and Raiz built the operational and regulatory infrastructure for Australia. That meant spending the first 11 months navigating ASIC, learning the payments system and selecting infrastructure partners who would still be operating a decade later.

“You want to set up a business for sustainability,” Brendan said. “We’re sitting here in 2016 going, who’s going to be around in 10 years to take us on that journey?”

The business launched publicly in February 2016, listed on the ASX as Raiz Invest in April 2018 and has operated under its own brand since.

The roundup innovation and $2.1 billion in small amounts

The core product is still the roundup. Link a debit or credit card, spend $6.50 on coffee, the app rounds it to $7.00 and holds the 50 cents. Once the accumulated roundups hit $5, the amount is direct debited from the linked bank account and invested in the chosen portfolio.

It is not complicated, but the compounding effect is. Raiz has paid over $230 million in dividends to customers, many of whom received a dividend for the first time through the platform. The business operates on a subscription model: $2.50 per month for the Light tier, $5.50 for Regular and $6.50 for Plus.

Southeast Asia: the right market, the wrong timing

Indonesia’s 280 million population made the expansion case easy to argue. The revenue model is user-based, so scale matters. Local governments had financial inclusion mandates that aligned with Raiz’s mission. The smartphone had already skipped the laptop generation.

The challenge was the market’s preference for crypto over equities, the absence of an ETF market equivalent to Australia’s and fragmented payment infrastructure. Brendan is candid about the lesson: “We were probably a bit too early for all that coming together.”

It is the same lesson Netflix learned arriving in Australia before broadband was ready.

CDR: a decade of roundtables with no consumer outcome

Consumer Data Right has been one of the recurring frustrations of Australian fintech’s first decade. Brendan’s position is direct: the problem is who is being consulted. The conversations have been dominated by legal and technical stakeholders, not consumers.

“They’re not talking to middle Australia, the masses,” he said. Raiz put a survey in-app last year and received 66,000 responses in 48 hours. That is the type of consumer signal the CDR process has consistently lacked.

Raiz has deliberately chosen not to be a first mover on CDR implementation. The strategy is to wait for the second or third wave, once the kinks are resolved and adoption is real.

42 people, $2.1 billion: what a lean fintech looks like in 2026

Raiz runs on a team of 42, with 7.3 FTEs handling customer support. When investors ask Brendan why he cannot cut staff the way a major bank has by deploying AI, his response is that he does not have 3,000 support staff to cut. He never hired them in the first place.

The product team runs three meaningful development projects at any time: two customer-facing and one back-of-house. The internal principle is not to become an owner builder whose house is never finished. AI is embedded in the workflow, not bolted on.

“RAIZ, R-A-I-Z. AI is in our name,” Brendan noted. “We’ve been using machine learning for years. That’s how we do what we do with 42 staff.”

The next 10 years: ecosystem, consolidation and endurance

Brendan’s product roadmap centres on building an ecosystem that spans a customer’s full financial life. Raiz Kids already serves the under-18 cohort. The vision is that a child who opens a Raiz Kids account and turns 18 migrates into the adult product and stays in that ecosystem indefinitely.

He also expects consolidation among micro-investing platforms within the next few years. His argument is that several players do different things well but none does everything well, and that consolidation would deliver a better, cheaper experience for customers.

The endurance principles he identifies in the fintechs that have survived a decade: stay close to customers, resist the bright shiny things, stick to your strategy three, five and 10 years out. Raiz has navigated the buy-now-pay-later hype, the crypto boom, the CDR promises and now AI without pivoting away from its core.

“A lot has changed,” Brendan said, “but there’s still a massive ramp for the next ten.”

Listen to the full episode

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Links from this episode.

Brendan Malone on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm exclusive to fintech. With me today is Brendan Malone, the group CEO of Raiz Invest, the ASX listed microinvesting platform with 1.6 billion under management and over 336,000 customers. Raiz started back in 2016, and you might have known them as Acorns. I chat to Brendan about his first decade in business, including the Raiz rebrand, their ASX listing in 2018, and their launch and expansion into Southeast Asia. Brendan, welcome back to Fintech Chatter.

Brendan Malone
Thank you, Dexter. Good to be here again.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
When was the last one?

Dexter Cousins
It was September 2020.

Brendan Malone
2020. Oh dear, mate. Mate, there’s a few gray hairs and…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I was going to say, mate, normally what I’m saying in these instances, older, bolder, fatter, and sadly no wiser, but I’ve lost a bit of weight since the last time.

Brendan Malone
No, I think I’ll put it on. There’s a few more grays and it’s been…

Dexter Cousins
Definitely no wiser, though.

Brendan Malone
Do you know, six years?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. But we’re here to, I guess, a couple of things. One is obviously catch up on that time. But this year Tier One People celebrates a decade in business, and it coincides, I think we’re about a month out from you celebrating a decade in business. And as part of my celebrations, where I really want to honor and pay homage to the businesses that were around when I started Tier One People, and really what it takes to build an enduring fintech. We’ve both been around for the last 10 years. We’ve seen a lot of people come and go. And yeah, look, I thought it would be great to have a chat about that, but more importantly, what do you think the next decade looks like?

Brendan Malone
Yeah, perfect. Let’s get into it.

Dexter Cousins
Let’s go back to the beginning, right? Raiz, you weren’t even called Raiz, were you?

Brendan Malone
No. No. If we go back 10 years, as you said, so February 2016, we launched to the public and opened up to the retail investors out there. But there was another 12 months before that. Yeah. So we talk about March 2015, we had the relationship with Acorns Grow, and that’s what we originally called out from the US, and we bought the joint venture out here to Australia. And it was kind of, here’s the technology, but you guys get the IP up and running in Australia, the know-how, operational, etc.

So we did that for the first 11 months, say, from March ’15 to February ’16, and then live. And like, as you said, we’ve been through so many ups and downs. We’ve been, not only from a political or a economic point of view, but also thematic in our fintech world. You and I have had several conversations across the buy now pay laters, the crypto world, the fintech world. There’s been a hell of a… and then you go into the regtechs and all that. We’ve seen a lot of them come and go. And it’s been a hard grind. So when you look around today, it has been 10 years that the solders have known each other. A lot has changed, but yeah, there’s still a massive ramp for the next 10.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So let’s talk about, and go back in time to that 10 year kind of starting point. What was, I guess, the genesis for the idea, and how did you get it off the ground?

Brendan Malone
Yeah. So it came through Baker McKenzie actually, and a guy called George Lucas, who had the opportunity to bring Acorns Grow out from the US. And they wanted to do global expansion. It was a, where do you go? You go to Australia. Language seemed good, banking system good, regulatory system. Let’s get it up and running. So we brought the joint venture out here, and then we spent that next 10 months, 11 months, talking with the regulators.

One of the biggest learnings for me was the payment section, the payments. I was in hardcore banking or investment banking, coming back from an accounting background before that. I had no idea about the payment system. So that was a big learning curve and understanding. And that was, oh, I wouldn’t say, back 10 years ago, but then things have changed since then with the NPP, even the CDR, consumer data right, and open banking. That’s all come in through the 10 years that we’ve known each other. And I’ll say there’s a combination of mess, but going through the weeds and trees and the forest to get to where CDR’s got to now, and I still think there’s some room to move on that.

But it was really understanding who are the players, who’s here. You want to set up a business for sustainability. It’s not a, oh, let’s just do everything today and then we’ll worry about tomorrow. No, you’ve always got to look ahead. And that’s the way we suck start. The way that we thought, we have about three or four key partners.

Dexter Cousins
Right.

Brendan Malone
So we make sure we pick the right partner that are going to be here in the next 10 years. So we know we’re sitting here in 2016 going, well, who’s going to be around in 10 years to take us on that journey? Because the last thing you want to do is unplug and plug someone else on the back end.

Dexter Cousins
Now, I’ve got a loyal following and I always assume that everybody knows who they are, but we also get new listeners as well. It’s probably a good idea if we talk about actually Raiz, and the solution and the problem that you actually solved. And maybe if we start where you are now, but then kind of work backwards to kind of what the first iteration of it was and kind of how you gradually evolved.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. So as I said, we started with Acorns and now we’re Raiz, and we changed the name in April 2018 when we listed on the ASX as a company. But what drew me to the Raiz, or the Acorns opportunity to bring out, was the fact that it breaks down the barriers to investing.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
For as little as $5, every Australian can get into the stock market. In the early days, I was doing panels and interviews in the universities and things like that, and you’d ask customers, are you invested in shares? And no one puts their hand up. And then you say, do you have a super fund? And they all put their hand up. So there’s a high opportunity. So that financial education, financial literacy wasn’t there, and we saw the opportunity to bring the Acorns back in to break down those barriers.

So the problem we were solving was getting into the market and financial education. So we created the system to be able to do that. But what we don’t realize as individuals is, what does a professional athlete do? Small bits of training to get better. What do you do with your own education? Small bits of education, get better. Well, why can’t you treat that for wealth?

So small amounts consistently add up. And if you jump forward to today, we’ve got over 340,000 active monthly users using the platform. But more importantly, we’ve got $2.2 billion worth of funds under management.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, they’re small amounts consistently, at 2.2. That’s a lot of money.

Brendan Malone
Over the 10 years that we’ve been operating, we’ve invested over $5.5 billion for young Australians.

Dexter Cousins
So the innovation, and it kind of doesn’t seem innovative now, but back then it really was, was roundups.

Brendan Malone
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
Talk us through that concept, what you brought to market.

Brendan Malone
We sort of pioneered the concept for wealth management in roundups, where you download the app from the App Store or the Google Play Store, or there’s a web app. We still running a web app, which a lot of people don’t, but we believe that bigger the screen, bigger the investment, and make sure it’s all as transparent as you can. But if you download the app, you link a funding source. So that’s where your money has to come from, and that’s got to be an Australian bank account, not a credit card or a line of credit, because that’s all with cash advances.

Dexter Cousins
So a bank account.

Brendan Malone
Then the second thing you’re asked to link is your roundup account. And why? People go, why do you need that? Because we want to use automation. Raiz is built on two core principles. Small amounts consistently add up, but also leveraging technology to make everybody’s life easier. And if you can set reoccurring deposits or you have your automatic roundups going, it does in the background of life.

Originally we would have said that the perfect customer is Dexter: download the app, set your automatic roundups on, set your $50 a week recurring deposit, and delete the app, and just let it build up in the background of life. And the core principle of it, especially the roundups: if you link your debit card or credit card to the app and you go buy a coffee downstairs, and for $6.50, it rounds it to $7. So it holds that 50. Then you buy some petrol. $8. Only $3.50 when we first put on, we did, we put on a post. It was $3.50 10 years ago, and we just reset, we reused it again because it was a high performing asset on social media. And it’s always good to get attention, and the first comment on the Facebook, where can you get a $3.50 coffee?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Yeah. Now it’s $6.50.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. But it looks at your transactions and said coffee, Caltex, movie cinema, news agency, adds up all those. And once those little roundups, 50 cents here, 22 cents here, 80 cents here, it’s like the ashtray in the car. Yeah. When you and I were younger, you pay for things with cash, you’d get back in the car and just put your coins in the ashtray. So it’s the virtual ashtray now.

And when those roundups get to $5, a direct debit your bank account and then puts it in the stock market for you. And you can have them automatically set up, again leveraging technology to make your life easier, or you can manually go in and do them. And it was very innovative back 10, 11 years ago.

Dexter Cousins
You kind of originally were targeting millennials. Has that kind of stayed true, or have you really kind of…

Brendan Malone
I think we took the playbook from the US, and it was very much focused on that 18 to 21 years. This is 10 years ago. But what we saw is that our real sweet spot started to become the sort of 25 to 35, finished uni, got their first job, have that little bit of extra cash to deposit away and sort of start their wealth creation journey. But today we’ve got right the waterfront because the product development’s changed so much. We’ve got Raiz Kids. Yeah. And we’ve got customers that are 88 and 89 years of age using the app.

So right the way through, there’s no real sweet spot. Yeah. There’s a chunk in the middle, but what we want to do is break down the barriers to investing for all Australians, no matter your starting point. Because we believe wealth is a right, not a privilege.

Dexter Cousins
So let’s talk about the growth plans, because as you pointed out before, we’ve kind of seen a lot of things come and go, a lot of hype cycles, a lot of advice that, on reflection, was it actually advice coming from experience, or was it advice coming from what they’d read some VC or influencer on Twitter? And I think unfortunately a lot of businesses have suffered or gone out of business as a result of some pretty bad decisions that were made.

I guess some that I want to have a chat with you about are, first of all, the ASX listing, and then the move into Southeast Asia, which both of them at the time would have been really sound strategies and growth strategies. Particularly the ASX listing, because there wasn’t a lot of appetite from VC to invest in fintech back at that time. What, when you kind of look back at those decisions, what kind of, first of all, what was the thinking at the time, and then what’s your thinking now, and if you got your time again, what might you do differently?

Brendan Malone
Yeah, I think to the first part of the question is, I think there’s no normal anymore, and especially 10 years ago things were changing all the time. And I do believe it was people were reading or listening to someone else. A lot of it wasn’t original ideas. They jumped on thematics, and that’s where I think a lot of…

Dexter Cousins
And a lot of it came from the US, right, where you got a totally different market.

Brendan Malone
Totally. And you think of the scale of… I was talking to a guy the other day that said, oh, he’s got a 9% market share in the US. And I’m like, that’s great. You think of 9% of the US market versus…

Dexter Cousins
Is the Australian market.

Brendan Malone
60, 70% of the Aussie market. And to his credit, he goes, oh, we want more, absolutely. But 9% in their first year is great because of the scale and the number of people. But it does come out. And what I’m very happy about with the management team, the board we’ve had here over the years, is we stick to our strategy. Today I have a north star that’s a couple of years down the road, anywhere from three to five. I’ve got a 10 year product plan.

But you got to manage to get to these goalposts first. But we stick a flag in the sand. Like, we put out our half year results last week, told the world, or the universe, or the investors, where we’re heading, and that’s where we want to continue to live, and then we don’t want to change. And as you said, when Afterpay went to the moon, everybody’s like, why can’t you be on Afterpay? And there’s a couple of reasons for that.

If you and I, down the road on Martin Place, and you handing people $100 and saying, here, take 100 bucks, pay me back in four equal installments. And I’m saying, hey, give me $100, I’ll look after it.

Dexter Cousins
Whose queue’s going to be longer?

Brendan Malone
Simple. Per crypto came along. Oh, look, Bitcoin’s going to the moon. Everybody piled in. So no, no, stay core to our thematics. We listened to what our customers were wanting. And when we broke down the barriers to ETFs, because our first portfolios were all ETFs, then we moved into some socially responsible themes, because our customer said, oh, look, we want to invest in what we did. So we made a socially responsible portfolio called Emerald. And then the next thing was, well, you’ve broken down the barriers to those, what’s this thing called crypto?

And my core philosophy is, I learned from a very young age, or adult, young teenager, of my first investment in Fosters: you only invest in what you understand, and what you really understand, not what you like, and head versus…

Dexter Cousins
So that leads into my next question. One of your side hustles is you manage pubs and own pubs.

Brendan Malone
I don’t anymore, but that’s okay. Maybe I’ve learned two lessons on this, that side of the… this side of the… But the customer say, what about this thing called crypto? So we spent a lot of time talking with ASIC about how do we get an allocation to crypto. And we chose Bitcoin, hardcore Bitcoin, not a derivative of. So we built a portfolio called Sapphire, where it had a 5% allocation to crypto, so that people could understand and educate and, I won’t say enjoy, but be part of that volatility movement and what that actual asset class actually means.

So whilst there’s thematics there, you can do it better than just jumping on. And as you and I have seen over the years, a couple of fintechs that haven’t survived because they’ve rapidly changed their strategy. But what I’m happy about, especially with Alex, my CFO, we stay very consistent with what we do, what we say we’ll do, and where our strategy is going, but we have it three, five and 10 years out.

Dexter Cousins
Southeast Asia, obviously, on the face of it, huge market, 600 million odd people. What I would say is a kind of burgeoning economy. I was in Bali, I think it was about a year and a half ago, actually there in a couple of weeks. But it was the first time I’d been back in about 10 years, and I couldn’t believe the change. And what it was all down to was a smartphone, right? Uber and Grab and all of that stuff.

And everybody, whether it was a kind of waiter, they were all self-employed brands, kind of hustlers, right? And it was amazing to see, go from people, their only option is to sell me a bangle or a piece of tat on the beach, now all of a sudden…

Brendan Malone
It’s booming.

Dexter Cousins
How did that translate then with the Raiz product, and what were the challenges, changes that you saw?

Brendan Malone
Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, and we go back to the American population, and that’s why Acorns originally, say they got a massive population. Australia’s got 24, 25 million, they say maybe 26 now, but the Indonesians got 280 million people in it. So it was a scale game, because our revenue model is about number of users. A lot of people confuse us as an asset manager that goes, whatever your FUM is, there’s your fees. We don’t do performance fees. We don’t do anything like that. It is about number of users.

And you’re in Australia at the moment, you either pay $2.50 per month for as many deposits, if you’re in the Lite, or withdrawals as you want, or rebalances. Regular’s $5.50 a month, and the Plus is $6.50 a month. So it’s a scale game. Yeah. And when you’re talking about a population of 280 million people…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
That we want to bring… the local governments are the same thing. They want to be… Any government has a mandate, or should have a mandate, of financial literacy, financial inclusion, financial awareness and all that sort of stuff. So we saw an opportunity there. And I think to your point, we missed the Indonesian and a lot of South skipped the laptop generation. They went from the PCs to the phones, and that’s where it’s really come, when you look at the Grabs, etc. It’s a great bit of technology, great bit of kit, bringing accessibility to everybody.

But our biggest challenge was that they want higher growth sort of exercises, and unfortunately there was more investors into the crypto space in Indonesia than there was to the equity space, because they saw the volatility, the quicker, the higher gains, the quicker gains, the bigger gains, more than that long-term consistency investing. So that was probably our biggest challenge there. They didn’t have, or they don’t have, an ETF market like we do. What is an ETF? Gives the investor, in Raiz’s case the first time investors, a massive diversification exercise. They didn’t have that.

And then one of the challenges for Raiz was the payment systems. They got their e-wallets, they’ve got the bag gig systems, trying to bring all those together. We were probably a bit too early for all that coming together and having a customer’s adoption rate on those.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. It’s a bit like when you look back, 10 years ago Netflix came to Australia. But I remember being a Quickflix customer and trying their streaming service, and it was just terrible, right? But I’d still use it to get the DVDs mailed out.

Brendan Malone
Yep.

Dexter Cousins
And then all of a sudden broadband started to really kind of, we get the infrastructure, and the NBN got its game together. And all of a sudden Netflix, like, right, it’s ready, let’s go. And obviously they dominate.

Brendan Malone
It was a game changer. Absolute game changer.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So it’s a kind of lesson that being first isn’t always…

Brendan Malone
No, it going to be there at the end.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, exactly.

Brendan Malone
Look, we still, even from our technology and the systems that we use here in Australia, when the CDR came here, we deliberately chose not to be the first adopters on it. Go the second, go the second and the third tier, to make sure all the kinks are ironed out, and then there is an adoption from the population.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about CDR and kind of regulation, and a little bit more depth, because I think the biggest frustration that I’ve got, and I’m not a founder of a fintech, I’m a business owner, but I’m not kind of trying to create a fintech, but looking at from the sidelines, that conversation around CDR has been the same conversation for almost 10 years, and we really don’t seem to be any further forward than the kind of conversations we’re having about the merits of screen scraping versus…

Brendan Malone
Oh God, I remember those.

Dexter Cousins
Yes. So where do you see that it’s at from a founder’s perspective? You know what? One of the things that I’m really frustrated about is that if I look at this past decade, there’s billions of investor dollars, and hundreds of founders and businesses have been burned, are no longer around, and they’ve been literally used for R&D from the government and regulators. Let’s do another policy submission. Let’s do another round table. Treasury is doing it, right? Let’s say, sign up for your membership fees. Five different governing bodies all ask us to submit the same policies.

What’s your take on what we need to do in this next decade, if we’re to move from what I call fintech 1.0, which is what businesses like you guys have done and set the groundwork, to now this next evolution, which we’re in it. Yeah, we’re truly in the digital era now. It’s not like kind of retrofitting.

Brendan Malone
No.

Dexter Cousins
And on top of that, in the last x amount of months and years, is you put AI over this.

Brendan Malone
Look, that’s a good question, and it’s a tough one. I mean, CDR drives me nuts. We have been having the same conversations. People tell me that the adoption rate’s improved and it’s going great guns, but from a practicality point of view, from a business and a consumer, when you’re doing…

Dexter Cousins
As a consumer, like, what difference does it make to me?

Brendan Malone
It does. It hasn’t. So you build, and as I said, we’ve got our three, five and 10 year plan out there, but if one thing doesn’t change here, you got to continue to review it, continually adopt it. And it’s not as if, especially at the business that we’re at now, we have to keep the show on the road. I can’t pause just to do a new thing. I had actually a round table consultation yesterday, another one.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
And it is, guys, stop putting the red tape in. Stop, let’s make a decision. But they’re making decisions that… My biggest gripe is who’s making the decision, because they’re not talking to middle Australia, the masses.

Dexter Cousins
This is kind of the argument that I’ve made from day one, right? It’s called CDR, which I thought that C stood for consumer, but there’s been no consultation with consumers at all, right? And the conversation’s always been about legal stuff and technical stuff.

Brendan Malone
Exactly.

Dexter Cousins
I said, my views are, it’s the classic startup mistake, right? You’re building something, thinking build it and they will come.

Brendan Malone
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And you’re not asking the customers actually what their problems are.

Brendan Malone
I had the same thing, especially with Raiz, and we’re very fortunate that our customers will tell us. And there’s 340,000. Okay, it’s not the biggest, but it’s not a small consensus as such. But going back to the pub analysis, we had a bloke down on that would turn up every Thursday, goes, if you put two is new on tap, I’d be here every day.

Dexter Cousins
No, you won’t, mate.

Brendan Malone
Yeah, exactly. No, you won’t. Absolutely not. But what we learned, in the first sort of six or seven months, when our customers were telling us, we would like a socially responsible portfolio, we would like a socially responsible portfolio, we built it and they moved across to it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
At the early days, it fast became our second portfolio within a couple of weeks, couple of months. So what we’re doing now is we are listening to our customers. We put a survey out the other day in the app, and we had 66,000 responses.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

Brendan Malone
Within 24, 48 hours.

Dexter Cousins
Superannuation firms would love that type of engagement.

Brendan Malone
And this is what I was saying at the round table. You’re not listening to the everyday population. So what we’ve put out in our half-year results at the end of February was our product road map. And I’m on the road as an ASX listed company, talking to investors about it, and they’re like, oh, we’re a bit nervous. No, no, we’re not a company that builds a product and goes, oh, let’s go and find the customers. We’re putting the product in front of the customers that the customers are asking for. And what does that do? It creates that sustainability and use of the product.

Dexter Cousins
Let’s look forward to this next 10 years, because we’ve touched on this a bit. When I started my business 10 years ago, I was obviously bricking it, right? Wondering what have I done? And I was equally parts excited as I was terrified. And obviously, the milestone, you reflect and you go, well, what’s the next 10 years going to be like? And I’m equally parts excited and terrified. And I think the reason for that is AI, and every founder that I’m talking to saying to me, gosh, if I would start again, I think I could build this business and not hire 500 people. I could hire 50.

Brendan Malone
Yep. Yep. Yeah. Look, obviously in the press in the last couple of days, and I’ve been on the road show with investors, and they’re like, oh, how come one of the banks cut 3,000 support staff for the use of AI? Why can’t you do that, Brendan? I’m like, cuz I don’t have 3,000. I’ve got 42. And we’ve got, I think it was about seven or eight, 7.3 or 7.5 FTEs on our customer support desk.

Dexter Cousins
And I think this is the flip of it, right?

Brendan Malone
We didn’t go out and hire, and you lassing go out and hire and they had to bring back, and a lot of them have gone up and down, but we haven’t done that. We just stayed true. We’ve got a great team. We’ve got experienced people doing what they need to do.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I think this is kind of the narrative that I’m… And this is where I’m kind of frightened of the second and third order consequences.

Brendan Malone
You’re right, though. It is different. This is different.

Dexter Cousins
From my perspective, I look and I go, great. Brendan with 40 people, if they’re using AI, they’ll be doing the work of 400, right? That’s the reality, right? And I’m saying that now. It’s not up for debate as far as I’m concerned. But I think the kind of issue that I’ve got, the thing that I’m concerned about is, great, we’re kind of building all these new startups, but we all know that startups, 90% of them fail.

And if Atlassian is making 1,600 people, right, that’s 16 new startups that have to be super successful, but only with 100 people, to kind of make up for that loss, right? So it’s a really interesting kind of period that we’re at right now.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. Look, people have said to me, especially in the last couple of months, is like, would you do it all again, cuz you can build it quicker and faster and all that? And the answer is no, because whilst you can still build the tech, you still need the customers. We’ve accumulated and spent a lot of time and effort talking to our customers, nurturing them through, which is, for a lot of them, I think there was $230 million in 10 years worth of dividends, for the first time they’ve ever received a dividend. Yeah, we’ve done that. So no, I wouldn’t do it.

Yes, we are using AI a lot. And look, it’s Raiz, R-A-I-Z. AI is in our name. We’ve been using it. That’s how we do what we do with 42 staff.

Dexter Cousins
Oh, the rebranding already, or capital A, capital A Z, lowercase R, capital A.

Brendan Malone
Exactly. That’s the shirt. But that’s, we calling it machine learning, AI. It’s been those terms for years. And what we do here internally is make sure that we’re delivering projects. We usually have three on the go, three decent ones going, as well as your hot fixes and keeping the show on the road. But we do two for the customers, one for back of house, because what I don’t want to be, and coming from the banks and talking to a lot of friends that having incumbent systems not talking to each other…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
So we make sure that we’ve got two for the customer and two for the back of house, because we don’t want to be the owner builders whose house is never finished. And that’s where AI is stepping in.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I guess if you look at the, and one of the themes that is coming as I’m doing these conversations is this thing about endurance, and the same thematics come through, which is cyclical.

Brendan Malone
Yeah, it’s cyclical.

Dexter Cousins
It’s that, but it’s also don’t chase the bright shiny things.

Brendan Malone
Oh yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Keep true to your vision, but also build over a long time. Whether it’s Chris at Stockspot, whether it’s Alex at Spriggy, there’s a few things that I think are really very clear, that is that the CEO or the leader of the business is still super close to customers.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. Oh, you have to.

Dexter Cousins
Super close. And everything is built with a customer in mind. And it’s been fascinating over this last decade to say that every business that has scaled, where they stop, or where the brakes get put on, is usually they bring in somebody external who starts with product, chief product officer or whatever, and they start building.

Brendan Malone
Absolutely.

Dexter Cousins
They do two things. They build the thing that they think is cool…

Brendan Malone
Or they listen to the guy at the pub who says you should put on two eies.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And whoever complains loudest, kind of, they build features around that.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. But I know so many guys out there, mates in fintechs, that have spent so much, as in millions of dollars, building something and then, no, turn it off. You’ve got to… and like, I still read the reviews on Facebook. Even the pub, I hated having social media at the pub, because if you sit down and have a good meal…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
Thanks, Brendan, see you later. If you have a bad meal, on the train on the way home you get on the Facebook and you put about a post. But you got to read them.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
I like reading it. Now, when I read Raiz, we’re fortunate enough to have more good reviews than bad reviews, but I read both to understand what the customers… And when we set the business up, I talk to customer support and say, at the end, at Friday, I want all of you guys to give me the top five issues that you had, or what were customers ringing for? And we consolidate them and give them to the tech boys to sort it out, or the marketing team to sort it out, whatever it is.

I get very upset if any of those five are on next Friday’s list.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
Because all it’s doing is blocking up. It’s not a great customer experience. It’s blocking up customer support for other questions that might be new and relevant. Because no matter, tech, it’s technology, there’s always going to be a bug. You get one in 100,000 bugs instead of one in 10 bugs, sort of, these days. So we need that channel. We listen to… look, I spend most of my ferry ride home looking at reviews on Facebook to see what the customers are saying.

Dexter Cousins
So, next 10 years, mate, what is the road map?

Brendan Malone
Well, mate, if you’ve lost weight in the last 10, that might be my goal for the next 10. My hair gets a lot shorter than what it used to be these days because of the grays. But I think, and you’ll see my half year results, is there’s an ecosystem out there. I’ve got a lot of competitors out there, and we’re all competing for the investor dollar.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
With the dollar. Not… I’m not fighting for… We used to fight for Dexter. Now it’s kind of, yeah, but what’s Dexter doing with his wealth? Where’s he putting it now? Should you have put a dollar in 10 things, or should you consolidate them? So we’re building an ecosystem. And I’m going to steal your word, endurance, because I still use the word sustainability of the organization, but the endurance of the… let’s create an ecosystem that, I’ve got from kids, millennials, 75% of my customers are millennials and under.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Brendan Malone
I want to be the Dollarmites of my era, where 34% of our customers still have a relationship with CBA at my age, because they had a Dollarmites account. So if we can create an ecosystem, and what I mean by that is, my dad was 79 last week. Lived up in God’s country near you. He’s got a Raiz account cuz he’s my dad and he has to, but he’s got kids accounts. So Izzy and Tom, five and seven, down the center of the scale. So when they turn 18, they’ll move to them and it’ll stay in that ecosystem.

So I really want to build out that ecosystem where we can offer… And I think, on that line, there does need to be some consolidation in our space, because it’s not only from an investor point of view, but if a couple of us came together and consolidated, it’d be a much better, cleaner and cheaper experience for a customer.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Awesome.

Brendan Malone
So that’s what I think will happen in the next… and I don’t think it’ll be in the next 10 years. I think it’ll be in the next couple years that we can all come together, because a lot of us don’t compete directly with each other. We all do a couple of things well, but not 100% what we all do. If a couple of us came together to deliver that better customer experience, build that trust, build that knowledge and relationship with a customer, the customer will win.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Awesome.

Brendan Malone
Absolutely.

Dexter Cousins
Well, Brendan, it’s been great to catch up. We’ll probably not leave this one, the next one, for another six years.

Brendan Malone
Definitely not.

Dexter Cousins
Where can people find out more about Raiz? Download the app.

Brendan Malone
Yeah. So it’s Raiz, R-A-I. Remember the AI. raizinvest.com.au. And you’ll see this on social media, but available on the Apple Store, the Google Store, or, as I said, we have a web app if people want to get in and learn. But I think a lot of the reason is people say, why would I use Raiz? Just remember, it’s in there for their wealth. If you put your $10 in and you’re not comfortable, you’re not happy, you hit the big button that says withdraw, and you get your money back.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Well, as always folks, you can catch up with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you are new to the show, make sure you give us a follow if you’re listening on podcast, and if you’re watching us on YouTube, give us a thumbs up and also subscribe. It really helps spread the word about great businesses like Raiz. Until the next episode, keep well.

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