Podcast

Up Bank CEO Xavier Shay on building a bank people love.

September 22, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Xavier Shay runs a bank that most of its new customers join because a friend told them to. He is the CEO of Up and was its CTO before that, and he spent close to seven years at Square in San Francisco, arriving when the payments company had around 150 staff and leaving when it had three and a half thousand.

He joined Up as employee 27 of a company famous for having twenty people, and he arrived asking whether he could write code for a while until he worked out what to do next. Four and a half years ago Bendigo and Adelaide Bank bought Ferocia, both founders left, and the engineer who wanted to build things ended up running the bank.

A bank that grows by word of mouth.

About 70% of Up’s new customers arrive because a mate told them about the app. Xavier puts that down to a product that surprises people rather than one that only works. Save Up $1000 walks a customer through their first thousand dollars saved and throws a small party along the way. 2Up gives two people a joint account without the paperwork that usually arrives alongside a mortgage and children. Perk-Up buys the occasional morning coffee outright, and Happy Hour does the same for Friday drinks.

Support sits at the other end of the building and answers in the voice of a friend. The thing customers screenshot and pass around, Xavier says, is a support reply that ended with a GIF. He says Up holds the highest rating of any banking app on the Australian App Store.

Why Up said no to buy now pay later.

At the peak of buy now pay later, every interview Xavier did asked when Up would launch one. Buying now and worrying later did not fit a bank built to make people feel better about money.

Up shipped Laybuy instead. A customer puts an item into the app, Up builds a savings plan and a progress bar, and when the money is there the app asks whether they still want the thing. Half say yes. Half keep the savings. Xavier says the customer reaction built stronger brand connection.

Where Up can advertise and other banks cannot.

Up ran a Mario Kart stand at PAX in 2018 while every other neobank was at Sibos. It advertises on rock posters and community radio, and sponsors music festivals without the sponsorship reading as a bank buying attention. Xavier calls the brand a moat, by which he means it buys reach that competitors cannot buy at any price.

From employee 27 to the CEO’s chair.

Xavier came home from San Francisco without a plan. He knew Dom Pym from an earlier company, and asked if he could help out writing code and build things for a while. Six months later he had opinions about how to scale the company, and the opinions turned into a leadership role.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank acquired Ferocia in 2021 for up to $116 million. Both co-founders left and Xavier took over the CEO role. Eighteen months ago he joined the Bendigo group executive as chief digital officer while staying CEO of Up.

The AI problem is quality control.

Xavier does not think workplaces need to teach people to use AI. It’s not like the turn of the internet when most people didn’t know how to use a mouse. Everyone uses technology every moment of their life, so speaking to a computer needs no instruction. The gap Xavier sees is quality. A weak writer now produces far more bad writing and cannot tell the difference.

The same applies to software engineering. The industry has already changed and most of the workforce remains unsettled. The more exciting aspect of AI for Xavier isn’t the tools, but the potential on the consumer side, working out how people will want to talk to their bank once using AI agents is the norm.

Up hires through careers@up.com.au and up.com.au/careers

Chapters.

0:00 Introduction
1:00 Building a bank people love
2:50 Why word of mouth works
5:18 The launch party and the brand
7:06 Saying no to buy now pay later
9:19 Marketing where banks cannot play
10:47 Gamifying saving
11:33 Moving fast inside regulation
14:21 Responding to AI and security
16:18 From Melbourne to Square
18:18 Employee 27 at Ferocia
21:04 Inside the Bendigo acquisition
23:21 Competing in a functional market
27:00 What is next for Up
28:12 AI adoption and the workforce
30:45 Careers at Up

Links from this episode.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders to talk about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm that for the past decade has been working with businesses like today’s guest to help them find that 1% who redefine what’s possible.

Today’s guest is Xavier Shay. He’s the CEO of Up. Xavier, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Xavier Shay
Thank you for having me.

Dexter Cousins
It’s brilliant to have you. I’ve dealt with hundreds of bank CEOs over my career, and I’ve never met anybody who is as unique, or who fits the bias of what a bank CEO looks like so little. So it’s fantastic to have you on, and such an incredible journey as well. I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody who started as a CTO and then became a banking CEO. So lots for us to talk about today. But before we do, maybe you could tell our listeners and viewers a little bit more about yourself.

Xavier Shay
Up is a bank that we started about eight or so years ago now. The goal there was to create a bank that people could love, which sounds a bit ridiculous at the time. People don’t love banks, that’s not a thing that happens. But we thought there was a real opportunity there, because if you change how you feel about your bank, it changes how you feel about money, and then that changes how you can succeed and thrive in life. So our whole thing has been to make money easy for people.

I think a lot more about this than just financial wellness. That’s step one. You go from people being too afraid to look at their bank balance to, okay, maybe I can do this. But actually we can go a bit further and say, this is fun. I’m actually enjoying this. And then that leads to better outcomes for our customers.

That’s been the mission for Up since we started, and that’s coming through very strongly today. Pretty much all of our growth is word of mouth. About 70% of our new customers joined because a mate told them about us. We’re the highest rated banking app on the App Store in Australia, and so we’ve got very high NPS, CSAT, all that sort of stuff. It’s because we help customers get better at money without them feeling like it’s a chore.

Dexter Cousins
I want to dive down a bit more on the word of mouth. It sounds great, but you’ve got over a million customers. Seven hundred thousand people by word of mouth, that’s a lot of word of mouth. So how have you gone about getting that traction? That is insane.

Xavier Shay
Part of it comes back to really focusing on how this makes people feel. If you’ve got a product that’s good and solves problems for people, that’s nice, but you’re maybe not feeling compelled to tell your friends about it. Whereas if you’ve got something that actually gives you a surprise, or like, oh my god, I can’t believe that just happened, that’s the sort of thing you tell your friends about. We see this through a couple of different things.

In the product, one of our very popular features is Save Up $1000, which helps people save their first thousand dollars. It’s a big deal for people. It’s a bit of a party along the way, you get lots of rewards, and we make it approachable to people. For a lot of people that’s a bit of a wow moment, where it’s like, I didn’t think I could do this, and I could.

Another feature that feels very different for people is 2Up, which is our approach to joint accounts. Historically a joint account is one of those things that’s almost the last commitment you make. You’re probably married with kids before you get a joint account. But most people have shared financial relationships, from splitting the dinner on your first date. So we wanted to make that more approachable and useful for people much earlier on the journey. You keep your individual identity but you’ve got a joint one. It’s easy to shut down. If you write into support, you can write in as an individual or as the two of you, so you can have a three way support channel. Stuff like that makes it feel like, wow, this feels different. And it feels special. 2Up is one of our most popular features. People love it.

But the other thing is the brand itself and what that lets you do. Support is probably a good example of this. We have a fantastic support team, and they’re all just down the other end of the building. If you write in, you’re going to get a quick response from one of our team members, and it doesn’t feel like talking to bank support. It feels like talking to one of your mates who’s helping you out. That feels different. I can’t believe I just had that interaction with my bank. That’s actually one of our biggest triggers for people. It’s like, hey, look at this chat, they sent me a GIF at the end.

One more example. We do a thing, one of our ongoing promotions, called Perk-Up, where if you pay for your coffee in the morning with your Up card, randomly we will sometimes just pay for that coffee for you. We also have another one called Happy Hour, which is Friday afternoon we might pay for your snacks and your drink. That’s more of a social one. Similar idea, but it’s that, I can’t believe my bank just bought me a coffee. That’s the sort of thing that people tell people.

Dexter Cousins
I was one of Up’s early users and I remember being at the launch party in 2018, I think it was September 2018. Anson, who was the chief product officer at the time, did a demo of the product where Siri sent Dom fifty dollars and we watched it on screen happen instantly. That was like magic at the time.

I look at the journey that Up has been on, and I think what’s really impressive is the authenticity. You talked about the brand before, and it seems to have remained from that very first experience that I had with the brand itself. I remember, this would have been late 2018, early 2019, on a Sunday I was in the pub with a mate. I went to buy beers and I forgot the PIN on my card. I went through the process and there was a glitch. Once I got to the ID bit to change my card, it kept glitching. I actually sent Dom a message on Twitter at the time. This is a Sunday afternoon. Bank CEO responds, says, yeah, we’re on it. And we got it fixed by the time I got the next round of drinks in.

You’re thinking, wow, what CEO of a bank does that? The thing that’s really impressed me as I’ve watched this journey of Up is how you haven’t deviated from that. What’s been your experience as the bank has gone through the ownership structure, where it was Ferocia and now it’s fully owned by Bendigo Bank? Have you had to fight to retain that, or has the bank taken a step back and let you run?

Xavier Shay
There’s always been a strong commitment from the bank board to say, hey, we know what’s important here and we want to make sure that we keep that. I wouldn’t call it a fight, but it’s work. And it comes down to knowing what’s important. Everything I just talked to you about before, about word of mouth driven growth and actually solving problems for customers, the brand is such an important part of that. So that’s the thing we can’t compromise on.

This came through really strongly in an example a couple of years ago now, at the height of buy now pay later, when that was really frothy. Every interview I had was, when are you going to do buy now pay later? Put aside whether that makes sense commercially or not. Can our brand do this? What is it saying about our brand? Because at the time in particular, buy now pay later, which I think has been a very interesting development, was very much the, we’ll buy stuff now and worry about it later. And it didn’t really fit with our brand.

But we actually did something different. We did one of our other features, it’s called Maybuy. If you’re old enough to remember lay-by as a concept, it’s a similar thing. You want to buy a thing, put it into the app, and we’ll create a little section for it. Are you saving up for a new bike or a new jumper or whatever? And then we’ll say, okay, if that’s a couple of hundred bucks, do you want to save for it every week? We help you put your savings plan together, and we give it a little progress bar. At the end it’s like, congratulations, you’ve saved up for the thing. Do you still want to buy it or not? And fifty percent of people say yes and fifty percent don’t. It’s literally split down the middle. Some people are like, you know what, I really want that. And other people are like, I don’t want it any more.

But what was super interesting about this feature is that the reaction from our customers pretty much amounted to, we knew you were one of the good ones. That for me really tells the story of how we think about this and how important this is to us. It has to come through in every product that we do.

Dexter Cousins
I remember the early days, and I think it wasn’t long after the launch party, we had Sibos in Sydney. This was 2018, huge banking event, everybody was there, all of the neobanks at the time were there except Up. Up were at PAX, with a Mario Kart stand. I was just blown away by the marketing strategy of that. And I remember they got something like twenty thousand sign ups.

Xavier Shay
We haven’t done PAX in the last couple of years, but we’ve done a number of other street festivals and festivals. I like to think part of doing a brand like this is how to use it as a moat, like where can we play where others can’t? We advertise on rock posters and community radio. Not many other banks can get away with that. We can sponsor music festivals in a genuine, authentic manner. A lot of other brands can’t do that. And so not only does that help us get reach, but it’s unique reach in a sense. And then that reach reinforces the brand as well. So it all kind of turns into this positive spiral.

Dexter Cousins
In the early days, before I had a podcast I had a blog, and I referred to my trip to the Ferocia office at the time. It was like going to the banking version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Having used the app myself, I found probably the most addictive feature ever on any banking app was Pull to Save, where you would lift up the screen and a dollar would go into savings. I was sitting there and it was like I was playing a pokie machine, but saving money, not spending money.

Xavier Shay
That’s exactly how we think about it, because we’re in this unique position where if we can gamify things in a way that, I don’t know, if you get addicted to it, well, you saved money. That’s probably not a terrible outcome.

That’s informed a lot of how we’ve thought about saver products. Pull to Save is a good example of that. Round ups, being able to boost your round ups. Rather than round up to the nearest dollar, round up an extra three dollars. Worst case scenario, you round up too much and you have to move money back out of your savings, but you’re probably still in a better position. So there’s this really good, what’s good for customers is good for us, if that makes sense.

Dexter Cousins
One of the challenges, and the reason why I still love recruiting in fintech, is it’s probably the most complex recruitment I could ever think of doing. You’ve got to find people who’ve got the capability to work in a start-up and a scale-up where it’s constantly evolving, and they’ve got to context switch. Unlike a lot of other tech niches, you can’t move fast and break things. You’ve got to move fast and make things, and they’ve got to fit within regulation. How have you got that balance right between all of the fun stuff and the experimental stuff that you’ve done within Up over the years, and done that in a, hey, but we’re a bank, and we’ve got to make a profit?

Xavier Shay
Fundamentally, if you start from a position of we’re trying to do something that’s good for customers, which is where we do start from, it doesn’t matter if your app’s fun if people can’t access their money. That reliability and security is what a lot of regulations are about. Are you actually showing up for your customers when they need you? A lot of that lines up, and so it never feels like a distraction. If we’ve got some tech debt building up that we need to pay down, it’s very easy to tie that back to, this is the fundamental thing we need to get right.

Part two is that in some ways what you’re talking about is exactly the hard thing. And that’s what makes me take interest in it. Actually, if you do it right, it can help build a moat too. How do you not treat this thing as an extra burden or an extra thing we need to do, but include that in our creativity, include that in how we’re doing this in a way that we can keep moving fast and make it look effortless, even when in the background you’ve done a huge amount of work to support it.

The way I think about regulation is that regulation is the expressed will of our customers. So it’s not an extra thing to customers. It’s a formalised view of what our customers demand of us in exchange for us being able to hold their money. It depends on the fintech, but for us, holding people’s money, it’s a high burden.

Dexter Cousins
When I talk to bank CEOs, and it’s interesting that this conversation is one I’ve probably had for the last decade, whether it’s a founder of a small fintech or a CEO of a bank that’s got thousands of people, they’ve all said the same thing going back ten years ago, which is, is what we’re building today even going to be relevant in twelve months’ time? Now it’s, is what we’re building today even going to be relevant in twelve days’ time? It’s crazy, with all the challenges around things like legacy tech, security, AI. How are you managing that? That must, for anybody, keep you awake at night.

Xavier Shay
There’s a lot of change going on at the moment, and I think a couple of things about this. One is, how are you doing the judo move of using the new technology to your advantage as well? I’ll use the security thing as an example. If you’re not using AI to help adapt to the AI security challenge, it’s not going to work.

But I think the other part is making sure you’re in the game. I’ll use AI as the example. Even if you don’t have products out in the market, are you, personally, or you as a team, do you know what’s happening? Are you playing in the space? Because if you’re not playing in the space, you can’t react.

With all these things, particularly when things are changing, what’s most important isn’t that you get the right idea first. It’s that you can respond. So how are you preparing yourself to be able to respond? You could do things like, if you can get your delivery cycle shorter, that helps you respond, and it’s got nothing to do with any external factors. That’s the thing you can control.

Or you can think through, from a feature perspective, how your features can potentially play together. We’ve got a payday feature where we can recognise your pay as it comes in, but as a result we can link that to, well, okay, now we know how far it is between paydays. We’ve also got a regulars feature where we identify what your regular bills are. Now we know if you’ve got enough money from your pay to cover your bills, and we can build that in. So we can build a new feature that’s actually built on top of the other features. There’s almost a product foundation. It’s not just building individual products, it’s thinking through how these things could recombine in the future. Some of them you end up doing, some of them you don’t, some of them just sit there until the right moment. But I think through that a lot as well, how you position yourself so that you’ve got some optionality.

Dexter Cousins
Talk a little bit about your background as well. Prior to Up, how did you get started in the industry, and what was the path here?

Xavier Shay
I’ve been in fintech now for fifteen years. Maybe I could start rounding up to twenty. The bulk of that at two companies, Square and then Up. Prior to that I was doing start-up stuff around Melbourne. My background’s a software engineer, so I’m a software engineer by trade, did that for a while, moved to San Francisco and joined Square when they were about 150 people. Square, the payments company. This is the fintech podcast, everyone knows Square.

I joined them as an engineer but very quickly moved into engineering management, and that’s when my leadership career started, if you like. That was super interesting, so I saw a lot of growth there. When I joined we’d just launched in the US, 150 people. When I left we were three and a half thousand people. We’d IPO’d. We were in four different countries. Just a crazy ride.

I learned a lot there, and that’s also where I think I developed a lot for fintech. The thing I like about fintech is that I like infrastructure problems. It’s going to sound odd coming from Up, which is a very out there brand, but I like the things that take a lot of work to keep working, but ideally people don’t notice. The fact that pretty much anywhere in the world you can take a bit of plastic and pay for something with just a tap. Anywhere in the world’s probably a little bit much, but you can go travelling and tap, tap, tap. People don’t even think about that any more. It’s a huge amount of work.

Dexter Cousins
I remember, it would have been the end of 2019, I went to Barcelona. My wife and I had a five day trip in Barcelona, and using my Up card on that overseas trip I think we saved something like nearly a thousand dollars in exchange fees.

We were tapping it everywhere and people were like, what’s that? What’s that? And it was either Up cards or Revolut cards everywhere we went, and we were thinking, all these Aussies have got these Up cards.

Xavier Shay
We’ve become very popular as a travel card. Those sorts of problems appeal to me, and then getting to pair that with something that also feels good as well. So it’s this weird thing, it’s like I want it to make you feel good, but also I don’t want you to have to notice it. I think Square embodies that pretty well. Up does as well. It is there to be appreciated, you can appreciate it, but you don’t have to think about it if you don’t want to.

I was in engineering leadership at Square for a while and did a few different things there. I was in platform engineering, and I was also responsible for all of the acceptance and settlement, so a lot of the core infrastructure stuff. I’ve actually got more of a background as an infrastructure guy, if you like. And then I came back to Australia. There was a year in the middle where I did some consulting and whatnot, but I came back to Australia.

It’s actually kind of a funny story how I got involved with Up. I was looking around for other senior engineering leadership roles and I just wasn’t really feeling it. My heart’s not in it yet. But I knew some of the team working at Up. You mentioned Dom before, I’d worked with Dom at a previous company. So I sort of said, hey, I’m not really sure what I’m doing with my life yet, but I can write code. Can I just come and build some stuff with you guys for a while whilst I get my head back in the game or figure out what I want to do? And they said, yeah, come on, build some cool stuff. So I was actually a software engineer at Up for six months.

But I joined at a really interesting time. I joined just after launch, and it was going very well, so the company’s growing. Ferocia at the time was famously a 20-person company, and I was employee number 27.

Dexter Cousins
I remember the wooden bench in the kitchen. Everybody used to be able to fit around it.

Xavier Shay
We were starting to face into some of the problems and opportunities that every growing company faces, how you scale this thing. Turns out that’s the thing I’ve got opinions about. So I started having opinions about it, started getting more involved in the management side of it, and kept doing more and more of that. And then we’re sort of fifty people and starting to actually have to think about management as a thing.

When we were acquired by Bendigo, this is now about four and a half years ago, that’s when the two co-founders exited the business. Both of them will tell you they want to run a small company, and that’s what both are doing now. I took over running the business that was now part of the wider group.

I’ve been doing that the whole time. About a year and a half ago I stepped into a position on the group executive, and so more formally took on the wider chief digital officer role as well.

Dexter Cousins
How have you found working within, I wouldn’t say a traditional bank? I think Bendigo’s probably been one of the most progressive there, and has really been very brave in a lot of the decisions that they’ve made, and all of the bets that they’ve made there as well. What’s your experience of having worked with probably one of the most revered founders in the world, and then working in a juggernaut like Square, and now coming in here?

Xavier Shay
It’s been super interesting, and different things need different approaches at different times. That’s been a learning for me. In some ways we’re dealing with very different problems, but also we’re dealing with the same problems. Every company I’ve been involved in has had some version of, are we shipping fast enough? Are we delivering the right things to our customers? What’s the right balance between tech debt and product? I actually think that’s healthy. If that’s what you’re talking about, that’s where we should be optimising.

It’s been interesting at Bendigo because in some ways what we’re doing here is pretty unique. It’s not often that a bank buys a fintech and then the fintech kind of hangs around. But I think two things really helped that. One was a really strong commitment from the board and executive in terms of, yes, we’re buying a fintech, but that doesn’t mean we’re buying a bit of technology. It means we’re buying a way of doing things and an approach. If we try and buy that and then tell them how to do it, what did we just buy?

And then also really clear shared values about what we’re trying to do and what we’re here for. Bendigo Bank’s got a very long history of feeding into the prosperity of communities around Australia. It’s got the community bank network, which is the biggest of that type of model in the world. Very big on its brand, very loved by its customers. And Up is similar. Different, but similar in that sort of ethos of we’re here to make the world a better place and we’re here to do right by our customers. So even when you might have had some disagreements at the tactical level, you can always bring it back to, wait, why are we here? We’re here for the same reasons. All right, let’s rebuild from there. So I think that’s really what’s made things work.

Dexter Cousins
I look at the last decade and I think back to those early days and the promises that were made from the industry. Perhaps the technology just wasn’t quite there yet. It feels like the technology has finally caught up to the promise now. We’re seeing in the community banking space a great example, where we’re now starting to see those businesses go onto platforms like Constantinople, and all of a sudden they’re able to offer a digital experience that’s comparable to something where the tech spend of a big four bank would be required. How are you seeing that from a threat perspective?

Xavier Shay
Australia’s an interesting market because it’s actually quite a functional market. You look at our core banking infrastructure, we’ve got free instant payments. That’s still not true in a lot of places. I think Australians don’t realise how weird that is. A lot of the banking rails are relatively functional. And even when Up entered the market, even the incumbents had decent apps. You look at some of the meteoric rises of other digital banks around the world, a lot of them were coming into markets where literally there was just no other digital experience. That’s not what we were facing into. All the apps were pretty good, and to be blunt, are still pretty good. If you want to do a feature by feature comparison of Up versus random, honestly, Up’s not winning on features. That’s never been true.

And so for us, when I think about competitive advantage and competitive threat, I come back to what I started with, which is our brand, how we make people feel about money. That’s the thing. Yes, we’ve got good technology, yes the technology is good, yes we stay on top of things. But that’s necessary but not sufficient to compete in the Australian market. You need to have something else.

The other thing about having functioning infrastructure is there’s not a lot of margin hanging around. I look at some of the other global fintechs and you look at their margins, and they’re talking about ten percent margins on lending, and you’re like, I’m sorry, what? You’re not going to see that in Australia on residential lending. So that’s also been very interesting, to balance the, okay, we want to do something for customers, we also need to make a sustainable business. Which we have done now. We’ve been standalone profitable for the last twelve months or so, which is awesome.

Dexter Cousins
The model as well. I remember at the time the debate, and I had exactly the same questions that you’ve just pointed out there, which was, if you’re going to take what’s happened in the UK and replicate that here, the big four banks here, as you say, have already got some of the best digital experiences in the world. And unfortunately the cost associated with getting a banking licence and just keeping the lights on.

Xavier Shay
And also, a lot of other markets, you look at the US, you’ve got fintechs who can. In Australia we’ve only got a population of twenty five million or a bit more than that now, compared to three hundred million in the US. So you have to take a much bigger slice here. But then you can’t really make money off interchange, certainly compared to other markets. You can’t make money off instant transfers. So you don’t have as many options in terms of how you want to monetise in Australia, and it makes it tough.

Dexter Cousins
We’re coming to a wrap, Xavier, but what can we expect from Up in this next twelve months?

Xavier Shay
Good question. I don’t tend to talk too much about what’s coming up publicly, but we’re still investing in our home product, so I’m very excited to have some new stuff coming out there soon. That’s been a very popular home loan.

Dexter Cousins
Massive problem to try and fix.

Xavier Shay
Exactly, a lot of opportunity, but I think what we’ve put together there is quite unique and quite useful. And so more stuff coming there. And then also, I don’t want to talk too much about it, but playing around in the AI space. I actually have some pretty contrary opinions about how that should and will play out in terms of what consumers want, but I might let the product do the speaking.

Dexter Cousins
It’s just an incredible moment in time, right? I’ve never been as equally excited and scared as I am.

Xavier Shay
I think that’s a great way of putting it.

Dexter Cousins
I was at the Stripe Tour a couple of weeks back in Sydney, and obviously their growth as a business is phenomenal. But when they start to talk about agentic commerce and what that means, it’s almost like everything that we’ve had before has been ripped up.

Xavier Shay
We’re heading into a lot of change. And I also think that mainstream adoption is tracking much faster than we typically see, for somewhat obvious reasons. You don’t need to teach people how to use AI because they’ve already watched a sci-fi movie in their life. I just tell my computer, I speak at my computer and it does a thing.

Dexter Cousins
It’s really interesting you say that. A bit of a divergence, but when I started my recruitment career it was the late nineties and everybody started to get a computer on their desk. We got the computerisation of the workplace. Most people, we had to test them on things like Word and Excel and email. And they’d come in and say, what’s this thing? That’s a mouse. How do you use it? And we had to spend six to twelve months to get people to use these programs and understand how to use email. We’re not getting that now. As you said, it’s literally, hey, in your own time, figure out how to use the tool.

Xavier Shay
That probably already happened.

Dexter Cousins
Yes. And I think we’re seeing that impact on the workplace, where there are some people who are absolutely flying now and unfortunately there are others who are really struggling. They’re getting caught up in the whole noise around will my job still exist, and all of those things. It’s making it very difficult for leaders to be able to understand what role this tool plays in the workplace.

Xavier Shay
I also think that the problem for me isn’t necessarily training how to use it at all. It’s more training around quality control. If you were a good writer previously you can use AI to help you write well, but it doesn’t replace you. But if you weren’t a good writer, you don’t know that you’re creating lots more bad writing. And so we need a bit more quality here. But actually, for me, that’s a good problem to have. We’re getting more output and so we have to be more conscious about the quality. Okay, I can deal with that.

Dexter Cousins
I had a conversation with a CEO this morning. He’s like, I’m sick of getting these five pages of reports. The question nobody’s asking is, here’s the signal. He’s like, just put it on a page, and give me three or four bullet points of what we need to do.

Xavier Shay
I think that’s it. There are two different things. There’s what does this mean for consumers in terms of the bank, and then what does it mean for the workforce? Right now I think the workforce is very much up in the air. Software engineering has changed. Other roles, I actually think it’s still a bit up in the air. But how are consumers going to want to interact with their bank? That’s where I’m spending all my cycles, because for me that’s the most interesting problem at the moment.

Dexter Cousins
Before we do wrap, we get a lot of great talent listening to the show. They’re interested in careers at Up. Where’s the best way for them to find out more?

Xavier Shay
careers@up.com.au if you want to send an email. Otherwise up.com.au/careers is the website. But I encourage people to write in, and even if we don’t have a job at the moment, we might have one in the future.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. And I doubt there’d be anybody watching or listening to this who probably hasn’t already signed up to Up. But if they haven’t, where can they go?

Xavier Shay
up.com.au is where you can go. But actually, probably your best bet is to ask around your friends. One of them will tell you about it and they’ll give you a referral card.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Well Xavier, it’s been fantastic to chat with you. Great debut, and I’d love to do this again when you can share more.

Dexter Cousins
As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, then make sure you follow us wherever you listen or watch podcasts. If you are watching on YouTube, give us a thumbs up and a subscribe. And until the next one, keep well.

← All episodes