Trent Daniel – Azupay’s Big Move with NAB

0:00 Chris Titley: You're listening to a Day One FM show. Hi, it's Chris Tittley here, and on today's episode of Fintech Fun, we're joined by Trent Daniel, Chief Customer Officer at Asupay. Trent, great to catch up and looking forward to the podcast.

0:14 Trent Daniel: G'day, Chris. Great to see you. Great to be on here. Thank you, mate.

0:17 Chris Titley: Mate, for the listeners out there that know nothing about Asupay, can you give us the elevator pitch on what you guys do?

0:24 Trent Daniel: Yeah, happy to. All right. Asupay, we are an Australian-based fintech, Australian-founded fintech. We're the, I've got to say, we're the OGs of real-time account-to-account payments. When it comes down to things, when it came down to the launch of the new payments platform going back about 7 years ago, Asupay were the first kind of startup to kick in and develop a business receivable solution utilizing the NPP.

0:49 Chris Titley: Excellent, mate. And when it comes to what Asupay does and the customers that you serve, can you give the listeners a bit of an understanding of that?

0:57 Trent Daniel: Yeah, of course, mate. So, Asupay, we develop and deliver real-time payment solutions for large corporate enterprises across Australia. They can be globally based organizations but operating domestically in Australia. We're enabling companies to connect with real-time account-to-account solutions from their consumers and business customers. In that solution suite, our flagship product was originally our Dynamic PayID. So Asupay rewrote the book on the Dynamic PayID solution back in 2019. And that solution today generates transactions for a range of airlines, travel partners, gaming platforms and wagering, telcos, utilities. So customers like Optus, for example, JB Hi-Fi. We've just had National Australia Bank actually launch a white label of our product as well. So we have a very broad range of customers and servicing different industries. So the second receivables product we brought to market was Payto. We were first to market and we delivered a whole range of solutions for Payto, which is the real-time replacement for direct debit. So Payto today is being utilized across a range of industries from financial remitters, money remitters, through to superannuation insurance platforms, investment platforms, utilities. I do have a large property company going live as we speak, rolling out Payto for rental payments as an example. So it's a great solution. It takes direct debit from being a very bulky and cumbersome, slow process to digital real-time environment. And the third part of our solution stack we have with our customers is our real-time disbursements. So we have a payout solution. We're delivering that for a range of sporting organizations, membership organizations, financial organizations. So we can actually handle delivering funds in real time to their customers. What we do different, so we're not just a stack of APIs that orchestrate payments, we actually provide a full end-to-end user experience journey. So we really host this stuff for merchants. What we found early on is that it's great to provide some dumb APIs and just get you into market, but be able to provide a really capturing and unique customer experience means that your customers' customers get a consistent experience whenever they choose to pay or receive payment via those channels. It also enables a really fast delivery time. So we have the ability to have customers go live in as little as 3 sprints. So as an example, we had 4 airlines that went live from first conversation to go live in an 8-week window, which is almost unheard of. That is consistent across our customer base.

3:28 Chris Titley: Mate, I'm curious to know, as the business was founded, what the initial problem was, I suppose. And you've already identified some of the solutions that you offer now, but what was the core, I suppose, principle or values around the problem that you're solving when it comes to payments, et cetera, and how's that evolved, I suppose, up to where we are now where there are more, I suppose, techniques around receiving and sending payments?

3:53 Trent Daniel: Where we came from, a bit more of our history. So we were founded back in 2019 by 5 very seasoned engineers. We're not your little startup with a bunch of 20-year-olds come out of union trying to create a payments platform. These are seasoned engineers and architects, systems integrators, And they've been delivering on a few different large projects across the industry. So around the time, or before we launched, they've been delivering on the NPP connectivity for Cuscal, who is a large fintech sponsoring top ADI in the market today. And they are the backbone behind credit unions and building societies. And they also were working on and designed and delivered the New South Wales Government Service, New South Wales CPP. And that's that single payments platform inside Service, which 60-odd different agencies can utilize to receive payments from citizens, from businesses, et cetera. So that was kind of where we started. These engineers were working in these different spaces and they had identified a problem in government with regards to reconciliation of BPAY. And BPAY is a very cumbersome tool being used online. So the team went away and came up with the idea of the Dynamic PayID. Mm-hmm. So PayID had been in market for a couple of years at that point. We're all used to making a transfer with our mobile phone number as an alias for bank account. And one of the ideas that the guys identified is the ability to use the email format of the PayID to surface a real-time dynamic solution that can be used for a single use in transaction flows. At the time, it was not approved by government. It wasn't approved by the Reserve Bank or the industry to be able to use PayID in that way. PayID was originally just a peer-to-peer payment mechanism. Our team worked closely with the NPP and with the Reserve Bank to design this flow and get that approved for purpose. And they went ahead and built the pilot. The very first customer was New South Wales Government. Our very first transaction was the liquor license for a large supermarket in Australia as well. So we came from some pretty solid roots.

5:52 Chris Titley: Mate, absolutely. There you go. A little bit of history about Asupay and the founding team, et cetera. When I hear payments, sometimes it's a bit overwhelming and people say, what are you doing in payments? You're like, oh, another one. It's pretty crowded. And then I hear people like real-time payment providers, et cetera. I suppose what sets Asupay apart? What's the core offering, the difference, I suppose, from other payment providers when I hear the word payments?

6:17 Trent Daniel: Yeah, thanks for that question. So Asupay's differentiation and where we come from is that we specialize specifically only in one thing, real-time account-to-account payments domestically in Australia. So MPP, pay ID, pay to, pay out. We do that, we do that very, very well. And through that process, like I mentioned before about our hosted user experiences, that became a core piece of our differentiation. We first launched a product, we identified that need to make it simple for the government agency to integrate and to deliver with our solution for the PayID. So we devised that user experience to be hosted to really enable that flow for the customer or for the merchant and the actual end user. Over time, that became more important to our customers. We have a lot of customers using just APIs, yes, but we have a lot of smarts behind our system to orchestrate the transactions the way we do and validate transactions the way we do. But we also then have spent a lot of investment and time and research into our hosted user experiences. And that's become that core differentiator. More and more of our largest, large corporate customers are taking up that solution for the same reasons I mentioned before: simplicity of integration delivery, consistent user experience across the board. Add to the fact we are consistently working on the solution, improving it, updating it, researching it, so our customers get access to those enhancements every other week. Every time we do a release, they get access to those enhancements, not having to whole build themselves on their own front end.

7:49 Chris Titley: Yeah.

7:49 Trent Daniel: When we do a major release, yes, it's a bit more of a change management program behind that to make sure our customers are ready for it. We've just gone through a large change recently, changing our UX from our second version to our third version. And as that continues to evolve, we put more capability behind that. So in that, for example, that most recent release, we added on Passkey functionality. So with our Pay2 user journey, you can now secure that journey with— Passkey. Passkeys. That's a biometric, like a face or a fingerprint, for example, on your device, which can transfer between your devices, between your MacBook and your iPhone, for example. So that means that we're securing payments as well. So real-time payments being very secure, knowing that it's the account holder that's approved the agreement in the first place on their phone, and then they're choosing to use the Passkey and the user experience to repeat that journey. That's really the sort of things we're doing to keep on adding features, it's feature-rich and drives that adoption and drives further use cases down the value chain.

8:47 Chris Titley: You mentioned adoption there. When we have newer things, I mean, we've had BPAY, we've had Direct Debit, we've had lots of things for a long time and we've had things like CDR come on in, et cetera. The adoption rate either comes from government, comes from consumers, comes from fintechs, comes from enterprise. I'm curious to know when it comes to PayID, PayTo adoption, drive adoption, and I suppose some endorsements from corporates?

9:12 Trent Daniel: Yeah, so adoption's a really great point to raise, and there's a lot of challenges. You mentioned CDR before, which has been struggling with adoption more broadly, but PayID and PayTo have their own journeys to go through. PayID was a slow journey for adoption at the very start, but as users, as individuals became more experienced at using PayID for their own personal methods, That then created the ability, or I should say the appetite, to when they see PayID, they know it and trust it. So key piece when it comes to payments for adoption is trust. It's got to be good experience, it's got to work, and that they trust that it's secure and it can work every time. So we found that what's driven PayID adoption has been element of just that ubiquity coming through, the customer experience through that journey, But then also the different use cases. So for example, in our airline partners, they have a situation where today we surcharge on credit card transactions. And when you're booking a flight, you might be paying $1,000 flight, a surcharge can add up pretty quickly. Under the regulations that they have in the air force industry in Australia, they need to provide a fee-free method. So that fee-free method they choose to use is PayID. So we have a financial or an economic nudge for customers to use PayID. It is cheaper. It's a free payment option to use. That's been quite powerful. But there are other industries where the adoption curve has been driven by the merchant directly. So where we actually have clients want to move off BPAY, for example, when they have the experience of, well, if you choose to pay with BPAY, we won't know about it and can't apply it to your account for 3 days. But if you use PayID, you get the value instantly in your account. Mm-hmm. So these are the kinds of examples that start to drive that.

10:58 Chris Titley: There's a lot of benefits of being paid instantly. And as you mentioned, be paying on a Friday afternoon, it may hit the bank account on Monday or whatever it might be, or at least being reconciled on Monday. Can you talk about some of the benefits, I suppose, of PayID and the importance actually of the underlying, you know, instant payment and how that can affect the supply chain?

11:21 Trent Daniel: Well, it's interesting when it comes down to working with large enterprises, the funds being in the physical account is not so important. The most important part is the real-time notification of the transaction. And that's how our system works. Kind of like pay for something with a credit card. If you buy with a credit card, you tap your phone, tap your card or your phone, or you go through the e-com site. That payment gets processed and there's a real-time response to the merchant and they can apply that value of funds in their system, they can apply that that transaction's been received and they can give you the ticket to your flight or put the money onto your, your wagering account, whatever it might be. But they don't get the money until the next day. So it's the reporting, that notification is a really powerful piece. And with you say BPAY, for example, I have many stories of people where they've paid their car rego on 5 PM on Friday afternoon and they get a fine on Sunday. Reconciliation hasn't occurred, the notification of the transaction hasn't occurred for the merchant on the other end until the Monday or Tuesday after that. So that's what's really powerful with a real-time payment with PayID and Pay2. I missed one step back there. We're talking about adoption. Pay2 adoption is an interesting one. It's been a slower burn than we were expecting. We were all expecting much faster take-up of Pay2. And I think that's driven by two things. One is really heavily around the merchant adoption, and that comes down to the commerciality of it. It is a bit more expensive than traditional direct debit, and some of these large billers focus less on that speediness of it as opposed to the, uh, the cost of processing. If you can imagine, if you're processing 1 or 2 million transactions a month, a difference of 5 cents really adds up. So There has been that bit slower burn for Payto in the market, but also awareness. While Australian Payments Pass have been doing a really fantastic job with promotion and advertising, just in the weekend I was seeing Payto ads on my Instagram feed and we've seen them on billboards and buses and so forth. But the consumer awareness is still not quite there. But that is also a bit of a chicken and egg. So we have a situation where consumers don't know about it because billers aren't putting it in place and billers aren't putting it in place 'cause it's expensive. Or perceived to be expensive, but there's no one using it yet. So there's always this chicken and egg kind of pull. So how do we get this momentum happening? I think we're going to get there very quickly. At this point in time, it's been a slow ramp up so far. Like I mentioned before, we have a large property company going live as we speak. There are multiple other examples of those in market. Telcos that are going live with Payto. Amazon went live a couple of months ago with Payto. So is that growing awareness. As we get the next billers on board, that major cycle, that will actually start to drive that adoption much more quicker.

14:12 Chris Titley: Trent, I'm curious on the pay-to side of things when it comes to direct debit failures per se in Australia, whether that's a headache for customers and corporates, etc., or, and what happens in the instance of pay-to potentially when there is no money to be taken?

14:30 Trent Daniel: Yeah, that's a really good question. It's interesting. So direct debit And you get a different experience per merchant. And that really comes down to the size of the merchant and their relationship with their banking partner. A very, very large merchant, for example, like a large telco, they'll run their direct debit file. They'll put their batch in overnight, say it's 30,000 transactions, and they'll be credited that value of funds overnight by their bank. And then over the next 3 to 5 days, they'll get the dishonors come through and they'll be withdrawn out of the account, pulled back out of the account as dishonors. Now that creates friction for that merchant. They have to back out transactions, reversals in there, adjust their accounting flows. There's a fair bit of manual work that goes into doing that. And then they have to go ahead and chase the customer as well. There's a delay. And that's what happens in that kind of large institutional merchant environment. They get the value of funds. Smaller ones, smaller companies and mid-sized companies, they might have a payment processor who will do the direct debit, take the funds out of the consumer account,, but then sit on them in their facility for 3 to 5 days before they sweep them to the merchant. So you have the flip side there where the merchant doesn't get the money either. So they're losing out. The customer's already paid. And then you have, if there's a dishonor, there's often then a large fee back on the consumer as well. So it's quite a negative experience across those flows. So you've got the reversal issues, you've got the dishonor of funds and delayed notification. Now how that compares to Paytoo. Well, it's real-time. So if the funds aren't there, the funds aren't there. We know straight away and we can take action straight away. There's a few other key components of Payto that are really different to direct debit, which make it a much better experience for customers and merchants combined. One of the prominent examples for me is around authentication of the account holder. Today we do a direct debit form. While the requirements for the sponsoring bank for the direct debit say the merchant must authenticate that the account holder is the person signing on the direct debit authority, it is very, very rarely done. There was a time where it was more people would have to show their bank statement to compare, but that doesn't really happen anymore. And so out of that, you have this issue of direct debit fraud. PayTo, conversely, When you set up your pay-to agreement against your BSB account number or your PayID, your personal PayID, you actually approve that agreement within your banking app. So you'll get a notification from your bank, log into your banking app, and you approve it in the app itself. So we know that the account holder is a person that has actually approved that agreement. So you've got much more security in that model. Then also for, as a user, at any time if you need to cancel your subscription, cancel membership. You can control that inside your banking app. A2 Agreement section, you can actually go in and pause or cancel your agreement. Now historically, if you close your bank account and moved on somewhere else, you had to go and change your direct debits. Now often you'd get to do something, you'd miss something, miss a bill, and the biller wouldn't know until next month they run that file and they find out their account's closed. And then they get hit with a fine, a fee for a failed payment, for example, or late payment. With Paytoo, as soon as you close your account, you close your PayID, or any action you take on that agreement, the merchant gets a real-time notification. So they can actually address it upfront before it becomes a problem. That's another great little tool. The other piece, which is really fun with Paytoo, is that we're now able to create a direct debit style product, a pull transaction out of bank accounts that is suitable for a real-time e-com world. Today with direct debit, it is not suitable for that environment. There's no point using direct debit on an airline ticket. You'll never get there in time. Whereas Pay2 really makes that an experience that can be done in real time. So it can be used in any channel. You can use a credit card. It's the same great user experience that you can achieve as opposed to just credit card only or. not having direct debit in those environments.

18:33 Chris Titley: Mate, there's a heap of problems and personal experiences there that I've had in the past in regards to changing bank accounts and signing up with a digital bank and going, oh, I wonder which direct debits were, I mean, firstly, you don't, you have to scour through your transactions to find them. And then you're like, I'm sure there's one once a year that happens in July that you've gone back for 9 months and it's not there. And you're like, oh, well, it's probably not there. And then you get a letter from them going, your annual insurance thing has now been failed or something like, oh, I moved banks. I knew there was one, right? So there's lots of different use cases there for Paytoo. And I suppose the prevention, as you mentioned, in terms of the direct debit reconciliation from accounting, from paperwork to staff time to reconcile that, you can say, hang on a second, there's not enough money there. Can you please rectify this within whatever? Otherwise your subscription might be canceled or whatever it might be, particularly in the subscription.

19:26 Trent Daniel: Yeah.

19:26 Chris Titley: Style economy. Now, you did touch on, Trent, a partnership with NAB that you did in the earlier part of the podcast. I'm curious to know about partnerships, and in particular, this particular one sounded very big in the announcement that Asupay did on LinkedIn. Do you want to talk about that partnership with NAB?

19:45 Trent Daniel: Yeah, sure, happy to. Look, Asupay, since we came to life, we've had a bit of multi-prong strategy with how we do business. We have our direct merchant relationships We work with software partners, we work with payments partners. And the model we're doing with National Australia Bank is a great advancement on that partner model for Asupay in that we're working in that SaaS environment. So we're really providing our solution as a software layer that helps payments organizations and banks to be able to provide solutions to their customers they don't necessarily have themselves yet. And this is a great example. Dynamic PayID, when We launched with PayID back in 2019, first company doing dynamic PayID solutions. It was in government and it wasn't really, people weren't really aware of it in market, but over time it started to shift. Now every large corporate banking tender, every government tender coming out for banking and payments is requiring dynamic PayID as an option. So went from being a peer-to-peer only solution to a business tool with some awareness and growing to now being mandated really across industry. And in that timeframe though, the banks were really hedging their bets on Pay2. Pay2 was seen to be the panacea for payments. And that was going to be everything you need for real-time is using Pay2. But what we've seen is that that hasn't quite gotten there yet. And the demand for PayID has meant that we need to catch up. So now you see that the The banks are becoming more aware of that, and that's the work we've done with NAB. So NAB realized that what AsiaPay could deliver was a fantastic product and solution and brought us in to help them to deliver that dynamic PowerD solution for their large corporate institutional customers.

21:29 Chris Titley: Can you tell us what, from a NAB point of view and from your point of view, I mean, firstly, A, it's huge from your point of view in terms of credibility and brand and dealing with one of the big four banks in Australia and doing this significant partnership, but what it means for their customers and consumers as well?

21:45 Trent Daniel: Yeah, look, that's a really good question there, Chris. I think for NAB, what it means to their customers, they can get access to a solution which they wouldn't otherwise normally have. Now, one of the challenges as a fintech is we can get into progressive and early adopting organizations, but when you come to the really large institutional clients and government, there's often that fallback to, oh, we need to need this to come from our banking partner. So that's always been a kind of sticking point. So we do have some fantastic customers and we have fantastic large corporates we work with, but we do have that gap a few times of not being their banking partner or maybe not quite being big enough for them to want to take that risk on. And that's shifting. We've got a really good presence today and a great brand presence in the market. But what we found with— By partnering with NAB, what it means is for the customers we've been talking to that really want to work through their banking partner, If they're a NAB bank that they work with, they can work with us. Fantastic solution with great synergy. And we've done that. We've brought some of our Pursuit customers who said, "Oh, we want to do it, but we need a bank to do it with." We brought NAB in and that's where we've gone to and it's worked really, really well. And for NAB then, they can open up the door to a whole range of use cases that they couldn't really address before. So that Dynamics Payday that we provide that solution and even our hosted user experience is now available to NAB's whole book of enterprise customers. I've had some great conversations with them on various industries and use cases. I won't go into detail, they might be a bit upset if I do that, but they're really engaging with how we can work together and help them to solve problems for their customers from a range of different industries in their book.

23:23 Chris Titley: Mate, congratulations on this significant partnership. And partnerships are very I suppose important. We've seen a number of fintech awards around partnerships and testing and learning, et cetera. From your point of view, how important are partnerships with not only banks, the big four that probably want and thrive upon new innovations and fintechs, but also regulators and other fintechs and why you think it's important?

23:52 Trent Daniel: Partnerships are critical to our success. We are a small team. In my sales team, there's 5 of us that are actively out there selling. And it's great, we can get across a number of customers with that. But having partnerships, we have that one-to-many approach. We work with a range of different organizations as partner models. So just focusing on the sales and payment side of things, from other large payment service providers through to payment gateways to software platforms. We've got one, for example, in the higher education space. Mm-hmm. So Xetta have got pretty much dominance in the higher education student fees space and as a student fees management platform. And we're integrated in there and they helped us to get access to the university segments. Now, individual universities are not really high volume in numbers of transactions. They're not that lucrative on their own, but having someone else to actually do half the sales work for you and a speed to delivery, It's a great partnership to have, and we get traction to a range of customers very, very quickly. We have other customer partners where when they turn us on, they just make us available to 2,000 of their submerchants. So that's a great distribution tool to have. On the other side, you mentioned regulators. It's really important to be very close with your regulatory partners and the banking partners. You'll be across what's happening in industry, the changes that are coming, There is, in our space, in the NPP or in the real-time account-to-account space, there's a lot of industry consultation ongoing right now. And that requires partnerships to be really powerful to make sure that our voices are heard and that the voices of our customers are heard as well.

25:33 Chris Titley: Mate, let's touch on the future now for a second post that significant partnership with NAB. But I'm curious around innovations in real-time payments. We've talked about PayToPayID and account-to-account. The space, et cetera. What excites you about this sector, I suppose? We talked about adoption firstly as well, but other things that excite you around the technologies themselves?

25:56 Trent Daniel: There's a few things in there that really excite me. One of them is really interesting piece and maybe it's a bit nerdy of me, but when you look at Payto and we think about the issues we talked about before, if you change banks. So right now, It's early stage, the maturity isn't quite there, but I'm excited for the future of Payto when we introduce portability. Now, one of the core tenets behind the development of the NPP was to increase the ability for consumers to be able to change their bank, so bank account portability. And then one of those challenges was direct debits. So at the moment, Payto agreements aren't quite portable between banking institutions, but the future is there. Yeah. That when you do move banks, you can move your PayID and your PayTo will go with you. And that's really powerful. I'm really excited for that to come.

26:46 Chris Titley: That's very interesting, I suppose. And from a point of view of maybe if you move banks and there's that portability, there's an option to say, would you like to continue with your Netflix, your Stan, and your rent payments and your Origin Energy or whatever it might be? And then you say, actually, no, I've changed providers or whatever. And it'd just be easy, wouldn't it?

27:04 Trent Daniel: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I'm looking forward to that side of things, the portability framework. On our side, the innovation we've been doing, I mentioned before about Passkeys and securing the PayTo transactions. But what that has also meant is that we're able to deliver a true omnichannel PayTo experience. So there's a lot of noise right now around how do we do PayTo, how do we do NPP in retail and do it efficiently and securely? Our Passkey solution really helps deliver that. That's quite powerful, and that's a piece of work I'm really excited to be working on right now with a range of organizations. So we're seeing that come to life. We have also molded and adopted and adapted to the needs of our customers. I mentioned before that one of our core payment offerings is our disbursement platform and payouts. So we're now releasing out a disbursements application a payout product that makes it easy for companies who need to utilize payouts, but also we're combining that with some tech around account checking and verification. So we all heard about confirmation of payee is now available in the banks when you make a transfer. It's coming more into market over this year. So we will be embedding confirmation pay into our flow. And we're looking at other services that provide a similar powerful tool to verify that, hey, you are the account holder. That's really important. So if you're getting money paid to you from an insurance claim, from a refund for something that happened years ago at your telco, that kind of thing, a payout type solution where you can verify that it is your account, it works for the customer and it works for the merchant combined.

28:40 Chris Titley: And mate, we're sitting here in 2025 and if we don't talk about AI in 2025, then it's not a podcast, is it really, to be honest? Everyone's talking about this as a sector. Your views on AI within the financial services segment, is there anything interesting popping up now in regards to that?

28:58 Trent Daniel: Hmm. AI. So look, I was a slow starter looking at AI and probably about 4 months ago I started getting really deep into AI off the back of spending some time with a good friend of mine who's actually a management consultant expert out of the US. On AI. She was out here to deliver on a conference about it. And I see AI has been really powerful for business and so many things from tech to in development. Replit, which is that can build a website and an e-commerce platform in minutes. Those are really powerful and it's what you can do today in development. It's not about cutting jobs, it's about improved delivery. And that's what we're seeing in the market. In the financial service space, there's a discussion right now around agentic AI. Now that one I'm worried about. One is ultimately who's given the authentication for the payment. So if you're building agentic AI into a payment flow, who's actually saying, yes, I want to do that transaction? And does this open up merchants to a plethora of chargebacks, for example? The other one is choice. Customers like often to choose to pay from different accounts and different methods depending what they're buying. And so I'm not really sure how they'll go with wanting to hand over that control to an agent and want a bit more control themselves.

30:21 Chris Titley: Mate, yeah, you're right. I mean, look, the application use of AI in financial services is yet to be seen from my point of view, from a public point of view. But obviously some banks are spending a lot of money trying to work out whether it is customer service or whether it is actually on the transactional side or, or whatnot. It's yet to be seen. It's a very interesting space. We can probably talk about it.

30:41 Trent Daniel: I saw some really cool stuff. We had a roundtable with some companies who are involved with one of our investors, and we're talking through from the CROs and CCOs about what we're doing and some discussion around AI tools like Qualified, which is a really interesting one that you put onto your website that helps you with your sales funnel. So it's an agent flow that can help capture the journey and really qualify those customers and move them through the pipeline much more seamlessly than today. And I know I see on our website, we look at our buyer's intent stuff in HubSpot and we see the traffic of companies' pages that are seeing our website, but it's really hard to capture that funnel. They might go to the Contact Us page 5 or 6 times and not put a submission in. We're having an AI agent there to pick up on that activity and to continue that journey. I think that's really powerful from a sales point of view and that's coming to the financial services space. But then also, as you mentioned, banks and other organizations using AI to look at improving their assessment, the speed of assessment and things, for example, lending, credit, looking at risk modeling. There's a whole range of things we can pick up on with AI that I think we can do a better job than we can do manually. But it helps us to— it's a tool, right? It helps us to get better at what we do, not replace what we do.

31:55 Chris Titley: I agree. The tools out there to speed things up, to make people more efficient. I remember Interestingly, Xero, when they first came out many years ago, probably a decade ago, and it was the accountants, and the accountants were like, oh, is this going to replace us? And then once the accountants started using Xero with their clients and it became a fast and easy process to collect information, to reconcile information, to provide information, it was like, hey, this is good for us and it's good for the consumer and it's good for everyone. It was like, oh, oh, right. So it's not actually a competitor. And I think AI would be similar in terms of some of the functionality around like Well, this is a good experience. So this is fast, this is easy, and this works 3 times faster than it used to. So anyway, we'll wait and see. We've digressed a little bit, Trent. If we talk about Asupay and we repeat this podcast in 2028, maybe, where would you like the company to be?

32:46 Trent Daniel: 2028. I'd see Asupay in being ubiquitous for payments in Australia. We are growing strong. We have a fantastic team of— and culture is really important to our team. We are growing really well, really well, really strong in that. That culture environment that we're in. But 2028 for us is about large businesses and small businesses will know our name and they think of us as a comparable to PayPal even, you know, and it's ambitious.

33:15 Chris Titley: But yeah, might as well have that big hairy audacious goal, mate. I'm just, well, before we get onto the fun part of Trent, I'm, you know, just want to touch on how important that NAB partnership is for you and I suppose validation of your company and and the work that went in and I suppose the moving forward, the execution of that.

33:34 Trent Daniel: Yeah, look, that is, coming back to that one, that's a really important partnership for us. It does give this, it does provide that validation in industry. We have had a lot more attention in market since that announcement came out. A lot more companies who previously we would struggle to get a meeting with all of a sudden we're getting meetings locked in and proactive reach out. So it's been very powerful for us so far and I'm excited to see more of it happen. And hopefully in 2028 you'll see not just one bank that we're partnered with, but, but multiple. I should say that actually we do have another bank partnership. We do are partnered with HSBC as well and we have been for a very long time. A different model of partnership with them. They actually work with us into their Omni Collect platform.

34:19 Chris Titley: Mm-hmm.

34:20 Trent Daniel: And by that element, HSBC were the first bank in Australia to be offering a PayID or PayTo solution to their customers via this partnership with Asupay, but it wasn't as deeply integrated as we are in the National Australia Bank one.

34:35 Chris Titley: Brilliant, mate. Now, when we're not talking PayID and PayTo and all the jargon that goes with payment, Trent, is there a secret hobby? Do you switch off? What do people know about Trent Daniel that they may not know already? And this is the fun part of the podcast.

34:50 Trent Daniel: Yeah, my, uh, my previous answer, maybe, maybe prior to COVID, was probably more fun to answer that one, is, um, I used to be a competitive ax thrower.

34:59 Chris Titley: Right, that's the first time I've ever had that on the podcast, so let's delve into that.

35:03 Trent Daniel: So throwing axes is definitely a sport, and it's not just for Vikings. Uh, look, it was, it was a fun one. I got into around, I think it was around 2017 or something. Axe throwing venue in Sydney, went there for the boys' day and found I had a knack for it. And they had a league competition weekly, one night a week for a couple of hours for 8 weeks. I joined up and I didn't just have a knack for it, I had a very strong skill at it. And I won my first season, which really upset people who've been playing for years. Won the second season, I was invited to the world championships, the I think it was for 2019, but didn't get over there. But then we formed a team to get across, and I was in the, uh, the first Australian cohort of Axaros to represent over in the World Championships in February 2020, just when the world was shutting down with COVID But these days my hobby is mainly hanging out with my kids and spearfishing. So I live down on the beach at Cronulla and spend a large amount of time under the water hunting fish, free diving. So—

36:09 Chris Titley: Mate, excellent. Trent Daniel, thank you so much for being on the FinTech Fun podcast today. I really do appreciate taking your time to give us the backstory of Asyoupay, the history, the values, the growth of the business, the areas of focus right now, as well as that significant partnership announcement with NAB and a little bit about your axe throwing in a previous life. I really do appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show and I look forward to catching up.

36:34 Trent Daniel: Thanks, Chris. Been a pleasure.