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Jamie Twiss: How Beforepay uses AI credit risk to destroy payday lending.

May 25, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

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Jamie Twiss took Beforepay Group from a pre-IPO startup into a profitable ASX-listed fintech writing 40,000 loans a week with a 99% repayment rate. He explains why the company exists to destroy payday lending, how Carrington Labs is selling AI credit risk models to US lenders, and why he believes AI will fundamentally rewire the entire finance sector.

About Jamie Twiss

Jamie Twiss is CEO of Beforepay Group (ASX: B4P) and Carrington Labs, with over 20 years in financial services spanning McKinsey, Commonwealth Bank, and Westpac where he served as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Data Officer. He holds a degree in Slavic Languages and Literature from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford.

Beforepay Group and Carrington Labs

• Why Beforepay exists to destroy the payday lending sector and how it charges one tenth the cost

• How the company’s AI credit risk models analyse hundreds of variables to achieve a 1.1% default rate

• Beforepay’s H1 FY26 results including $4.2 million net profit, up 50% year on year

• Why 2026 is the year of personal loans with originations up 73% quarter on quarter

• How Carrington Labs packages Beforepay’s risk IP into a SaaS product for US lenders

• Jamie’s comparison of AI to electricity and why he believes it will rewire entire sectors

• Why he backs capability over experience every time when hiring

• The culture formula of accountability, kindness and obsessive data analysis

• How studying Russian literature at Harvard prepared him for running a fintech

LINKS & RESOURCES

Jamie Twiss on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/james-twiss

Beforepay Group: beforepay.com.au

Beforepay Investor Hub: beforepaygroup.com/investors

Carrington Labs: carringtonlabs.com

ASX: B4P

Fintech Chatter is brought to you by Tier One People – Executive Search for Fintech, where we work with founders like Jamie to find the 1% who redefine what’s possible. If you’re upscaling your leadership team, start at tieronepeople.com.

Links from this episode.

More on lending on Fintech Chatter.

More on AI in financial services.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Jamie, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Jamie Twiss
Thank you. It’s terrific to be here, mate.

Dexter Cousins
It’s fantastic to have you here. Before we go into today’s show, maybe you could explain to people watching and people listening a little bit more about Beforepay Group.

Jamie Twiss
So Beforepay Group is an ASX-listed fintech. There are two sides to our business. We have a mission-driven consumer finance business that issues small short-term loans to people who just need a little bit of money to tide them over until the next time they get paid. We write about 40,000 small-dollar, short-duration loans every week. And then separately, we have an enterprise risk analytics software business. We have a lot of IP on the lending side that helps us understand who to lend to and how much. And Carrington Labs is the other side of our business. What that does is commercialise that IP: it wraps it up in a product and sells it to other lenders globally, mostly in the United States.

Dexter Cousins
Okay, my head’s spinning just listening to that, because it’s hard enough to build a consumer fintech in Australia. It’s equally as complex to build a fintech software business. To be doing both in parallel, you must be spending a lot of money on a therapist every month.

Jamie Twiss
Well, perhaps I should be spending more money on therapy. So I’d say there are two things. One is obviously having a very strong team under you helps a lot, and we have a very capable group of data scientists, product people, engineers and many others, and that’s a big part of our success. The second thing is the core of both businesses is the same core capability around data-driven credit risk management. We built that because we needed it for Beforepay. We needed to find a way to lend a few hundred dollars to people in a way that worked for them and was sustainable for us. When we built that capability, we realised it had broader application to many other lenders as well. So that core build was heavily overlapping, and that’s what I think makes it…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So you’re also an ASX-listed business, which adds even more complexity to that. There’s nowhere to hide when it comes to the numbers, and you delivered some pretty impressive results recently. Do you want to talk through those?

Jamie Twiss
Yeah. So the company is profitable. We’ve been profitable for a couple of years now. If you look at our first half of FY26 results, so that’s the period from July 2025 to December 2025, we had net profit of $4.2 million. That comes off the back of good revenue growth, so that core business is still growing pretty nicely.

And then the real kicker is, in any lending business, repayment is the product. It’s easy to get money out the door. Whether you’ll make money depends on whether you can get those loans back again. And so year on year we’ve steadily improved the way that we do risk management. I think we actually have a world-leading capability in how to think about data-driven credit risk. And as a result, our average loan size is about $450. The average duration is about four weeks. So these are small, short-duration loans, and we did more than approximately 2 million of them, but about 99% of that money comes back. In FY24 that default rate was 1.4%. In FY25 it was 1.1%. So we do find we’ve kind of cracked the code on getting that money back again.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So there was, I guess, a lot of stigma attached to the category, particularly, I’m thinking back a decade ago now, with things that happened in the UK. And here in Australia, to some extent, there’s been noise around buy now pay later and some of the ill-advised practices around that. What have you done with Beforepay to, one, get those types of results in terms of the repayments; two, be able to pick the right customer; and then three, I guess, look, we’re sitting here where there’s just been another interest rate increase, and the cost of living is a challenge for everybody. What’s the role that Beforepay plays now in this challenging economic environment that we’ve got?

Jamie Twiss
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’d say the answer to all of those is essentially the same thing, which is really understanding your customers, and understanding who can use a small short-term loan in a way that will put them in a better place and, as part of that, will be able to repay us as well. So if I think about why we exist: we exist because there are millions and millions of people in Australia, as many as half of all employed Australians, who just don’t have a big margin for error. They don’t have a lot of savings. They are keeping their head above water, but if something goes wrong, they’ll be in a difficult situation. Historically, the financial services sector has not done a good job of helping those people when they get into hot water.

And very specifically, the payday lending sector is a very predatory and unpleasant sector, and we exist very explicitly to destroy that sector as it stands today. The key to doing that, and the most important element of that, of course, is giving customers that same sort of flexibility, that access to short-term credit when they need it, but in a way that is safe and affordable. And so there are really a couple of elements to that. The biggest one is we are just vastly more affordable than a payday lender would be. Often one-tenth or less of the cost, depending on how you use the products. And the second thing is just a number of safety features: you can only have one advance at a time, so you can’t stack them up, and we don’t have penalty fees and things like that. So when you put those two things together, you give the customer a much better and more sustainable experience. If someone has an unexpected veterinarian bill, or the car breaks down, that shouldn’t be the ruin of their financial life. With a payday loan, it can be. With us, we lend you the money, you pay us back, and you get on with your life. It’s quite a different proposition.

Now, to do that, this comes back to what I was saying a moment ago. You have to really understand those customers, and be able to look at an individual and a rich set of data around them and understand: well, this person actually can affordably, responsibly handle a $300 advance, but 500 or 600 would start to stretch them. So you have to have a good data-driven way of figuring that out. And we do that by getting their consent to look at their bank transaction data, and we calculate literally hundreds of different variables about them. That gives a very rich picture of them, and then of what the right lending outcome for them might be.

Dexter Cousins
So you’ve called 2026 the year of the personal loan. Can you tell us about that product, why you developed it, and where you’re going with it?

Jamie Twiss
So our flagship product is the pay advance product. That’s what we started with. It ranges from $50 to $2,000. It’s usually a few weeks long, up to a couple of months. And that product works really well. We’re writing 40,000 of those every week. Customers value it. It’s designed to be safe and affordable, and that works well. Now, we often find, and we celebrate this when it happens, that some customers may start at the lower end of that $50 to $2,000 range. They might start at $50 or $100, but then as they get older, they get some raises, they start to establish themselves a bit more, and their capacity increases and their needs increase as well. And so we found there were customers who were what we call graduating from the product. They got to the point where the advances that we were giving them weren’t really enough, and they kind of had to go somewhere else. And often those customers are quite loyal and supportive of us, but we just have the right product for them.

And so what we’ve done is we’ve launched a personal loan product, and it picks up where the pay advance left off. It starts at $2,000, and it currently goes up to $5,000. And we’ve been very clear that we will continue to increase that over time as we prove out the credit of that. It also has a longer duration. So it started at 3 months, and then it’s gone to 6 months, and we’ve said that it’s going to keep going from there as well. So that product is designed to do two things. One is it gives our existing customers an option, so that we can grow with them as they grow. And of course, it also enables us to tap into other customer segments, where a $450 average pay advance might not be what they need, but a $3,000 loan or a $4,000 loan actually solves the use case in front of them.

Dexter Cousins
One of the interesting stats that I’ve noticed when I’ve looked through my business is that historically the split of the portfolio has typically been around about 70% software businesses and 30% what I’d say is more the fin side of fintech, which is financial products. Actually, over this last 12 months that’s levelled out. It’s almost like a 50/50 split. The encouraging sign for me is: is this finally the point now where we start to truly see innovation within fintech on the product side, not just on the CX side or the infrastructure and technology part? You’re sitting in a fairly unique position, where you’ve got a software or technology business and you’ve got a financial products business as well. What’s your take on it?

Jamie Twiss
It’s a great question. I think fintech is a very broad church. There are lots of different businesses that can label themselves as fintechs. And I think you’re right that some of those are creating products that actually nobody really needs, right? They’re taking something that already exists, but they’re putting a brightly coloured label over the top of it, or the user interface or user experience may be different. Now, there has been innovation. I think payments is an area where there’s been very vibrant innovation, for example. In wealth, you can see the green shoots emerging, with people trying to lean into that. Lending has been a much tougher nut to crack, and there are a bunch of reasons for that. One is it’s capital intensive, but the biggest one is that credit risk is very, very difficult. You have large banks with billions of dollars of profits, and even they, with tremendous resources, I think really struggle to have a sharp point of view on how much they should lend to people, under what conditions and so on.

So I do think you’re right. We are one of the first companies that I think really has a genuinely different way of thinking about that risk piece, and particularly that data-driven credit risk management. It’s enabled us to grow as a lending business in a very healthy manner, and I think we’ve got a lot of runway there as well. We also think, in terms of how you scale this business quickly, that providing that software to other lenders in non-competitive settings is fantastic, right? It’s capital light, it’s high margin, and so that’s a great business for us as well, because it is genuinely distinctive.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So, Carrington Labs. Tell us a little bit more about that. You’ve looked to push into the US as well.

Jamie Twiss
Yeah. So we are active in the US. Most of our Carrington Labs clients are US-based lenders of different descriptions. The core of Carrington Labs is the same capability that has powered the Beforepay business. What we have done is we have taken that ability, abstracted it out of this specific situation, consumer finance in Australia, and rebuilt it and packaged it in a way that virtually any lender can come to us. We can look at their lending data, their customers, their experience, and we can quickly create a very high-end, custom alternative data risk model for them. So if you are a credit card company, and you’ve been doing things with a credit score and a couple of pay slips, we can take a much wider set of data and give you a much sharper point of view on whether this is somebody you should lend to, or issue a card to, or not.

And we also do a lot of work around, for example, limit management. So you might be good for, let’s say, a credit card or a loan, but is that $5,000 or $10,000? That’s something that most lenders don’t have a sharp capability on, and we have a very rigorous way of thinking about that. And then we also do a lot of work on your existing book of business. We can monitor that and help you think through how to interact with your individual customers to maximise repayment and so on. So it’s really a software as a service, a SaaS product, where we will work with you, create a very high-end, custom, sophisticated model, deliver that to you, and keep maintaining and refreshing it behind the scenes.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now, judging by your accent, you’re not an Aussie. Tell us a little bit about your journey into fintech.

Jamie Twiss
Yeah. So I am American. And I do think sometimes, especially when I’m meeting with Americans, they are clearly expecting Crocodile Dundee to walk into the room, and they often get disappointed when they see just a guy from Seattle showing up in their offices. So my journey: I grew up in the US and I went to university there. I started my career there, and then I went to business school. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but I met an Australian woman, we fell in love and got married, and I moved to Sydney.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Jamie Twiss
And I’ve been here, on and off, for about 25 years. We spent some time back in the US, and we’ve been back in Australia for eight or nine years now. My career path: I started as a consultant. I worked for McKinsey for just shy of a decade. Then I spent another decade at some big banks. I was with CommBank for a while, and then Westpac. At Westpac I was the head of strategy, and then I was the chief data officer. And then about five years ago I moved out of big banking into startup land.

Dexter Cousins
And that was before… I remember having that conversation with you before the move happened, and I gave you some stark warnings. Do you wish you’d taken my advice?

Jamie Twiss
It’s actually been a fantastic journey. I think the big banks obviously have tremendous resources, tremendous scale. If you can do something there, you can change a lot of lives. But it is hard to drive change. It’s hard to actually change the way things operate. And at Beforepay, even though we are a small company, about 70 people depending on how you count, 50 to 70, we have over a million and a half registered users. We have hundreds of thousands of active borrowers. Since you and I started speaking here, let’s see, it’s a Wednesday morning, we’ve probably done, probably not quite a thousand, we’ve probably done a few hundred loans already.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

Jamie Twiss
So it does actually have quite a bit of scale to it as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What was the biggest shift for you, moving from those environments into the environment that you’re in now? And I think at the time, had Beforepay just listed, or were you…

Jamie Twiss
No. So I came on essentially with the mandate to take it to listing. It had started and it launched. Our two co-founders, Tarik Ayoub and Dean Mau, did a fantastic job of just creating it from nothing and getting it going very quickly, and then handed the baton to me to, you know, let’s get it on the boards and let’s keep growing from here. So I joined in May of 2021, and our listing was January of 2022.

It is a big change when you move from the big end of town to the small end of town. For me, it’s been very positive. I think large organisations are complex, and the effort involved in keeping people moving forward is a lot. I often say that when I was at the big banks, I often felt like most of us were facing each other around the circle, trying to get each other to do different things and move forward. Whereas at Beforepay Group, I feel like we are standing facing outwards in that circle, right? There’s relatively little time that we need to spend on just working out who’s doing what, and relatively few committee meetings. It’s much more meeting-light. And as a result, there’s just more time to work on the stuff that I’m passionate about, which is actually using modern tools, modern technology, modern data science to drive products at scale that make people’s lives better.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I recall, if you listened in January ’22, I did an end-of-year podcast in 2021, and we were all super excited and thought 2022 would be massive, because the world was opening up. Borders had just opened up. We were coming off nearly 2 years of lockdown. And lo and behold, a few months later, the wheels start to come off. What was that experience like, of coming in and listing at the peak, and then all of a sudden the landscape changes very, very quickly and goes from peak to trough in the space of, what, six months?

Jamie Twiss
Yeah, it was almost exactly six months. I think our trough was June of 2022. So certainly it’s challenging, and there are a lot of things that you have to think about differently. Previously, up to and through 2021, many fintechs had the strategy of: we’ll raise a bunch of money, we’ll go spend it, we’ll raise some more, we’ll spend some more. And there wasn’t really a second part to that strategy. In some ways we were very fortunate with our timing. We did get the IPO away, we got the resources in the door, and as soon as those resources were in the door, it became very apparent the world had changed. And we were quick to recognise that. We didn’t say, oh, it’s going to change back soon. We said, no, no, this is real.

And so we were very focused then on how do we use the resources we have, the money from the IPO, to get ourselves into a sustainable position, which really means: how do we become profitable and make sure we aren’t burning cash before we run out of cash? That was, again, a very challenging journey in many ways, and some people weren’t up for it, which is of course fine, but it made us so much better as a company. I think with companies that grow too long in favourable funding environments, you don’t really get tested. You don’t know if your business model is actually quite right. You don’t really have to think about the cost of delivery sharply enough. Whereas we realised we had to be absolutely ruthless on cost, on efficiency. So we ran genuinely flat headcount for a number of years, even as the revenue growth was remarkable.

And it really is what led to what I think is the core of who we are today, which is that absolute focus on credit risk. We were losing money on each advance when we started out. We had to get that under control. So we went very, very deep on how do we solve this problem analytically. And I think the cost pressure and the lack of additional funding resources meant that we really cleaned up the automation in the business, so the ability to run at scale with very little human involvement. And then we really cracked the nut on credit risk analytics. And I think if there had been free money forever, I don’t know if we would have done either of these things.

Dexter Cousins
And I’m just curious about your earlier background. You studied Slavic languages and literature at Harvard. How do you end up in fintech from that?

Jamie Twiss
Well, I’m actually a deep cover spy. I think this is the time to tell everybody.

Dexter Cousins
YouTube is the place to tell everybody, right?

Jamie Twiss
I’ve been tired of living a lot…

Dexter Cousins
We’re pivoting the podcast now to cover conspiracy theories, everyone.

Jamie Twiss
So I studied Russian literature at university. Just personal passion, and I very much enjoyed that. Having said that, I’ve always worked at the intersection of data, technology and financial services. I did that as a consultant, I did that at the two big banks, and that’s what I’m doing today. So I’ve been building credit risk models, gosh, for 20 years now. To me, the subject matter that I’ve been working on has been different but similar across my career. What’s different is taking that from the big end of town into a startup, and really focusing so specifically on that analytic question.

Dexter Cousins
So obviously there’s been a big push in this last, what, 10, 20 years to push people into STEM, right? You didn’t do that, and yet you’ve… So what are your thoughts on the path that you’ve taken, your advice to others, and how you’ve shaped your career and your expertise, even though you haven’t come from the classical background to do that?

Jamie Twiss
Yeah. This is just a personal belief, but it’s an experience, right? It’s living proof of it. I see the reasons that we have to push into STEM, but I think it would be a missed opportunity if we just viewed all education as some form of vocational training for the job you’re going to have later. And I think that’s a shame for two reasons. One is I just think my life is much richer for having read great works and really lived in that. I don’t know if me spending that time studying statistics would have been necessary. I also do think having that grounding in the humanities has been tremendously helpful for me in my entire career. I’ve always been a fairly numerate person, but just the breadth of perspective it gives you… If you have read a lot of 19th-century Russian literature, I think it makes you a calmer person. It gives you a broader sense of perspective. I think you learn a lot of lessons about people, about leadership, about groups and how they come together. And I do think everybody picks up the technical skills they need for whatever their job is at the time. Not everybody gets that sort of broader understanding of people that you will always need to take it to the next level.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been having discussions about a lot, particularly with people and culture leaders, is this concept of context switching, which has started to get some momentum now. But when I started Tier One People 10 years back, that’s what we were looking for in people. It wasn’t necessarily a term, but it’s this ability to just emulate what you’ve done this morning, right? We’re running a bit late because you’re an ASX-listed CEO, and something comes out of the blue, whether that’s something from an investor, something with a regulator, a technology issue, a product issue, a customer issue, something that’s happening with a potential deal in the US, a capital raise, whatever that might be. You’ve had to go from that to this, and then you’re going to have to go back and be in a completely different mindset. And that’s exhausting, right? That’s draining. And I think that kind of elasticity that you’re talking about… for me, education, and I look at my kids in high school and I’m like, hey, utilise this, right? It’s not necessarily that you’re learning stuff. It’s that you’re going from science to maths to English to humanities to physical education, and you’re doing that six times a day. You go to university, that stops. You go into a job, that stops.

Jamie Twiss
I think your point about context switching is a very good one. And I think a lot of people, as you say, get into a path where they’ve really only ever done one thing, and then they’re exposed to something new. And that skill of how do I context switch, but also just how do I learn something completely different or new, which you may need as your progresses, can easily be lost.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the culture at Beforepay, and, as a leader, the values and the culture that you’ve looked to instil in the business.

Jamie Twiss
So I’ll start by saying I don’t think you’ll ever find a CEO who doesn’t think they preside over a good culture, because they’ve shaped it the way that they…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. It’s like kids, right? Nobody’s got an ugly kid. They’re all beautiful angels.

Jamie Twiss
Exactly. Right. So rather than tell you we have a great culture or whatever, I’ll just tell you what I think are the salient points of our culture. I think it’s really perhaps three things. One is we do have a pretty tight performance ethic, a high level of accountability. We are able to pretty clearly measure our people being effective in their roles. Is somebody making this work or not? And then I think we are supportive in how we do it. For some people it works out well, and for other people it’s just not the right fit, and we all try to call that early. It’s better for…

I think that high level of accountability sits in an environment that is… the underappreciated value in a company is: are you nice to each other? And I think companies that are nice to each other can be tremendously effective, especially if you can compare that niceness up with that level of accountability, that high performance ethic. And then I think the third piece of our culture, which is the thing that most people notice most immediately when they come in, is we are the most analytic, data-driven people you will ever meet. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this. You can’t measure everything, and not everything can be analysed, but a lot of things can. And so we always think about: well, what’s the marginal cost of acquisition, as opposed to the average cost, and how do we map that back to expected customer lifetime value at the moment of origination, and how do we actually set our marketing budgets up accordingly, to ensure that every decision we make is value-creating? That permeates every level of the organisation. If you can prove it with data, prove it. If you can’t, how do we test for it, and how do we think about using those things to drive our agenda?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Do you find there are people coming from certain environments that fit that profile?

Jamie Twiss
I think background can be unpredictable, especially with people earlier in their careers, because I think with our current system of how graduates get their first jobs, it’s not random, but people get sorted into all sorts of different classes. So we’ve had great people come from academia. We’ve had great people come out of the big accounting firms, great people come out of the banks, other fintechs and so on. I think the thing that we see in people who are successful, the biggest one, is just that raw capability. What we do is simple, but it’s done in a very sophisticated way. And so you just need to be able to keep up with how we think about default elasticity with regards to loan configuration terms. So you have to have that raw capability, and I will back capability over experience every time. We hire and promote people who are patently unqualified for the roles, and that works out great if they have the capability, whereas the reverse is not true.

I think the other thing is, and this is again especially early in the career, everybody wants to do a good job, and most people actually want to lean in and work and contribute. I think that can be trained out of somebody. We don’t see that many of these people, but you will find people who have been in very large organisations where there just hasn’t been a lot of accountability, and they’ve lost the actual doing muscle. They have the go-to-meeting muscle, they have the delegate muscle, but the actual work stuff…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, it’s funny you mention that, because all of our data backs up exactly that. And sadly there’s this misconception as to what it actually means to work in a business of your size, where people think it’s about innovation, and it’s not. Like, the innovation is the product of nights without sleep, stress, tearing your hair out, thinking it’s all going to fail numerous times, really seriously questioning what you’re doing, probably about to quit, and then you get a breakthrough. I’m going to misquote Thomas Edison, but he said something like 99% of innovation is perspiration. Thomas Edison, what a great bridge to the next question, the AI question, right, that everybody’s talking about. You’ve compared AI in lending to electricity in manufacturing. Why have you chosen such a monumental analogy?

Jamie Twiss
So if we look at the truly disruptive innovations, or economically disruptive innovations, of the last century, century and a half, you’d probably pick electricity. You’d probably pick modern logistics, including containerisation. You’d pick computers, you’d pick the internet, and you’d probably pick AI. I’d say those would be the five. And I think with all of them, the initial invention often produced a lot of excitement, sometimes a bit of hype and hot air. AI is no exception. It takes quite a while to really understand what one of those inventions is for, and then it takes even longer to actually rewire your economy around it.

So to go with the electricity example: at first electricity was really just a cool little stunt. You’d show somebody electricity arcing across a Van de Graaff generator. Oh, that’s exciting. And then the first productive uses were very small, closed-loop things. You could have a generator in your house, and it could power electric lighting for you. Now, if you want to make bigger economic changes, you then have to flow that into the productive sector of the economy. And so the next step of electricity was: well, previously factories worked by daylight, and they would have different hours in the summer and the winter, because when it got dark you couldn’t work anymore. And they realised they could put electric lights in factories. And then what they eventually realised, and it takes a while to realise this and a long time for the capex to flow through, was that you no longer needed to put factories on rivers because you had a lot of hydraulic power powering these machines, or next to rivers where you could unload coal. With electricity, you can put a factory basically anywhere. And when you can move factories around, you can put them closer together, and suddenly get all these second, third and fourth order benefits that in the early days of electricity no one had any idea about.

Computers, very similarly, were first used for word processing and keeping a schedule and things like that. That’s not where the benefits came from. The economic benefits came from much tighter management of supply chain and logistics. They came from squeezing inefficiencies out of how we do cash handling in banks. They came out of those broader things as well. I don’t see any reason to think AI will be any different, and so far it’s exactly the same. You have a lot of people who are talking a very big game about what they’re doing with AI. What they’re really doing with AI, I think, is trying to make the current way they do things better. That’s a good thing to do. But the real change is going to be when we actually rewire not just organisations but entire sectors around AI capability, and I think that’s going to disrupt lending tremendously.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I guess the finance sector is the one that we’re here to talk about. What are the types of disruptions that you see happening?

Jamie Twiss
So I think a few things. One, and I think this first change will be enormously positive, is that the finance sector over recent decades has become gamified in the worst possible way. A tremendous amount of the profit created by the industry is made by basically little tricks and traps around pricing, exploiting behavioural flaws. Your term deposit is at this, but it’ll renew at this lower rate, and auto subscri…, all that sort of stuff. I think as consumers and businesses turn over more of that financial management to AI, the AI won’t have those behavioural flaws, and it will call banks and other providers on that. I think we’ll see a lot of that unfair pricing disparity collapse. That’ll have big economic ramifications, but it’ll be very positive for society.

The second big change is that obviously tremendous amounts of cost will come out. Economically, that is how productivity goes up, but that does flow through to people’s jobs. There will be dislocations, and as a society we need to think about that quite a bit.

I think the third big disruption will be that what AI enables us to do is process unstructured information at scale, quickly and efficiently, the way that we can already do it with structured. You can take anything and toss it into AI. And I think what that means is that for individuals, businesses, any customer of the financial services industry, AI will give you a much richer understanding of your own situation, then flow that through to the specific things that you need, and then be able to go and source those from the industry. Traditionally the greatest value in any industry is captured by the company that has ownership of the customer, that has the last mile. I think with AI, customers essentially become their own last mile, right? The agents that are working for them are actually going to be the ones that are able to go out and source things in a more wholesale way. So I do think you’ll see a tremendous amount of economic value shift out of the industry back to the customers. Again, disruptive, but that is exactly what we need. There are far too many people working in finance. Those people should be off teaching our children, looking after their neighbours and the elderly and the sick. They should be curing cancer. They should be making great works of art. The number of people we have sitting in back offices moving data between spreadsheets breaks my heart.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. We’re coming to a wrap, but before we do, what can we expect from Beforepay Group in this next 12 months?

Jamie Twiss
So I think we have really three things that we work on. The pay advance business we continue to refine and optimise. That business is working well, and it’s at scale. Personal loans: as you said at the beginning, this is the year of the personal loan. Originations are up 73% quarter on quarter, and we expect great things in that product. And then Carrington Labs. Obviously enterprise software sales can be quite lumpy, and we’ve been very careful to never promise any particular outcome on any particular time frame, but it is quite a globally relevant capability.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Jamie Twiss
I don’t know what will happen when, but I would say watch this space.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Cool. If anybody who’s listening is interested in joining the Beforepay journey, what’s the best way for them to find out about opportunities and careers?

Jamie Twiss
So we do put them on the website, or you can reach out to me, or indeed to anyone, on LinkedIn or via email. I think we’re always looking for people who are super smart and are passionate about the same things we’re passionate about, which is basically giving Australians, and people more broadly, a better and fairer financial experience.

Dexter Cousins
We also get a lot of banking execs, and execs from non-bank lenders as well, listening to the show. If they’re curious about the Carrington Labs solution, what’s the best way to…

Jamie Twiss
You can reach out to us on the website. We actually have a lot of resources on the carringtonlabs.com website. We publish a lot of white papers about how to think about where lending is going. We do have a lot of very simple tools that are fairly easy to deploy. So I think… I’m very confident that we know where lending is going over the next decade. I think the industry has not yet moved there in a big bulk, but as the first big lenders start to mature this capability, and we see this in the US, you can see this actually starting to turn, it will be critical that lenders keep up with this. Otherwise it’ll be very challenging.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Well, Jamie, fantastic to have you on the show.

Jamie Twiss
Terrific. Thank you so much for having me.

Dexter Cousins
As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re new to the show, make sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure that you give us a thumbs up and a subscribe. It really helps me in promoting and supporting great founders and CEOs like Jamie, and great Aussie fintechs like Beforepay. Until the next episode, keep well.

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