Podcast

Send Payments CEO Matt Barr on embedded FX for enterprise.

September 28, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Matt Barr runs Send Payments, a Sydney company that builds cross-border FX into other businesses’ platforms. PEXA uses it to pay overseas vendors at property settlement, BoardRoom for dividend distributions and pay.com.au for small business invoices. Matt became CEO in August 2025, after eight years at Mastercard and senior roles at eftpos and Australian Payments Plus, as the business finished its pivot from consumer FX to embedded FX for enterprises.

Send was founded in 2019 to serve consumers and small businesses, segments that Wise, Remitly and others now serve well. Matt says compliance is what wins enterprise partners. A team of about 70 people runs the business with 140 AI agents working alongside them.

Compliance is what enterprise partners buy.

The first meeting Matt took at Send was with the head of risk and compliance. AML/CTF transaction monitoring and reporting is the part of FX that keeps partners awake, he says, and getting it wrong can end a scale-up. Matt says Send often wins business on the compliance it built into the platform, which includes a direct API integration into AUSTRAC, ahead of price.

The platform is modular, so an enterprise with its own technology stack takes only the parts it needs. One of Matt’s first jobs was building sector expertise into the commercial team, so sales could match a platform already designed for enterprise clients.

Three partners in three verticals.

Matt says Send is the only FX provider integrated into the PEXA workspace. When an Australian property has an overseas vendor, Send onboards the vendor through the conveyancer so settlement funds land directly in the overseas bank account. Lawyers no longer carry paperwork to a bank branch or set up trust accounts for a double hop.

BoardRoom uses Send for share and dividend distributions, and Matt says Send is also picking up Morgan Stanley Shareworks business for employee share plans. Those batch files serve companies including Brambles, BHP, Lendlease and CSL. pay.com.au integrated Send close to a year ago and switched on its marketing in July, so small businesses can pay Australian dollar and foreign currency invoices in one place.

Where the market is bigger than Australia.

Matt puts the Australian FX market at five trillion dollars and Send’s addressable share at sixty to eighty billion across about eight verticals. He says about ten percent of an Australian small business’s invoices are in foreign currency. He puts the equivalent at about five percent in the US, sixty percent in the UK and seventy-five percent in Canada.

Several of Send’s partners already operate in the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand without offering FX. Matt plans to license Send in those four markets and follow the partners there first.

Agents with names, resumes and managers.

Every agent at Send has a name, an avatar, a resume, targets, coaching and a line manager. Matt says the team saw a lift of 40% or more in output per two-week sprint with the same headcount. When Send gave the agents’ resumes to Hays and asked what hiring those people would cost, the answer came back at over five million dollars a year.

An agent called Barry reviews every account manager conversation for compliance, checking that the right identity verification questions were asked. Barry sends complaints to Charlotte, a person, who handles the follow-up. Matt says Charlotte first worried Barry would replace her and now says she cannot do her job without him.

Matt struggles to see a regulator letting a personal agent approve a half-million-dollar property settlement. He sees agents working on KYC, document validation and exception monitoring, with people approving the money.

Hiring for a remote-first team.

Send has about eighteen people in Sydney and the rest spread across the Gold Coast, Queensland, Melbourne, Adelaide, New Zealand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Matt hires people who work independently and own their work, because small teams expose anyone who does not. At a recent brown bag lunch, forty-nine of the seventy staff watched a colleague build an agent.

Send is still hiring people. Matt expects business development and relationship management to keep needing people, with fewer hires in technology and compliance as those processes are automated. Open roles are listed at sendpayments.com.

Chapters.

0:00 Introduction
0:45 What Send does
2:39 From Mastercard to a scale-up
4:00 Sales led to enterprise
5:26 Compliance by design
9:40 Enterprise partners and use cases
13:42 Markets beyond Australia
18:09 70 people and 140 agents
23:20 Agents and the platform
27:42 Hiring for a remote-first team
30:05 Agents that write requirements
31:10 Energy when capital is tight
34:10 Staying lean past 100 people
38:16 Careers at Send

Links from this episode.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat to fintech leaders 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 helping companies like today’s guest find that 1% who redefine what’s possible. Today I’m joined by Matt Barr, CEO of Send Payments. Matt, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Matt Barr
Dexter, great to join you.

Dexter Cousins
Mate, great to have you with us. Maybe you could share with our listeners a little bit about Send and what you do.

Matt Barr
Send quite simply helps consumers, businesses and enterprises with cross-border payments. It’s really easy to say, but it’s quite tricky to do well and compliantly, and I think that’s where Send sets itself apart.

The business was founded in 2019, and if you go back to that time, foreign exchange and cross-border payments were really dominated by big banks. The amazing companies you see today weren’t really household names. Wise is doing a terrific job, Remitly is really impressive, and there were certainly others like OFX, Convera and Western Union around back then. But it was pretty early, it was pretty expensive, and there wasn’t a lot of innovation going on, so the time was right. The business was founded looking at that gap around service and digital innovation, offering a more price-competitive service, and it was really orientated towards consumers and small businesses at the time.

If you fast forward to today, if the business had stayed in that orientation, I suspect we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because some amazing businesses have set up and are servicing those segments really well. Where Send is today is right in the middle of finalising a pivot into being a real enterprise specialist FX provider, embedding FX. That’s pretty tricky to do. There’s no one who’s really good at it beyond us, in the way we can repeatedly stand up and engage different enterprises in different verticals with that embedded experience. So that’s the journey the business has been on. I’ve been with the business now for about fourteen months, and it’s been pretty exhausting to be honest, but pretty exciting at the same time.

Dexter Cousins
What was your background prior to starting at Send? Had you worked in fintech before?

Matt Barr
Certainly in fintech broadly defined. Eight years with Mastercard…

Dexter Cousins
Should I reframe that as fintech start-ups or scale-ups?

Matt Barr
Not so much. My payments training really was with Mastercard, then I joined eftpos, and then with eftpos when we went into AP+. So much more established payments players. The mandates were always around driving innovation, but you’re iterating on top of an established operating model and established relationships and layering innovation on top. Great fun, but leaving that, I was really excited about taking those experiences in what are really enterprise rhythms, bringing them into a scale-up environment, and helping rebuild something new and different.

When I became familiar with the business and understood that it was in the process of pivoting to that enterprise orientation, I thought, that’s really interesting. It’s a very different rhythm, and the business would need new leadership to help execute that new vision. But it’s a really exciting orientation and one that’s quite differentiated in the market. So that’s my background, and why I ended up getting involved when I did.

Dexter Cousins
I wouldn’t mind talking to you about something you just picked up on there, which is this totally different rhythm. I’ve seen this a lot with businesses, particularly over the last three years or so, where they’ve gone on this journey. Particularly in a scale-up business, early days are very sales led, oftentimes founder sales led, and then they become product led through the success and growth they’ve had. Or there’s a pivot, because it’s just not sustainable to run high-volume, low-margin business models in fintech in Australia. So they’ve had to switch to enterprise, and all of a sudden you go from being sales led, building a bunch of features and hoping people like them, and fixing the bugs if you get complaints, to building in partnership with an enterprise customer.

You get a whole host of other problems and challenges. It’s a different sales rhythm, but it’s also a completely different product roadmap and a totally different approach to building product. How have you found taking Send on that journey, and what have been the gaps you’ve found in going from a founder-led sales business to an enterprise, product-led business?

Matt Barr
It’s interesting. The business I joined was already in transition to that enterprise rhythm. The team had done a really good job of understanding enterprise needs, and the fact that real scale is going to come from embedding an experience and letting a partner own that experience and design it to be consistent and natural within their environment.

For a lot of the customers we’ve had, the piece in FX in particular, and payments, that really keeps people awake at night is regulatory compliance reporting. It’s all the AML/CTF transaction monitoring and reporting in particular. If you don’t get that right, it can be very expensive, and in fact it can be quite terminal for a business, especially a scale-up. So one of the first conversations I had in the business was with the head of risk and compliance, because you could do the payments processing, but if you don’t do the risk side of FX well, it could be over very quickly. So I wanted to understand how the business had gone about doing that, especially in an embedded rhythm where we’re helping our partners meet all of their obligations, and in some cases making sure we’re doing that for them.

The way the platform is architected isn’t just about the payments processing. It’s compliance by design as part of that rhythm. We have direct API integration into AUSTRAC, for example, so it’s not an afterthought. It’s very much in the thinking of the platform, and the compliance and reporting become really important. Often we’d be winning business based on our compliance credentials and how robust and scalable they are, as opposed to being the cheapest provider, because in payments, and FX in particular, managing the risk is often the number one priority for partners, ahead of making sure they’ve got really good value in terms of low cost. That’s not really the conversation.

The team had also thought through the platform’s modular architecture, so that enterprises with different technology stacks can ingest what they need into the right part of their platform. It’s not a big monolithic platform. Some of the older FX providers, especially if they’ve grown up in a direct consumer or small business rhythm, tend to have a more legacy, more monolithic platform, which makes it very hard to integrate. Because that was really well thought through, it was the sales side of our rhythm that needed to be aligned to it.

In my experience in enterprise, to really engage enterprises well you need sector expertise, to understand their needs and requirements and to talk their language. The business hadn’t done that orientation on the commercial side, so that was one of the first priorities. Once we’d clarified the mission and strategy, we got the organisation aligned to that strategy in an enterprise rhythm, so that we could engage and partner and really understand needs, because that helps us build out the platform to meet the needs of specific verticals. That’s how you build long-term relationships and partnerships in the enterprise rhythm. So in many ways it was aligning the commercial side with where the tech and compliance functions had got to, and then there’s a maturing of that model as we’ve executed.

Now, as we look forward into the verticals and we’ve got deeper, I think we’ll find ourselves a lot more platform orientated as those functions and features build out by vertical, and you can see those requests coming in already. Then you have that trade-off between scale and repeatability versus customisation, so there’s always that tension between product and platform and commercial. But those are great tensions to manage as you’re trying to serve customer needs.

Dexter Cousins
With the customers that you’ve got, can you tell us about some of the clients that you work with?

Matt Barr
Our partners are quite public about the work they’ve done with us. We’ve got three traditional enterprise customers that we hero, and the pipeline is full of some very exciting prospects that we can’t talk about. The first big enterprise partner was PEXA, which is effectively a regulated monopoly within the Australian property settlement market. If you’re selling a property in Australia, you’re invariably using the PEXA platform to set up for that settlement, and we are the only FX provider that’s integrated into the PEXA workspace.

If a vendor happens to live overseas and has an overseas bank account, we can onboard those vendors through the conveyancing lawyer and get all of the documentation squared away for settlement, so at the time of settlement funds can flow directly into the overseas bank account. That saves the lawyers in particular a lot of time, because otherwise they would typically be taking all the paperwork down to a bank to queue up and organise it, or trust accounts get set up to enable double hops. We make it a much cleaner digital process compared to the past. That’s a terrific relationship and it will continue.

We’ve also had quite a long relationship with BoardRoom on share distributions, and we’re also picking up the Morgan Stanley Shareworks business for ESOP program support. In that rhythm we can get very big batch files of dividend distributions, as you can imagine. They support some of Australia’s biggest corporates, so Brambles, BHP, Lendlease, CSL. So quite big files, big flows and highly automated processes, and obviously the reporting and compliance side of that is really important. That’s been great for our business, and I know it’s been really great for BoardRoom’s business, and it has caused that whole vertical to sit up and think about what’s possible. So that’s exciting.

Probably the most recent, and certainly an extremely promising partnership, is with pay.com.au. The businesses had been talking for quite some time. They integrated close on a year ago, but really lit up their activation marketing in July of this year. They had kept away from FX because of the risk of getting exposed to AUSTRAC obligations, but in talking to us they realised that working with us, those risks can be managed. It was clear that within small businesses there’s a clear need for FX support, and that’s incremental volume processing through the platform. Imagine you’re a small business. If I’m paying all my Aussie dollar invoices in one process and my FX in another, there’s complexity. So having all of those invoices processing through the pay.com.au platform is a great value proposition, and we’re seeing really exciting month-to-month growth now that they’ve lit that up.

Those are different verticals and nice ways of demonstrating the scalability of our platform in different propositions. All of them have given us credibility in different ways and have helped light up the pipeline of opportunities in front of us to execute. And there are a few stories where we know people have looked to work with some of our competitors and found they can’t get the same experience we can offer, given the architecture of the platform, or they really like our compliance credentials and processes because they give them a lot of comfort. So there are different reasons people are coming back and working with us, which is really encouraging.

Dexter Cousins
Now, you’ve mentioned the competition, and one of the things that struck me was a stat I found two years ago. At the time Australia, and it’s probably still the case, had the sixth largest outbound remittance volumes in the world. It made sense when I saw all of these entrants. You mentioned Remitly, and there’s been a whole host of international players enter the Australian market.

Are you seeing opportunities outside of Australia, and do you see other markets where Send can take this enterprise solution? Because the thing that really struck me about what you said, Matt, is when we think about FX and remittance, we automatically think about people sending money overseas to their family. You’re talking about stuff that’s really complex, high volumes in regulated institutions, coming from all these disparate systems, sometimes with legacy tech issues as well. What opportunities are you seeing for Send to go into other markets?

Matt Barr
That’s a really good question. The FX market is the biggest market in the world. Talking about the TAM, I can give you some interesting data points. Just in Australia, the Australian FX market is five trillion dollars. No one’s going to believe you if you say my TAM’s five trillion, right? So what we’ve done is look at the verticals we operate in. There are about eight verticals where we have a clear value prop, and within those, where are the enterprise volumes we’re likely to be able to access? We think in Australia that’s sixty to eighty billion of TAM for us. It’s still a really big number, but it’s obviously not five trillion.

When you look at other markets, think of comparables or multiples. A good reference point in Australia is that for a small business, on average, about ten percent of their invoices are FX related. So for every ten dollars of Aussie dollar flows, there’s another dollar of FX-denominated invoice flow. The comparable metric in the US is about five percent, which makes sense because it’s a much bigger domestic market, so there’ll be less FX. If you go to Canada, it’s more like seventy-five percent, if you think about NAFTA flows. So suddenly it’s a bigger market than Australia, and FX is a much bigger share of the market. Then the UK is sixty percent, which makes sense because of the EU, and you’re an island, so you’re trading with partners. So when you look at FX and where we play, Australia’s interesting, but the other markets are much bigger.

When we look at our value proposition and our partners today, we’ve got a number of partners operating in other geographies but not offering FX as part of their proposition, for different reasons. As we prove out what’s possible here, there’s a very natural conversation about how we can support them in the other geographies. We’re finding there’s a real overlap into developed English-speaking markets. If I think about the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand, there’s a group of partners with footprints that cover those geographies. That’s pretty clearly where we see the opportunity to expand, get ourselves operationally ready and licensed, and then extend our existing value propositions there. I think there are a lot of similarities in how those value props will resonate. The flow percentage is a bit different, but as a complete proposition for our partners, it makes sense.

That’s how we see ourselves growing. Once you’re in those geographies, you can stand up local teams, build out, and look at other local market verticals we don’t operate in here where there might be resonance. That’s for the future, but for the next few years you can see a lot of work to be done to get out to those four markets and scale out with existing partners, and then obviously embrace new ones. So there’s no shortage of runway for the business, from what I can see.

Dexter Cousins
Now, the type of transition you’ve talked about from a company perspective, Matt, previously would have required hiring and rehiring very different people, and a lot more of them, to build something like what Send has done. My understanding is that rather than go down that path, you’ve utilised the wonderful tools we now have at our disposal in terms of AI. What’s that journey been like, and how has AI enabled you to go through this transition and build something that’s enterprise grade? Because if I look at some of your competitors, they’ve had to hire hundreds, if not thousands, of people to build something that can do what the Send platform does.

Matt Barr
If that’s true, wow, that’s extraordinary. Look, the business has done an amazing job, and I’ll be the last person to take credit for it. It was already underway. I’ve certainly encouraged it, supported it and celebrated it, and the business is definitely an early adopter. To give you some numbers, we’re about 70 people today, but as of yesterday we’ve got 140 agents operating in the business.

The way the business has thought about it is quite well understood and common now, but it certainly wasn’t when it was established. Every agent has a name, has an avatar, has a resume, effectively has a job description, has targets, gets coaching and has a line manager. The team thought about bringing agents into the business as an employee, as a member of a team. Through that orientation, it’s not just an algorithm. It’s someone that needs coaching, so the HR processes to bring them on board, develop them and coach them become really important. I think it’s a really powerful paradigm. Of the 140-odd, some are individual contributors and some work as teams.

For us it’s really helped our operational leverage in the business, the productivity lift. It’ll be an old statistic now, I’m sure, but we could see a 40% plus lift in output within each two-week sprint, with the same number of people. And more in the way compliance is managed in the business. One of the agents I love talking about is called Barry. Barry enables us to cover one hundred percent of account manager conversations in the business for compliance and reporting. Are the right questions being asked around ID&V, and the follow-up? If there’s a complaint, Barry will report that to Charlotte, who’s a person by the way, not an agent. Charlotte now gets all the data from all those calls and can then put the real value on top where there needs to be follow-up between humans.

I know initially Charlotte was quite concerned that Barry was going to replace her, but now Charlotte says, I can’t do my job without Barry. What we’re seeing is a lot of those repetitive tasks, and some of them are really important repetitive tasks, can now be executed with much more scale and much more value add on top from the team. That’s the operational leverage. We did take the resumes of all the agents at one point and went out to Hays and asked how much it would cost us to recruit all this talent. The answer came back at over five million dollars a year. That’s a meaningful lift on our opex, and it’s obviously a fraction of that to run. What it means is that as we grow the business, as you said, we don’t need lots and lots of people. So that’s the agentic side of what we’ve been doing.

The next step is taking that capability into the platform itself, whether it’s dynamic routing, exception handling on payments, support for people going through the payments journey, or validation of documents that come in. We’re doing that through agentic workforces rather than people. There’s definitely a lot more we can do, but the business has really powerful foundations. One piece that’s become increasingly important, especially given the headlines around some of the rogue agents out there at the moment, is the governance side of what the team has done. How data is managed and the controls around the agents, what they can and can’t do. That was thought through from the get-go, so I think we’re in a really strong place to keep leveraging that technology.

We talk about ourselves as a human-led business, and that’s really important. We’re not going to get replaced by AI, but it’s certainly helping us run a highly productive and less risky business, which is exciting.

Dexter Cousins
The part you mentioned about each agent having a job description, a resume and their own training and coaching program. I’ve been having this conversation a lot with chief people officers. CEOs and chief people officers are the two in my network who are asking more questions than anybody else. It’s, what do we do, right?

The interesting thing with chief people officers is that their role is almost becoming what you’ve described. It’s jobs to be done, almost an arbitrage play. We can save five million dollars a year by going here, and it’s going to cost us X amount in tokens. If this is the outcome we’re looking for and this is the goal of the business, what parts need to be human, and what parts can we give to agentic AI? And there’s the complexity of all the things that stem from it. How do we train an AI? What are the policies if we’ve got agentic AI?

The other side to it, and I think this was the conversation I had with pretty much every CEO at Intersekt this year, is what does it mean for the platform? If we’ve got agent-to-agent transactions, what does that mean from a compliance perspective? What does that mean from a process perspective? Do we even need a CX? Do we need a user interface? You’ve got all these questions now that take it all the way back to first principles. What’s the outcome we’re looking for, and does all of this stuff we’ve got now even matter? Do we need it? As you’re going through that process, it’d be really interesting to see what gets eliminated and cut out of the loop altogether as you start to realise it’s not needed in this world.

Matt Barr
It’s interesting. One of the things I can see, especially in cross-border payments being so highly regulated, is that in many ways that kind of automation of trades is, I suspect, some distance off. Can you imagine a regulator saying, yeah, that sounds fine to me? I think in less regulated spaces you can see that level of automation. If it’s just domestic retail shopping and you’re sending out your personal agent to go do some shopping for whatever you need, I can see that. But in cross-border, and especially in some of our flows where it’s really high ticket, I’d struggle to see anyone being comfortable empowering their personal agent to go and approve a half-million-dollar property settlement. I don’t think that’s where it starts, and the key thing in all of that is going to be trust.

Dexter Cousins
We’ve seen some really high-profile fraud cases and scams at that moment of settlement. Maybe that’s the solution, right? It’s not necessarily agents, but fraud detection and scam detection and all of those things.

Matt Barr
Exactly. I can see KYC processes and document validation being really complemented by agentic workforces monitoring the platform for exceptions. You can see that being really powerful. But in terms of approving transactions and making sure people are in the KYC process, I think those things are going to remain people-centric for a long time. I’m sure at some point we’ll get to a world of digital IDs and validations and trust structures around agents where that’s possible, but in highly regulated industries like FX, I suspect that’s some distance away. We’ll certainly be monitoring it. For us the priority is getting that operational leverage into the business, as opposed to how we take people out of the transaction loop. I don’t think that’s where we’ll be prioritising our efforts, but it is interesting times for sure.

Dexter Cousins
With such a significant use of AI in your workforce now, and you mentioned you’re still very much human led, how has that impacted the type of person you look to hire at Send? Have you had to change the profile of person?

Matt Barr
I’m not sure AI has driven a real change in the person. But if I talk about our business and the characteristics we know people need to be really successful, we’re a remote-first business. We do have a headquarters in Sydney, but of the seventy people, I think about eighteen of us are in Sydney. There are ten people on the Gold Coast, more further up in Queensland, and we’ve got people in Melbourne and rural Melbourne, Adelaide, New Zealand, Vietnam and the Philippines. It’s such a distributed workforce. So for us it’s more about making sure we’re bringing in people who can work really independently, are self-motivated and driven, and can really own things. Because we don’t have big teams, if people don’t work well in that environment, you find out very quickly. It’s not for everyone.

What we see is a real curiosity and lean-in on this kind of innovation. The way AI is developed in the business, it’s done in partnership between the business and the technology and product people, who obviously have the expertise to help build it out. It’s really done in collaboration. It’s not agents being deployed at people to work with. It’s people coming up and saying, hey, I’ve got this problem, can you work with me to develop an agent to solve this need? I noticed the other day there was a brown bag lunch, and there were forty-nine people on the call watching someone build out an agent. There are only seventy people in the business. If you’ve got 70% of your people sitting on a call watching an agent being developed because they’re hungry to learn how that gets deployed, it’s just part of what the business does now. Getting people into the business who are curious and self-driven and want to learn and develop, I think that’s the core of success here.

Dexter Cousins
Jeez, I wouldn’t want to be a business analyst in this age. It’s requirements gathering, and all the middlemen are being cut out, right?

Matt Barr
Well, actually, and you’ll have to excuse me, I can’t remember the name of this particular agent, but the first person you talk to when you’ve got a new idea for a new agent is an agent. There’s a conversation you have, and that agent helps document everything you need to feed into the process. It’s the first step in the governance process. There’s actually another workforce, and Shaza, I’m not joking, is the leader of that workforce, who’s an expert in all the different technology platforms we have. When the product people are testing a new idea, they’re first engaging with that workforce to test the platforms and capabilities and start to build out those requirements. So there’s a lot of support in the business, and it’s very much woven into the DNA now. Come back in a year’s time and I wouldn’t want to guess how many are working in the business.

Dexter Cousins
With all that being compressed, though, it hasn’t actually changed the complexion of the type of person we look for in the ten years I’ve been running Tier One People. It’s this shrinking of teams. You’d have an army of business analysts and product managers, and it would take you six months to get a prototype out. The people I was hiring in fintech ten years ago are the very same people who are now building a prototype by themselves in a few days, or in a day, realising their idea wasn’t that great and moving on to the next thing.

I’m wondering, from your side, seeing this shift and this different way of working versus the way you’ve worked in slightly more traditional environments like Mastercard, what has that done for your energy? Do you feel like you’ve reinvigorated your career to some extent?

Matt Barr
That’s an interesting perspective. It does create a very high-energy environment. There’s a lot of innovation going on, and it’s clearly very empowering for the team. You can also appreciate that the team really wants to grow the business, and because we’re capital constrained, leveraging AI to help us go faster was a great priority, and it’s been a very successful strategy. It has created this environment and these rhythms in the business, and you’ll see that continue. I imagine if you’re in an environment that’s less constrained, there’s probably less impetus and less energy for driving that kind of change, because you are doing things differently, and change is hard.

This business is so used to driving change and letting someone else take over a process so they can go focus on something else. I don’t hear conversations about people being worried about their jobs at all. It’s, I no longer have to do that repetitive task, it’s really good. So I can see how, in a business of this size and with the nature of the people we have, people are comfortable driving that much change that quickly. I can see that being very uncomfortable in a more mature organisation that’s not used to that pace of change.

And maybe, Dexter, to your point, fintechs have always been starved of resources and trying to get things done on a shoestring, so people have always had to be creative with what they can do. Now they’ve got this amazing toolkit. It’s probably not surprising that those people are the ones thriving in this environment, because they’re used to making do with what they can get their hands on, and now they’ve got a really powerful toolkit to do that.

Dexter Cousins
Look, I think this is one of the great things. The last four years have been really tough on everybody, and every time they saw light at the end of the tunnel, it’s been a train coming at them. I’m really getting a sense of renewed vigour, optimism and energy, and it’s not just optimism, it’s actual results. There are a number of clients who might have reduced their workforce by thirty percent over the last eighteen months through natural attrition, and have found better ways of working, so they’ve not had to go and hire more people, and they’re actually getting better results.

This whole debate about remote and work from home has challenges as you get to a larger organisation. If you can keep something to seventy to a hundred people, well, traditionally that was always where the growing pains started for a scaling fintech. So now if your growth is being done by agents, and I’m sure they come with their own problems…

Matt Barr
Some agents have been fired, so it’s true.

Dexter Cousins
I think that’s one of the fascinating things about where we are now. That traditional challenge or hurdle. There were so many businesses, Matt, over this last decade that got to that hundred and fifty point. It’s a bit like watching the journey of a caterpillar to a butterfly, and you get that sticky chrysalis mess. A lot of businesses struggled in that chrysalis to grow the wings and get out of that sticky mess. They just got stuck there and couldn’t get out, and unfortunately some of them are no longer with us. I think one of the unspoken advantages of this technology is that it allows you to remain lean. If you focus on getting the right people, that’s not your constraint anymore. Capital isn’t your constraint. That’s the thing that I think has got everybody really excited and building and innovating again.

Matt Barr
You can definitely see it. If I think about the operational leverage we have in the business and the volumes we know are going to turn up in the next couple of years, the choice to invest in the cost base and people is really about the growth on top of that, because you can see our ability to service and support that growth. Even going offshore, to be honest, for some of the opportunities it’s not clear that we need to put boots on the ground. We can service it from a distance. The good thing is we can think carefully about where we invest in people. I can see very much in business development and relationship management that there’s still going to be a real need for people and connectivity. In the technology areas and compliance areas, where there’s a lot of ability to automate processes, you’re not going to have the same need to invest at the same levels.

Since I’ve been with the business, we’ve still been hiring people, and we’re still doing a lot of agentic work. There’s no thought process around doing what we do with fewer people. It’s more that as we grow the business, we can avoid bringing on big teams, which is what you’re saying. The timing of the business and the maturing of this technology have aligned nicely, so we’re not having to make those big decisions to reset a team or reset a culture because they’re resistant to change. We’ve embraced all that. It will be interesting to see where we land as we get into these other geographies, and the size of the teams, but you just know it’s going to be very different from what it would have been five years ago if you tried to do the same thing. So I think we’re in a really powerful place.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. We’re coming to a wrap, Matt, and that leads me on to this. You’d think we’d scripted it, but the very types of people we’ve just been talking about are the very people who listen to and watch this podcast. If anybody likes what they’ve heard and they’re interested in careers at Send Payments, where’s the best place for them to head to?

Matt Barr
Super easy. sendpayments.com. I love the fact there’s no .au, so that’s a statement of intent for sure. There’s a careers page there and all the open roles are posted there, so drop your CV in if there’s something of interest, and we look forward to talking to you.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. And if there are founders, bank execs and so on listening who think there might be partnership potential, where’s the best place for them to head to, and who should they reach out to?

Matt Barr
Drop me an email, or I’m sure people know how to track me down on LinkedIn as well. We’re on an exciting journey. There’s a lot to be done, and we’re definitely going to need talent to help us pull it off. Thanks for this opportunity. It’s great to tell the story of what we’re at and what we’re going to do.

Dexter Cousins
It’s brilliant for you to share what you have, particularly around what you’re doing in the AI space, and to be so generous in sharing those insights, because they’re a real competitive advantage. I think that’s one of the beauties of what you’re doing. The moat is in the complexity and the regulation. It’s not in, we’ve got a bunch of AI agents doing some stuff for us.

Matt Barr
It’d be very hard to replicate what we’ve got, that’s for sure. And I haven’t shared any of those details.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Well, if you had, I’d cut them out for you. As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re new to the show, make sure you give us a follow and a subscribe. It really helps me get great guests like Matt on. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. I really do appreciate it. Until the next episode, keep well.