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James Foster on EzyPay’s Expansion, Partnerships and Opportunities in Asia.

July 19, 2023 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

“Our success is defined by what we decide not to do because there are so many opportunities.” – James Foster


It’s been two years since James Foster last appeared on Fintech Chatter. And it has been an incredible two years for Ezypay with 50% year on year revenue growth, going from 60-100 people and now operating in 9 countries across APAC.

Summary:

In this episode, Dexter chats with James about the challenges and opportunities of being a profitable business in the fintech industry. James highlights importance of focusing on solving customer pain points and making money, rather than chasing funding and growth for the sake of it.

James also shares insights on the impact of Payto, a real-time account-to-account payment platform, and how Ezypay is leveraging this innovation to improve collection rates and enhance the customer experience. He highlights the need for businesses to adapt and innovate while staying true to their core values and profitability goals.

About James Foster and Ezypay

James Foster is the CEO of Ezypay, a payment solutions company that specialises in supporting businesses with recurring customer payments. With over 27 years of experience, Ezypay helps merchants optimise collection rates, improve the customer experience, and enhance cash flow. 

James has led the company through significant growth and profitability, navigating the challenges of the fintech industry while staying focused on solving customer pain points.

Follow Ezypay: https://www.ezypay.com/


Key Takeaways:

  1. Being profitable and solving customer pain points should be the primary focus for businesses, rather than chasing funding and growth.
  2. Payto is a game-changer in the payment industry, offering real-time account-to-account payments and improved customer protection.
  3. Ezypay’s success is attributed to its ability to focus on its niche market, make data-driven decisions, and adapt to the evolving payment landscape.
  4. Doing business in Asia requires understanding the unique cultural and regulatory differences in each country, as well as being open to learning from failures and making course corrections.

Chapters

00:00:00 About EzyPay

00:14:17 Navigating Complexity and Collaboration Across Locations

00:18:05 PayTo Impact and Benefits Australia

00:25:00 Expansion Strategies and Challenges in Asia 

00:40:45 Opportunities for Australia in Fintech

Links from this episode.

James Foster on Fintech Chatter.

More on payments on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Welcome to Fintech Chatter, presented by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. Follow us on your favourite podcast player or Fintech Chatter TV on YouTube.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. I’m your host Dexter Cousins, and in today’s show I’m rejoined by James Foster, CEO of Ezypay. I say rejoin because James was last on the show two years back, and he’s joining me again today to give us a bit of an update on Ezypay and talk about the last two years of innovation and PayTo. James, welcome back.

James Foster
Thanks Dexter. And you get this from other guests as well, but in some ways it doesn’t feel like two years, it feels like yesterday, and in other ways it feels like 25 years. So good to be catching up again.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
All I can say is fatter, balder, older, sadly no wiser.

Dexter Cousins
Well, I’ve still got my hair, but I’m with you in all those other dimensions. James, it’s great to have you back. And look, there’s a lot of stuff that I want to cover with you today. I think when I originally brought you onto the show, we were at the height of the frothiness of the market, and the key motivation for me bringing Ezypay on was to give it almost like a juxtaposition of a business that’s 20-odd years old at the time, who had always been focused on being profitable and building a really solid business. But for those listeners who maybe haven’t heard that episode, could you tell us a little bit about the big problem that Ezypay solves?

James Foster
Yeah, sure Dexter. And I think in a lot of cases Ezypay is similar to a lot of businesses in terms of we were founded by our business owner George Holman, who still owns the business, to solve a pain point that he had. So he was a health and fitness business operator in Australia, and he was one of the first in the market to introduce pay by the month, no lock-in contract, which nowadays we take for granted, but back then it was a bit of a revolutionary concept. And he struggled to find a banking partner to work with to take ongoing direct debits, and so he created Ezypay to solve his own problem.

And fundamentally, at its core, 27 years later, that’s still what we’re doing. We support merchants that have an ongoing relationship with their customers. That’s me avoiding the word subscription, instalment, recurring, card on file. But fundamentally what we’re not is a generic payment processor. We support those businesses that have that ongoing relationship, because there’s inherently a bunch of challenges that come with recovering payments in a recurring sense or an ongoing relationship. So optimising those collection rates, making it frictional, improving the customer experience, improving cash flow.

And then by embedding our capability, and that’s obviously a bit of a hot topic these days, embedded fintech, but taking our capability and leveraging our software partners and putting our capabilities into there so they can offer that to their merchants. So that’s fundamentally the place that we play.

Dexter Cousins
So when we I think initially caught up at Intersekt, probably two years back as well, we had a good chat. And as I mentioned in the intro, was kind of the height of the frothiness of the market. And I remember you saying to me that you kind of, I think might have been your first Intersekt as well, and you were a little kind of surprised at how advanced Ezypay was against some of the what might be kind of competitors who were getting a lot of press at the time. What do you kind of put that down to, and how has Ezypay gone about being profitable and being an organisation was also being able to innovate at the same time?

James Foster
Yeah, I think it’s a good question. And as you said, the market, your words, was frothy at the time, and we’ve seen a correction in that space, particularly for the startup part of fintech. Clearly we’re not a startup. And I think, look, some of that’s just a natural reaction to startup businesses. Number one, to get funding, need to have a great story, and they articulate that story, and it’s based upon the potential future vision, not runs on the board, because they don’t have runs on the board to talk about. They’ve got to talk about that future vision. And also not just around funding, but just as a business model, they’ve got to go out to market and talk about how awesome they are.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
So I can sort of understand why that’s the case, but the challenge with that is it’s really hard in the market to then differentiate between the… and the reality. And I think even in the last 12 months we’ve seen, both globally and in APAC and in Australia in particular, a number of payments businesses that have either collapsed or had significant downsizing, and people have been genuinely shocked in the market because the marketing was so great. How are these guys not doing well? They said everything was wonderful.

And I think that’s a little bit unfair in the community. I think as an ecosystem we’ve got to be able to share, hey, things aren’t fantastic, or there’s a challenge here, or it’s a little bit tough, because it doesn’t paint a great picture for those that are then coming after. Why did those guys have a challenge? Or again, not necessarily believing the hype too much and going after something from that perspective.

And so I think from Ezypay’s perspective, because we’d always been bootstrapped effectively, we hadn’t taken outside funding, we could just focus in what most businesses should actually be focused on, which is to make money, right? Is to solve a problem and do that profitably. And I think it was good in that fact that the business was always started that way, because we had to make the right decisions about where to invest and where to grow, and not do so super aggressively, and not to place really large bets from that perspective.

But on the flip side, recognising that in payments you can’t stand still, so you’ve got to continue to invest, you’ve still got to be able to move forward. As is a really great sort of microcosm example of what’s happening in payments globally, with PayTo and a real-time account to accounts, licensing regime changes. A whole bunch of stuff is going on, which means that as a payments business you’ve got to continue to innovate, but you shouldn’t necessarily be placing these massive, large, risky bets. You’ve got to find your niche in the market as to where there’s product market fit and how can you be profitable, and continue to sort of do that.

And yeah, so I don’t think we never, as I said, I think I was surprised a little bit in terms of reflecting on what others in the market were or weren’t doing and what the actual capability was. But also I think recognising, because now everyone’s sort of saying, well, VCs have seen the light and it’s not just about top line revenue growth and businesses have got to be profitable. I don’t think it’s actually really that way yet. They just want to have a story about how someone might maybe possibly one day perhaps become profitable. But I think people do lose sight that any business, doesn’t matter at what stage you’re at, needs to be able to generate money.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. How do you kind of manage that balance? Because I’m pretty certain two years back you would have had lots of people want to throw money at Ezypay, lots of people want to invest, lots of people telling you that you had to go and scale and do all of this stuff and go global and blah blah blah, do an have pay and do this. How did you kind of resist that urge to go down that path, and what is it that you kind of, help you kind of keep on the right track?

James Foster
Yeah, I mean, it’s a good question. I think, again, I’m fortunate by having George as the owner of the business. He’s a pretty level-headed guy, he’s not after world domination. And again, to that point, I think that definition of, we’re a 27-year-old business that is profitable. This fin year, which we’ve just finished up, we’ve grown 50% year on year, which is super awesome for a 27-year-old business.

Dexter Cousins
Not just that, right? But if you consider the last three years, and your customers, majority of them, what, health clubs, daycare centres, that have been shut for quite a long period over that three years, it must have been really tough to resist somebody coming to the rescue with a big bag of money and go, take some of this.

James Foster
Yeah, no. Again, if we go back to those dark days of COVID, yes, it was challenging, because I think as a payments business, if your customers aren’t processing payments, you’re not generating revenue.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And it was challenging for us. There was lots of benefits that came out of that. I think number one was, again, even though we are profitable business and we’re fiscally responsible, when you get into that environment you have to really, really care about your P&L and every single dollar that you’re spending. We have such a more robust cash flow model now than we did prior to COVID.

I think the other one as well was, again, it was good to see. We always talk again about our payments business with our partners and our customers, is that as they grow, we grow. But also the alternative of that is, as they’re feeling pain, we were feeling pain, but we are genuinely in it together with them.

And I think the other thing as well is that there are a number of our direct competitors that showed their true colours when COVID hit, in terms of taking a risk-based decision, not being very customer friendly, disabling billing for a lot of their merchants because they just cared about their chargeback exposure. And that really worked positively for us, because it differentiated us in the market, and post-COVID we saw a lot of businesses coming across to us because of that.

And so again, in hindsight, everything’s wonderful in hindsight. At the time we probably had a different perspective, but I’m glad we sort of went through that process. It has made us a better business. But it’s also just, as I said, when I talk about that 50% growth, that’s not about COVID return, that’s on top of. So we’re back to our pre-COVID levels, plus we’re growing 50% year on year, which is great.

Dexter Cousins
So you’re probably two years ahead of the kind of…

James Foster
Yeah, that’s true. And again, I don’t want to be too negative of the capital market environment, but in some of my conversations, when they hear of a business like ours, they still scratch their head and say, but why are you actually returning a profit? You shouldn’t be.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And I’m like, hang on a sec, that’s what you say into the… No, no, no, you should just be showing that you can, that it’s possible, that you have a story, that there’s a path to profitability. And that’s where you see a lot of these guys now talking about a path to profitability.

And so I still think there is always going to be this fundamental disconnect, and that just comes down to, I think, understanding different stakeholders’ views, right? When you’re an actual owner of a business and you want to have that for a long period of time, you care about that inherent long-term viability and that innate profitability, right? VCs, again, they’re placing lots of bets and they’re just hoping a couple of them really pay off. If you look at private equity or growth equity, they don’t have as big a risk position, but they’re only going to hold on to a business for five to seven years. And again, they just care about their return, they just care about that story. They care about, when they want to exit, is the business a better story than when they came on board?

And so I think a lot of founders or business owners have just got to understand what that actually looks like and what that actually means. And again, I’m not being negative. You can’t blame a dog for barking, but you can’t be surprised when that dog barks either.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And when George started the business, I don’t think such a term as founders, just an entrepreneur, right?

James Foster
Well, not even that. He was just a small business owner.

Dexter Cousins
He was just a small business owner.

James Foster
And again, no such concept as being bootstrapped or a scaleup or any of those terminologies. He was just a small business owner.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Right. And again, particularly in Australia, there’s a lot of small business owners. And so I think it can just colour, and as I said, I think lot of avenues. And sometimes there are a lot of people that start businesses with the explicit desire to be acquired, and hats off to them from that perspective. But I think when it comes to understanding where you want funding, what you actually want the exit to be, or what do you want that long-term goal to be, you’ve just got to make sure there’s alignment there.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Speaking on the talent piece, how difficult have you found it to find people here in Oz that share the ethos and mindset of the business, in this kind of industry, and then this ecosystem?

James Foster
Yeah, I think it’s a little bit challenging, not necessarily in terms of the value alignment or the ethos, but for our size of business. And I often talk about, so we just use the word scaleup, and it’s funny, we’re sitting here in the Stone & Chalk scaleup hub at the moment. We’re a mature startup, and I use that frame of reference, or sometimes I talk about we’re a complex small business.

So I mean, a year ago we were at 60 people, right now we’re about at 100, so we’re growing, and next financial year we grow to 160. So we’re growing quite fast in terms of people, but that’s not a massive organisation. We operate in nine countries across APAC in really interestingly regulated environments, and as I said, payments is constantly evolving. So we’re a complex business, but we’re not a large multinational, thousand-head sort of organisation.

And so that sort of challenge is that we want someone that has the ability to get done, to be able to move quickly, to be able to juggle a few balls at the same time, but also, like from a startup perspective, but appreciate the complexity of operating in nine countries with a mature product, with a lot of customers. And so you sort of get this challenge. Sometimes we can get people coming from larger organisations that are used to the complexity, but they might struggle with that roll your sleeves up, get done.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Or vice versa, we might have someone that’s come from a startup background, really used to the get done, but not so much the complexity, or that legacy of having a large customer base, for example, to deal with. So it is often that sweet spot.

And often what we’ve probably found is that some really great people that work for Ezypay have, and similar probably to myself, have come from larger corporate backgrounds and then dip their toe in the water in the startup space, maybe haven’t loved that risky situation where tomorrow the business could be all over, or the rolling your sleeves up means that you are licking stamps in someone’s basement, but like the model of getting done. But they want to be in a little bit of a more safe but exciting sort of complex business, and that’s been our sweet spot.

So we’ve gone to a sort of full hybrid. We do have some fully remote employees, but we have a lot of people that are based either here in our Sydney office in Stone & Chalk or in our KL, Malaysia office. And there is definitely that benefit of getting people physically in the same place. But, and you raise a really important point, is when you’re operating in multiple countries, pre-work from home, you still have this challenge of not everyone being in the physical same office. So if your business is relying on getting physically everyone together, you’re in a bit of trouble.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And so we always had that challenge. And to be fair, I think in the pre-COVID days, having two offices was much harder culturally, because you’d have an us versus them. You would have the Sydney team and the Malaysia team, and they had their own separate identities. And actually, I think work from home in COVID actually broke those barriers down quite a lot more.

You still have the inherent challenge of how do we get people together and how do we get that collaboration, and anyone that says that they’ve got that right is full of crap, right? We’re constantly re-evaluating what that looks like and what that needs to look like. But you spot on. I think a lot of people that sort of just focus on this debate of should everyone be in the office or should everyone be from home. If you are operating across multiple office locations, you’ve got to think different.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about PayTo for a little bit. So from the outside looking in, I would have thought, hey, that would be a major threat to a business model like the one that Ezypay has. What is the opportunity that Ezypay sees with PayTo?

James Foster
Yeah, and it’s interesting you sort of say, I guess, that it’s a threat. It’s not. It’s a threat if we don’t do it, you think. And for the listeners, because there might be, again, I’ve been embedded in this for a number of years now, so for the handful of listeners out there that might not be aware of what PayTo is, it’s effectively the real-time replacement for direct debit in Australia. Or to get into payment language nerd speak, it’s a real-time account to account payments platform. But it is actually globally unique in my opinion, because it’s not just about the ability to push a real-time account to account payment. We’ve had that with NPP for a number of years. And it’s not just around a request to pay model.

It’s built this digital mandate, or PayTo agreement, not allowed to use the word mandate anymore, which exists in everyone’s banking app, and it’s effectively a digital real-time version of that piece of paper we all used to sign, a direct debit authority. And so it fundamentally we change the game for direct debits in the Australian marketplace.

Now, having said that, change takes time.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
So it was launched July last year, and again, as a recognition of just how important it is to merchants that have an ongoing relationship with their customers, which is what we focus on, we were there on day one. So we’d planting it our flag and said, hey, we’re here, knowing full well that there wouldn’t be much demand, because as the market has seen, it’s taken the big four banks quite some time to actually meet their obligations to the Reserve Bank and be able to go live and be in a position. But it was really important for us to be able to be there from day one, so that we could show the market that we were there, but also so that we could learn quite early on. And it is fundamentally at the core of our business model.

And I think there’s a bunch of reasons for that, Dexter. Again, people focus on real time. It’s not the real-time movement of funds. The biggest issue that our customers have, so the merchants that we support, is knowing when a payment fails and what to do with it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
So again, direct debit in Australia today, based on the BECS system, you have to wait three days to get a file you message. There’s no such thing as a successful payment response. It’s ridiculous, it’s old school, it’s crazy. And it’s not about waiting three days to get paid. Some merchants care about that, but surprisingly not as many as people would think, particularly in a recurring business model. You’re not sweating on it, because you know you’re getting paid on a regular basis.

What you care about is that Dexter, that deadbeat, didn’t pay for his gym membership, so I shouldn’t be letting him in the door.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Or more importantly, Dexter’s payment’s failed, what do I need to do? Do I try again? When do I try again? Do I let Dexter know that it’s failed? Do I just charge him double on the next week or the next fortnight or whatever that is? So what to do when a payment fails is really important. And so again, PayTo is real time. We will attempt that payment and know if it was successful or not, and that’s going to power a huge collection improvement for merchants from that perspective.

What it also does, I think, as well is it’s much tighter from a consumer protection perspective, around the fact that you now as a consumer are actively consenting to this agreement, right? Again, direct debit forms, they’re shocking, right? Pieces of paper or digital forms, you tick a box, and then, hey, you’ve now got a dispute with that merchant. How do I stop the payment? Right.

And that’s where I find it really frustrating. There’s a lot of conversations in the market about chargeback protection on the card schemes, but the user experience is horrible, right? Again, even if you’re paying by credit card and the merchant’s refusing to stop billing you, you’re either doing a chargeback or you’re closing your accounts. It’s like the nuclear weapon, right? Whereas with PayTo, inside your own banking app, there’s the ability for you as a consumer to go in there and pause or suspend or remove that authority. So I think it’s a great balance between making sure merchants have a mechanism that’s fair to them and they can get paid in a timely fashion, but it’s also protecting the consumer.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
So I think it’s a great combination. As you can tell, I’m a bit of a cheerleader for PayTo, and that’s through our experience in nine other markets. PayTo is really unique for all of those reasons, and so I think it is going to be a game changer.

At the end of the day, though, that complexity comes with it challenges. Again, merchants, be it in the health and fitness space or a childcare operator or an education provider or a property manager, they don’t want to worry about how that stuff works, they just want to get paid. And so from that perspective there’s always still going to be that need for providers like us to be able to simplify, again, make payments easy. That’s why we’re called Ezypay. And simplify that for merchants, and again, working with our software partners, allowing them to take advantage of that. So yeah, that’s probably, I guess, our take on that.

And probably the last little thing that I always talk about there is PayTo is still going to be a choice. There are multiple payment methods. We’re not PayTo only, we’re not account to account only. There’s a few businesses have built their business model on that. And from our perspective, we see that as an option, right? So we not only support PayTo, obviously we still support direct debit while it’s still around, we also support cards, because consumers do want choice. And so it’s one part of a bigger picture.

Dexter Cousins
Now, with that kind of innovation, and technologies evolving and moving all the time, comes a fair amount of cost as well. We kind of touched on this earlier around the kind of focus being very kind of cost-conscious and P&L focused. We’re in an economic period now where I think every business is following that path as well. From your side, what have you kind of done, what have you kind of implemented in order to be able to navigate what have been and continue to be tough economic kind of circumstances, whilst being able to invest in innovation, whilst being profitable, right, and whilst going and growing the business and hiring all these people? And that’s a lot of things to be doing in a time where, if you look at the big banks, they cut technology spend and headcount, right? So you’re kind of doing the opposite, so to speak.

James Foster
Poor banks, right? They’re only making billions of dollars of profit. Feel sorry for them.

Yeah, again, I think it comes down, well, there’s a couple of things there, Dexter. Is yes, you need to make hard decisions, right? So our success is defined by what we decide not to do, because there’s so many opportunities, particularly even in our niche, right? So probably that’s the other thing, coming back to understanding what you’re good at and continuing to be good at.

Dexter Cousins
So you’re not looking at how to integrate ChatGPT?

James Foster
No, we’re not. No, we’re not doing any super smart AI lipstick on a pig type things. But again, in the payment space, obviously you do have those infrastructure providers that are wanting to be everything to everyone, right? And they’re trying to go for scale, and there’s big investments there. And we don’t do terminals, we don’t do one-off payments, we don’t do merchant funding for buy now pay later, we don’t do a whole bunch of stuff that theoretically we could do because they’re payment adjacent.

Focusing on what we’re good at, recognising as well where that product market fit is. And you’re still making some bets, but you’re reducing the size of the bets. That does reduce that size of return, again, right? So we’re not going for a moonshot. We’re looking at adjacent areas when we expand our offering, as to where there’s good overlap. I mean, a good example of that is why we entered the rental payment space, is because we saw some of the challenges is being very, very similar to franchised health and fitness, interestingly.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Right? There’s multi parties in terms of multi split payouts, there’s the same types of challenges around collection. There’s a couple of little bits and pieces that we needed to do, but it wasn’t a huge investment. So we’re not chasing these big prizes.

The other thing I think as well is that, and again reflecting, I think it was when Simon was interviewing you, and he mentioned when he started up Assembly, right, they did it all on credit card funding.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
I think there’s also this misnomer that you need millions and millions and millions of dollars. And I think VC money in the frothy times was too readily available, and people thought that you needed 20 million bucks to enter a market or to build a payments platform or to do whatever it might be, where in fact actually most of that budget went into marketing or really expensive C-level salaries.

So I also think on that point, here’s an interesting stat, right? And it was, it’s actually Dave and Stuart, Look Who’s Charging, who shared this with me about three years back. And at the time, a third of both Facebook’s and Google’s ad spend revenue could be attributed to VC-backed startups.

Dexter Cousins
That does not surprise me. That does not surprise me.

James Foster
And sometimes it feels good to see your logo on the side of a bus or wherever. But I think, again, when you have to be a bit mean and hard about looking at that again, necessity is the mother of invention, they talk about. But I think, again, it comes down to understanding how to do that.

And again, a good example for us is, I know a lot of people look at what we’ve done, and I don’t want to spill too much of our secret sauce here, but we’ve got a great capability of expanding into new markets in Asia.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And sometimes a lot of people will go, geez. Because our last market we went into was in South Korea. There was an investment required, for sure, but we did our due diligence, we learned from our experience, we knew exactly what we needed to do for market entry, and we kept that as pointed as possible, so we could get a minimum viable product and then scale from there. And so again, I think it’s just that mentality of recognising that, hey, this investment’s going to make a return on it, and it just sharpens your focus.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What are the plans for Asia?

James Foster
I get asked that a lot, obviously. I think we’ve been, and so context, we’re in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia. I think I said, I usually forget one. It’s a bit of a party trick to remember. Some of those markets are newer than others for us.

And coming back to my previous point, we’ve sort of gone into those markets initially with a particular vertical focus, with a couple of partners, with some existing merchants, to make sure that our solution is viable. And now what we’re looking to do is really leverage that footprint and grow from there. So both just in terms of working with existing partners, but also taking some of the vertical experience that we have in Australia and New Zealand and being able to replicate that into Asia.

We get asked a lot about entering other geographies, but to be fair, eight or nine markets is a decent number already. And I want to make that we’re returning some good investment. And as I said, that’s part of what’s powering our 50% year-on-year growth, is Asia. But again, we’re seeing good growth out of Australia and New Zealand as well. But it’s going to be just continuing to focus, responding to our partners’ feedback, improving the product, and also just scaling what we already have today from that perspective.

And probably the last point that I’ll just make, again, I sort of said at the start that people wouldn’t think twice in Australia about, gym memberships are paid by the month. Interestingly, in Asia predominantly gym memberships are not. They are upfront, paid in full transactions. And so there’s a bit of an interesting dynamic that we’re seeing shift there. Is not only is fitness participation on the increase in Asia, but just the insight around how people want to pay. So they’re sort of going through a bit of a transition that we went through 26 years ago, and so we’re seeing some good growth and engagement in that space, as an example.

Dexter Cousins
No, it’s notoriously difficult to crack Asia. I think one of the key reasons is because every country has its own unique culture, unique way of doing things. They’re not necessarily how we’re accustomed to doing things in the Western world from a business perspective.

James Foster
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
What’s been your kind of secret there? Have you managed to get somebody on the ground who understands that region, or…

James Foster
I’m going to take my own medicine for a second, Dexter. This is the point where normally I’d go, it’s because we’re awesome, we’re great, we’re wonderful, I’m the best CEO in the world. The reality is it’s hard bloody work, and we’ve had some absolute disasters, and it is really challenging. I want to be clear, it is really challenging to do business in Asia, I think for a couple of reasons.

One is, and you just mentioned, it’s not one region, right? And we talk to a lot of US and European based businesses that are wanting to come into this market, and they make the mistake of treating Asia as a region that’s homogeneous.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Or even to the analogy of sort of Europe, saying, okay, each country in Europe’s a little bit different, but it’s still sort of the same. That’s not the case. And particularly in the world of payments, right, payments is not the same country to country in terms of payment preferences, local payment methods. There’s a whole range of complexities and differences. And so that’s the first challenge, is just really recognising what is different.

I think the other aspect as well as just dealing with the licensing style approach. Again, one of the things I hear a lot of fintechs in Australia sort of complaining about the regulatory environment in Australia, but what I would say is regulators in Australia are actually very approachable. They are very open to conversation. Again, they’re slow moving, but in some ways that’s a good thing, because if there is a change, they sort of signal that far in advance. That’s a very different type of situation in a lot of Asian markets. There are exceptions, again, I don’t want to paint everyone with the same brush, but regulation can change there very quickly and you can be very surprised by that. Again, getting money out of the country can be very difficult, dealing with tax authorities can be very difficult. We’ve had a lot of challenges there.

So I think, to some extent, so with all that aside, what’s been our success? A little bit of naivety. I think, again, that’s where startups or scale-ups can benefit here, is if you overthink anything, you’ll never do anything.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Right? It’ll always look too hard. So sometimes it’s great to just sort of jump in and then deal with it afterwards, because if you’d sort of looked at it collectively at the start, you never would have done it. The second thing I think is appreciating things that are different, but trying to figure out the commonalities. So I think that’s what we have learned quite well, is how can we take what we do and figure out what the nuances are.

And probably the last point, and we found this particularly in, say, a market like South Korea. Part of our challenge is there, is that subscription payments is just not a thing over in that market, and so a big part of our challenge is just really explaining our business model.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And particularly in the health and fitness space during COVID, and this is the same with another couple of other markets, it’s considered high risk, right? So from a financial services perspective it’s a high-risk industry, put in the same category as crypto.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Right? Because of that forward payment risk. And it took a long time for us to engage with our banking partners over there to say, actually, our model is completely different. We don’t have that same forward payment risk, and in fact we are solution to the problem that you’re seeing.

But recognising that there is friction in being different is not a bad thing. It can be a good thing if you’re wanting to be different. And it’s that concept of, people talk about moats in a market. It’s good that there’s friction there, and that we’ve had to go through that, because conversely there’s not really anyone that does what we do, for example, in the South Korean market or the Philippines market or the Taiwanese market. And so recognising sometimes that things being hard is good, right, as long as that there’s a product market fit or a customer down the end of the train.

Dexter Cousins
So a lot of what we’ve talked about, I think, has been almost like, and we hear this often times in the fintech world, that there were 10-year overnight success. And it seems like a lot of what you’re talking about is just actually dedicating and committing the time to see something through to a successful conclusion. We talk a lot about failure, and there… issue with failure porn here, and the, I think, fintech industry, it’s not a great thing, right? So how have you managed to make that distinction between, as a CEO, to continue to invest the time, the money, the resources, and it’s going to pay off, versus, you know what, this isn’t going to work, we need to pull up?

James Foster
Yeah, and I think that comes down to the time horizon of what you’re talking about, and being able to make sure that you measure things. We are very data driven as a business. And again, there are some areas where you’re making some sort of investment. Again, it’s not a moonshot, you’re not wanting it to pay off in 10 years, but it has a horizon, and you’ve got to be focused on that.

And again, it’s not necessarily a binary, hey, this didn’t work, let’s throw it out and let’s pivot to something else, but what are you learning along the way? And genuinely speaking, if you’re not taking these big gambles and you’re measuring along the way, you can make these course correct it being too in recognising that things will take time, but not waiting too long for that, and then just being a little bit brutal in terms of what the data is sort of showing you from that perspective.

And again, that’s the thing, coming back to what we talked about with PayTo. We sort of recognised that it wasn’t going to be an overnight money-making cash windfall from that perspective. That’s not why we made the investment upfront. And I think there are probably some other businesses right now that are under pressure because they have, right? And again, everyone’s in a different situation, but it’s being able to build on that to some extent. And again, that’s the benefit of longevity, right? You’ve got a bigger foundation to build on. And I think that’s where I am fortunate from that perspective, is that we do have that existing experience, that existing revenue base, our existing partnerships, in which that we can continue build on.

Dexter Cousins
Now, I know you’ve made a conscious effort to kind of get a lot more involved in the Aussie fintech ecosystem over the last couple of years. What’s your kind of sense check as to where we’re at right now?

James Foster
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really interesting time. For those that aren’t familiar, there’s some significant conversations going on right now around pay licensing reform in Australia, which I think is a really great conversation to be having. Interestingly, Australia was seen as a relatively low-risk, well-managed sort of regulated environment, but the reality is that because we were sort of there early on, it was very simple. As a payments business in Australia, you either had an AFSL or you had nothing. There’s nothing in between.

And obviously there’s a lot of conversation about some of the newer areas, like crypto and digital assets, or stored value facilities and mobile wallets. But even that, for someone like our business, being a subscription payment provider, there wasn’t even a neat category for us to be licensed. And so it was always a little bit interesting to see some other markets sort of jump ahead of Australia from that perspective, because they went from nothing to something a little bit better.

But I think there’s a really great conversation going on today. It’s being led by Treasury, so again, anyone that’s in the payment space in Australia should actively get engaged, because what I found interesting, coming back to my earlier comment, a lot of the regulators are really open to feedback.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And what drives me crazy are fintechs that complain and whinge and moan about regulators but never actively contribute.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
Right? And the reality is, I think, for example, the team at Treasury got a really challenging job, right? They’re trying to create a licensing framework that encompasses all possible scenarios. And so the best way for them to get a view of that is for participants to actually go, hey, what about this situation? What about that? Have you thought about this? And so I think that was probably the biggest recognition that I had as getting engaged, is rather than being passive, hoping for the best, and then waiting for something to come out and then complaining about it, it’s far too late by that stage, right? There’s an opportunity, engage. I’m not saying that’s not frustrating, right? And government can move far too slowly.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And you’ve got to manage your own expectations from that perspective.

I think the other thing that I would say, and in fact had a conversation earlier this morning about this in one of the forums I’m involved with, is I also can’t stand that there’s often a default perspective of copying what other countries have done. There’s always this perception where we’re following someone else. So, hey, what’s the UK done? What’s Singapore done? What’s the US done? What’s Europe done? What’s Canada done? And I think there’s this opportunity actually right now where Australia can be world leading.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
We don’t have to look to others and sort of cobble together a bit of a Frankenstein solution, but we can actually say, hey, what’s the right thing to do?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Foster
And coming back to what I said around PayTo, like, we have some really unique payment ecosystem things in this country that set us apart from every other country in the world. And so there’s this opportunity to be leading the world, right? And I think in a lot of ways there are a number of fintechs that we’ve seen that can do that. You can start in Australia, get a good grounding, and do some really awesome things. So it is a really exciting time from that perspective. But as I said, I think people have got to contribute, right? You’ve got to be engaged.

Dexter Cousins
Well James, it’s been fantastic to have you back on. Great to hear about the continued success of Ezypay, particularly in the current economic climate, and where I’m kind of constantly getting war stories coming to me, it’s great to have a positive story to share with people. If people want to find out more about Ezypay, where’s the best place for them to go?

James Foster
Easy is to go to our website, ezypay.com, E-Z… P-A-Y.com. And obviously you can hit me up on LinkedIn. From my last comment there, always happy to engage in the community, share advice, not just what we’re done awesome, right? Everyone’s going to now want to know how you grow 50% year on year, but also all of the mistakes that we’ve made and what not to do. Always happy to share that insight and continue giving back to the community, because I think it’s an important thing, right?

Dexter Cousins
And also we get some awesome talent l… the show in 44 countries, believe it or not. If anybody’s potentially interested in a career at Ezypay, where’s the best place for them to head?

James Foster
Awesome. Two places. Again, you can go to our website. There’s an About Us and a Careers section there, where we do try to keep up with, as I said, we’re adding another 60 roles in the next 12 months, so we try to list all of those. And we’re also pretty active on LinkedIn, or for the Malaysians that might be listening to your podcast, on JobStreet. But go to our website or our LinkedIn page, and usually we keep people up to date there.

Dexter Cousins
Thank you very much for tuning in. As always, you can connect with me, Dexter Cousins, on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re looking to hire Tier One People, you can reach out to me on those platforms or check out tieronepeople.com. Alternatively, if you are on the market looking for a job, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn, where each day I’ll be posting job hunting tips, and you’ll also see us mention any opportunities that we’re working on. Until the next episode, keep safe.

Fintech Chatter is produced by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. We’ll find world-class leadership talent to build world-class fintech ventures, and you can find us at tieronepeople.com.

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