Today we're joined by David Walsh, an innovator in the world of business payments and rewards. David is currently the Head of Digital, Customer Experience and Marketing at pay. com. au, a cutting edge B2B payments and reward platform. He has a rich background in digital marketing and technology, specialising in leveraging data driven strategies and AI to drive business growth.

For our PO listeners, and especially owners of businesses in our industry, his passion and insight for rewards points, and the unbelievable benefits they can provide business owners, will change the way you make payments forever. David is currently the Head of Digital, Customer Experience and Marketing at pay.

com. au. Big role, David.

It's a real mouthful of a title, I should really shorten it.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, pay. com. au is, I, I think people are going to find this very interesting listening to because before I jump into the rest of your bio which is bloody impressive. Um, I can put my hand up and say, um, thank you because without going on to pay.

com, there's two trips to New York and a trip to Greece so far in, uh, us doing nothing different as a business. I'm pretty happy with that.

I, I expect you would be.

But let me keep going. Um, David's got a very rich background in digital marketing and technology. Um, particularly. Data driven strategies and leveraging AI for growth, which is going to be very interesting for a lot of our, um, PO listeners.

So. David, you also used to host the podcast. Points of view?

Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think we were just talking about set ups beforehand. Yours is much, much better than mine. But, you know, basically a podcast talking everything Frequent Flyer points. You know, how to fly business class and first class for not very much.

We'll get into that because I think that people do stand sitting there in the economy line saying, I don't want any. Why do people pay so much to get into that line and then you realize, as I did, Oh, I don't actually have to do anything different, but we'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. Um, but I think our pod listeners particularly will be very interested in your approach to how you've grown at pay.

com. au, some of the things you've done, and I think the extraordinary sort of, um, things that have happened over the past couple of years that I think any business can, thinking or looking, that are gonna get some very, very valuable insights. So David, thank you very much for joining us today.

Absolutely, I'm really excited to dive into it.

I shouldn't before we go on, I should also make sure that, um, all the listeners know that you guys have been massive supporters of POE. So, thank you, because, um, hospitality needs supporters at the moment and, um, you guys have stepped up. So, I appreciate us, you being part of this forum and also supporting it.

Everyone needs to know that and get behind the company. Absolutely, happy to, happy to support. Great. Well, I'll see selling, but the thank you is here. Talk to me a little bit about your background. I mean, obviously we've gone through the bio, but how did this all begin for you?

Yeah, it's, uh, I've got a mixed background.

Um, so, you know, like these days I'm running the marketing team for a, you know, business payments and, uh, and rewards platform. But, you know, I've got a degree in chemistry. Right. So absolutely nothing to do with marketing whatsoever. And Well, chemistry. Of course, you know, absolutely. It's all about interaction, you know, and how things work together.

Um, but you know, I remember studying at university and I learned one fundamental truth about my interaction with chemistry. And that is, acid burns hurt. And I didn't want any more of them. So I, you know, I was studying university and got a part time job at Dick Smith Electronics, uh, actually used to be around the corner at, uh, the old Dick Smith rest in peace.

I think it's just a, it's just a mailing list for Kogan now, but, Learned that I love talking to talking to customers about things. I was passionate about it Yeah, I'm a bit of a nerd chemistry degree, but I love technology at the same time So I got a real taste for sales and that took me the start of my career across a number of different companies from You know selling advertising listings through to working in the pharmaceutical industry through to a biotech startup.

And that's when I started to get more into, okay, well, how does sales then apply to marketing? And then how does marketing apply to product? So I've done been a salesperson, I've been a marketer, I've been a product manager. And I think the, One of the good things about that journey is that it helps keep you grounded in the fact that, that no matter what you're advertising, no matter the amount of data you're pulling together, or the, the, the really smart strategies you're pulling together, at the end of it is a person that You're trying to convince to do something and you know I think having that journey and knowing the hard slog of being in a sales role Helps keep me grounded Without sounding too egotistical.

It helps keep you grounded in the fact that you're fundamentally trying to talk to someone You're just doing it in a different way So I was fortunate enough to Be working at you know, an insurance comparator when an opportunity came up to work at a business called Point Hacks Which is where I really, you know found a found found my combination of Marketing and product passion and combined it with frequent flyer passion.

Then

here we are now Were you an avid traveler? Is that

avid avid traveler? So, you know, I'm a Typical ex pat kid, you know, born in the UK and then moved to South Africa, all over Australia, Singapore, London, back to Australia. I think we lived in maybe 20 houses by the time I was 18. So I, I guess growing up travel was a big part of, of, you know, of my life.

And I remember my dad was always, you know, it was always big on Qantas frequent flyer points. You know, we think my frequent flyer number, I think I've been a member since I was, Two years old. Um, I have accumulated a lot of points through that over the journey. And as soon as I sort of, I saw it was new, new points were important, but I don't think I really understood what you could do with them.

I always assumed you could maybe fly economy. You could, you know, use them on an online store. But when I found out you could use them to book business class and first class seats, and if you pay attention, like, it's very achievable to do it. Uh, real light, real light bulb moment for me. I remember getting on my first business class flight using my points.

It was on a slightly older Qantas plane from Melbourne to Japan. And it ruined me for the rest of my life. Now I'm, now I'm chasing points where, where it makes sense for me to do so obviously without, you know, spending copious amounts of money or letting it consume my, my, my, my spending habits. But I want you, once you turn left on that plane and you sit in a business class seat and you're looking around going, Oh, I didn't pay full price to get here.

This is great. It's, it's hard to beat that feeling.

It's, um, it's, it's ruined us. So, so we, I want to relate to, you know, many of the listeners here probably own businesses, run businesses in the industry. And, you know, I had started my first business when I was 18. So I understood this. And basically the mentality of being a self funded businesses, you don't waste money on dumb stuff.

Right. And so flying businesses, well, wait a minute. I'm going to put a value to my sleep here. So if I just stay in economy or the cheapest seat I can get and I can sleep, it doesn't matter about my sore back or, you know, when I get to wherever or whatever I need to do. But so we had the experience a couple of years ago cause we obviously a customer and we said, well, let's use our points and see what happens here.

So we flew business class, my wife and I, who run the business. And it was this, it was this, understanding in the middle of a flight over to Europe that the lady's come up to me with, you know, sitting in the really nice big chair and I'm the only one awake because I'm not, I'm not wasting one second sleeping, right?

I'm enjoying everything about it. She sort of taps me on the shoulder and says, you know, well, Can I help you? I'm like, it's three in the morning. I'm watching movies. I'm having the time of my life. She goes, you can't be sitting here at night doing this. You definitely need a cheese board and support. And I'm like, that's it.

I'm ruined. It's over. It's like, it's, it does ruin you. It's an, it feels like an extravagance, but it also, you start to understand how to leverage things in your business. Right. And this is, I think the thing that. That is incredible about what you guys are doing and I think maybe we step it back a bit because I think people don't understand this space at all before we get into that.

So tell us a little bit about pay. com. au because for us it's been transformative. What is it?

Yeah, it's a really good question and I'll take it back to, so if we assume that there's Fundamentally points are valuable and points can help. Let you do things that you wouldn't otherwise pay for yourself. Um, The, the idea for pay.

com. au came from, you know, the business Point Hacks. Now, Point Hacks, if anyone listening, is a, is a really good website that helps teach people, like, you know, consumers and business owners, how to use the point system to your benefit. How do you, uh, earn points and then how do you use them to, to get these business and first class flights.

It's very consumer focused though, and we were looking at, Opportunities in the, opportunities that existed in the business space, because, you know, business owners have a really unique vehicle being their business and their business has to make payments. You have to pay the ATO. Unfortunately, you've got, you've got staff to pay.

You've, you have expenses that, that exist and they're going to exist, you know, whether you're optimizing for them or not. So, uh, and before pay really came onto the scene, it wasn't easy to get it. Now, there were definitely ways of doing it. So you could sign up for a business credit card and you could earn your points with American Express.

The issue was that you couldn't use those credit cards for a lot of the payments you had to make. You certainly couldn't use them to pay your staff. And you couldn't use a credit, like, If you're looking to pay your, your BAS bill, for example, a lot of these credit cards have rules on them saying that if you're paying the ATO, you only earn half the amount of points.

Yeah. It can be a really suboptimal way. Yeah. So that's how the idea of pay. com. au came to be. It was how do we enable business owners to really maximize the, you know, the asset of their business and their business payments and be rewarded for payments they have to make anyway. So we started the product.

Solving that very first problem that I, that I was talking about. Being able to use that credit card on more payment methods, oh sorry, on more payments than, you know, what your suppliers would accept, so. Pay. com. au allows you to basically take, you know, say you could use your credit card naturally with maybe 10, 15 percent of suppliers.

We take that close to a hundred percent. You know, you can set up a supplier with pay. com. au, set up your payment method and earn points on that, on that credit card. Um, and you know, depending on the credit card you're using, you can also use that to pay your staff and pay the ATO and get your full points.

But we took the idea further than that. And we went, well, what would this look like if we. Had our own rewards program and the not just our own rewards program, but a rewards program that was really built for business owners and the fundamental elements of that like the cornerstone of that rewards program is this idea of flexibility.

Uh. If you're if you've got one, if you've got a lot of points in one frequent flyer program, it's great. You've got access to flights with that airline. But if that airline. happens to not have flights to where you want to go, and you're stuck with one type of point. You're kind of stuck. So we built our program to pay rewards with this, with this idea where you earn pay rewards points are similar to American Express.

and you can transfer them out to Qantas, Virgin, Singapore Airlines, Qatar uh,

uh,

uh, uh, uh, uh Core, uh, we, and, uh, so we've got five transfer partners at the moment. We've got another five joining the platform by the end of the year. So watch this space. Um, So, not only are you owning a program which is, you know, flexible, so you're, you know, if you can't find a flight with Qantas, you very well could find a business class seat with Singapore Airlines, or, you know, you've got so many choices there, but then on top of that, how do you build something that is, you know, that goes beyond just flights.

So, you know, we, we built this idea of pay rewards going, well, business owners could be earning a lot of points, potentially more points than they, you know, than they're going to fly with. We effectively created a good part of this program to allow people to use those points for nearly anything they want.

So, you know, with our program, you can, uh, instead of saying, oh, I want to go to an online store and buy a toaster with my points, you can give us an invoice and say, I want to redeem my points for this invoice. Yeah. And, you know, you've got complete flexibility in that regard. Which is

unbelievable. Yeah, it's a game changer.

Yeah, I mean, you say casually and like people are basically sitting there and I know I was one of those, right? Which is, and we've got interests in a lot of businesses, right? So, I'd call myself. The ignorant to this, where we run a performance business around businesses, but actually understanding the points now with the iteration, the elevation, you guys have taken it to, it is game changing.

And of course there's, um, taxation optimization, a whole lot of things that, you know, as people who are interested, we'll get more into, but the fact that you can now have that. type of flexibility and even for businesses growing, potentially leveraging these in different ways to get lines of credit in the right way.

It can be very, very advantageous to work out. How does my business use this? I mean. A business say doing a million dollars in expenses, and I realize that's, you know, just in the middle. Some business do a hell of a lot, some a lot less, but it's a hell of a lot of points.

It is. It is. It's a hell of a lot.

It's a hell of a lot and, you know, the, when you look into the value of what those points can get for you, you know, putting the flights aside for a second, you know, when you dive into the value of what those custom redemptions can do for your business, um, you know, it, it's definitely worth looking at for businesses.

You know, the, the number of customers that have told me that, oh, this is, you know. Almost a quote no brainer is more than I can count And then one of the one of the biggest advantages to building our own rewards program was that we could do things that no one else is really doing so What if you didn't want to use a credit card at all because some businesses don't yeah Well with pay.

com you can earn reward points on bank transfer payments And then also from a like growing the business perspective. We had this It's almost like a loyalty tool. We had our own rewards program where we could start to incentivize our customers to start using us. So it really opens some unique opportunities.

It's a very clever business. And listen, I'll just be blunt here as um, anyone who's listened before is, If you own a business and you're in this space, you need to, Look into this and just understand the guys will explain it to you You'll understand it from the whole the breakdown of how it worked, but you should know this exists, right?

The fact of the matter is every couple of years if you've got an extra trip to europe that is Basically net neutral of how you run is it's just stupid not to so let's just put it there If you're a business owner there and you haven't you haven't spoke to the guys one They're supporting posts. So you should be doing it b Just look into it.

As I said, we're a couple of trips to New York and a trip to Greece and we're no, we're net neutral in terms of we would have just wasted that. So it's a no brainer. So click links, do the thing. But while you're here, we might be a little bit selfish because you're doing some serious stuff around growing business, your business particularly, growing the business and leading teams in this very innovative space.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that? about the marketing, the approach, the stuff that pay. com. au are doing. Because I think that'd be fascinating for our listeners, because I think you're at the, the forefront and cutting edge of this. And do you mind if we delve a little bit into your role and sort of the progression over the last, um, A couple of years of where you've been taking the role and how you look at, I guess, marketing even in general as a, as a lead there.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, pay has been through the same journey that a lot of other businesses have where we had this idea and we, we, you know, we thought there was a product market fit, but we weren't sure. So. While we were still building the product and, you know, while we were, um, you know, getting our first iteration out into the market, there was a lot of assumptions that we had going into how we would market it, how we needed to, how we needed to get customers on board, but then sort of a view on, you know, where, what the future might hold for us.

But we had this assumption with pay that, um, we would need to be a pretty sales person, heavy business, a pretty hands on business with, with our customers. So. The, if we sort of go back to when we first started to market the business, we had some basic brand guidelines in place, some colors, a nice logo, um, and a decently designed website.

But I think there's a lot of marketers will know, especially when you're trying to start a business. If you're too precious around how your business looks and feels from day one, you have no idea whether that's going to resonate with your customers. You have no idea if that's going to. Someone's scrolling on Instagram and we were in this unique space where there wasn't a huge amount of search intent for what we were trying to do because we were Developing this new way of earning points for business.

Yeah. There wasn't this massive Google search intent, or like search history, search intent, search history, where we could see, okay, here, here's this volume of keywords that, you know, you can just go and run a Google ad campaign to. Yeah. So, the approach that we took was, We've got to inspire people. We've got to create something that's eye catching.

And some of the best platforms for that are the really visual advertising platforms. So think your Facebook, think your Instagram. Um, and these days TikTok, but you know, three, four, like four years ago, wasn't as big in the space. And I remember what we did, we, you know, we signed up with a, with a, um, with an agency to help initially.

But we had a pretty, you know, firm hand on the wheel around what we were looking to do. And it was Just creative blitz. We would go, Hey, here's. a pretty broad range of, okay, we can't go outside of this, but we're not gonna, you know, we have our brand cause we can deviate where we need to. Let's go make 50 different creatives, 50 different creatives, 50 different ways of telling the message and let's put it out there.

Low budget on each and start to see what works. And we were ruthless, ruthless around, um, you know, ads that I really liked, didn't perform cut them. Uh, ads that we thought, Oh, this is stupid. This is never going to stop anyone from scrolling. Elements of that stop people, uh, scrolling. And if you stop someone scrolling, then they can read your message and click through.

Um, and we were very focused on capturing leads at that time. So we had a team of salespeople that were all about customer acquisition and we're feeding the machine and we got pretty good at it. So we were doing things like, um, Utilizing Facebook like lead formats that you know if you're looking to drive leads and you haven't tried Lead formats or where the lead gets captured on Facebook.

I try it. It can be very effective. Um, and We were finding that we were driving very very like effective Cheap, you know business owner leads to our sales team And I think that the the reason for that was that we we became pretty good at Sort of selling the dream in the answer selling instead of the we weren't advertising a payment platform.

We were advertising You as a business owner in business class And you know as a business yourself if you scroll scroll down the feed got me like yeah, exactly you stop and go. Yeah Okay, your business payments can fly your business class. What does, what does that mean? Because that's interesting. So Boiling the message down to its like root proposition and really trying to like put the best version of that forward Because you've got a fraction of a second to to get someone's attention and then What you do from there is you know that that's where you start to get into optimization you get into your quote unquote funnel but When we started the business, as I said before, we had a lot of leads coming to the door.

It's the only business that I've ever worked at where at a number of points over the course of that journey, we had the sales team saying, saying, Hey guys, this is too many leads. Um, surely not, which is absolutely true. And it's not their fault that there were too many leads because I've, I've worked in sales.

There's only so much time you have in your day. I think it's very, very easy to, you know, be, be flippant about it, but you can only, you can only talk to so many people and unless you, unless you start to get smart about it. Yeah, I'm a business perspective. You don't want to overwhelm people and you know, I don't think it's I don't think it's fair There's I'm not gonna hold any of the sales team back there.

Of course It's saying I know that you should have just taken it because it was it was too much But it might

just ask the question is it was that a qualification process you needed to build in or it was literally We're just getting too many great leads. It was too many like it's incredible. Yeah,

so we we We're asking qualification questions throughout the signup process.

So, you know, we'd always ask what industry you're in, what your business turnover was. Um, like, so there was, there was some fairly rich information that was coming through. Uh, but it allowed us to take a step back and go, okay, well, how do we optimize from here? How do we change things up to, cause we were capping and unless we hire more people, which brings on a lot of extra costs, how do we make that more efficient?

Um,

we. We, we had a few observations though. When we, when we were driving these leads, you know, we would have, and all the ads were driving to leads. And so nothing was linking through to saying, Hey, just sign up to the platform. We took a pretty bold move to just go, okay, well, what if we just stop capturing leads?

What if we changed that process and went, okay, well, let's just put a bit of time and energy into making the ingestion to sign up to our business and create an account, get onboarded. Uh, let's. Try and make a really lightweight version of getting that automated and look at the, look at the conversion rate and look at what the cost, the cost per active customer off the back of that because you, if it, if it was better than driving a hundred leads and getting X percent signed up through a salesperson, if we could for the same cost, Drive Double the direct signups on platform.

Well, that's something interesting and interesting to go down and we took that punt and that's what we did So a lot of our sales team are now customer activation specialists So well people come sign up to pay to come do directly and we're we're doing that Doubling, tripling down on automation, self service tooling, um, and you know, how do we let our customers come in and start to really drive value themselves within their environment without, without necessarily having to speak to someone.

It's an, it's an incredible insight. I mean, we talk a lot, particularly in the, in the game we're in. We, it's a foreign concept and, you know, you've given us some gold here, particularly around. The, the ruthlessness at the start, we call it, if you're not losing enough money in the right areas, you're always going to struggle as a business.

And, you know, we're, you know, as we said, we use some blunt terms internally, but we have a metric particularly for our businesses. Are we losing enough money in what we call innovation areas around the marketing, around sales and things like that, which sounds like in the early stages, that ruthlessness of spread it wide, cut quickly, find the core, dig deep and extract.

But then that, that movement to be able to get. customers to self activate. I mean, we, we run, you know, loss leading type things for customers because they understand their metrics so much that it actually doesn't matter if we're taking loss at certain points in our marketing strategies, because, you know, to relate it to people in hospital, get him in the door, give him that experience.

We're looking at long lifetime customer

value. That's a really good way to put it as well. I think it's, it's a way that we think about customer acquisition. Um, and I'm sure my CFO will love us using this term because he uses it all the time. We call it an LTV to CAC ratio. So that lifetime value of the customer versus your acquisition cost.

And that is,

we use that like, That's a thing, you know, tattooed on people's backs.

And not enough, not enough, especially new businesses understand that. At all. They'll look at the short term, okay, like I need, I've got customers coming in the door, and maybe you don't understand what the lifetime value of your customer is, but you have, if you think, Okay, when I get someone through the door, that first sale is going to be 100, 200, right?

But if you are like, okay, well, X percent of these customers are going to be sticky. They're going to come back and they're going to, um, you know, transact with us again. If you're taking a view of what that looks like from a customer's perspective over a 2, year period, well, then suddenly, you know, well, I might be open to spending a bit more to get that customer on board and then I'm backing myself as a business to keep them.

Absolutely. I mean, um, as I said, we've got, we've got some interests in different types of business and particularly we've got some in the hospitality interest, um, industry. And we, we were doing some research the other day of like, how do you, you know, How do you become the favorite? You know, if you're in a local area, neighborhood or something like that.

And it was some statistics that people need to have, I think, three interactions in the first month to start putting you in the rotation of regular restaurants. They go to regular bars, they go to whatever it is. So the question then becomes, well, do we need to make any money? In those three interactions, shouldn't that be our audition to get them for the next two years?

Because actually once we're in the rotation of their psyche in there, you know, they're inviting friends there to doing all this stuff. It's a game changing metric for us where most people are trying to do a special game in the front door where we're actually playing a game of how do we get them in four times in a month?

It's that frequency of mindset shift that it's changed some of our investments in those areas because people just don't think like that, right? The same way you guys are thinking is. It's not about that first click through, right? It actually doesn't matter. It's just, do what we say we're going to do and we're going to get them for, try and get them off us.

Absolutely. And then, and then

you've got different strategies for different life cycles of that customer, you know. Get them in your acquisition, in the acquisition phase and then, how do you maintain that customer through, you know, what gamification can you do? What, um, what, you know, we, we start to get into some pretty technical terms here, but you know, like, um, Looking at a data science perspective, you know, there's a model that we use called RFM modeling.

So, you know, recency, frequency, and monetary value. Um, and you can start to segment your customers based on how often they're coming, and, you know, interacting with you, how much they're spending with you, and how, um, like, recency, frequency, and yeah, monetary value, how much are they worth to you. Yeah. And you can start to really, You know, break down your strategy for each of these segments because, you know, you might have your, your top champion customers that, hey, they're loving you.

You don't actually need to spend a lot of time. You want to service them amazingly well, but you don't necessarily need to spend all your time convincing them to keep using you. Um, So, you know, segmentation is your friend, right?

Yeah, but I mean, you say it casually, but a lot of, particularly smaller businesses don't get that, right?

This is a new concept because they've never had that, that experience. But even, in particular, maybe that's a, a segue into the next part. Because that sort of data or insight used to probably be out of reach for a lot of businesses. Now, there's a hell of a lot of tools. In fact, you know, particularly even these marketing tools.

They want you to be more successful because they want you to keep spending. So they're giving you insight and different or support to be able to get it. Maybe you talk to us a little bit about how you've using or how you use AI in this because you're talking a little bit around that level of sophistication that you're getting into.

Can you talk to us a little bit about the role that's played, um, for you guys?

Yeah, so I mean, I think the term AI gets thrown around a lot. So we, we, um, there are, I'm personally a big believer in it. Like I almost look at it as like the next industrial revolution, which is a pretty big, big term. It's bigger than that, mate.

But I also think people get a lot of the public perception of it because AI is used as a very hot term. We do a lot of, you know, what you call machine learning, data modeling, as well as using, you know, generative AI where it makes sense. Um, and it's the, It allows you to punch above your weight, um, when it comes to creation of content, but also if you're using, um, and you, you, you're working with, you know, either a member of your team or an agency that can help you understand how your customers are interacting can be, can be very useful.

So, um, we've done, um, work. We take, Generative AI as an example. Um, if you are in a small business and you don't think you're using AI in the business and you've got any employees, trust me, you're using AI. Employees just aren't telling you they're using AI. Um, but we've done some really interesting things.

So, I remember when we were looking at, uh, you know, how do we really, you know, Uh, start to, um, punch out more customer testimonials, customer success stories. And we would do these filming sessions, um, with our customers. And, you know, you'd get a really polished two and a half minute video out of it, which is great as a testimonial.

Yeah. But you've also got An hour's plus worth of unused footage. You've got recordings, you've got, um, You've got like ad hoc conversations that happen to be captured on on video between the customer and whoever's in the company on the day and like That usually just gets put on a storage drive and thrown in a drawer and either gets forgotten or deleted at some point Yeah, um, so we had this idea of well, what if we take Take that and we just strip the audio files off it and start to utilize some of the, um, the, the, the tools that are in market.

So a good example of this is, um, open AI who make chat GPT have a tool called the whisper, the whisper API and whisper is one of the best audio transcription services out. And if you're using it direct from the company. It's very very powerful. Yeah The the output of you know, correct words is amazing So we would take all this footage strip out all the audio and then we would go.

Okay. Hey transcribable Now suddenly we've got this transcription of the entire Um, entire recording session and we will then go to the, the generative tools and say, Hey, these are what some of our other case studies look like. Here's what the finished version of this case study look like. Um, what else can we drive from this?

What snips can we drive? What other insights have we missed? And get it to like question our own data and start producing short term, short form Snippets, start producing, uh, blog articles that we can, we can put out. And it's not to say that we would go and put that as a finished product into the world.

But, I don't know about you, but for me it's much easier to look, look at something and edit it, than it is to stare at a blank piece of paper and try and start from scratch.

100 percent like it. It's exponentially faster when you have a starting point, right? We're the same here, we call it counter punching.

Like, give us something to work with, we'll rip it apart. Get started, we'll be here in a week still trying to work out which way should we go. Absolutely. And, and these

Like, we hacked that together a year ago, but this is starting to become standard features, so to call it, in these tools. Um, you know, you've got, like, Anthropic is, you know, with their Claude 3.

5, like, you wouldn't have heard of them a year ago, and now they're suddenly, um, being compared to, against ChatGPT, like, and a lot of these, these tools that, You know, you had to hack together, are starting to become standard features and functions in these, um, AI kits. I mean, you look in three months, two months time when Apple's going to release their Apple intelligence, very smartly named by the way, AI.

Uh, uh, Apple AI. They always nail it. Oh, they do, they do. Um, but as a, as a business owner, like the, the, the value that you can get out of like keeping your ear to the ground and, you know, keeping your finger on the pulse of these new tools that come out. Um, and just. Test them, see what they can do, or have someone in your team put some time aside for them to test and see what they can do.

Because the volume of content that they might be able to create, or the insights they might be able to create, we're not talking about building AI tools, just using AI tools. Um, you know, I think one thing that we did very well at Pay, Over the journey was we punched above our weight when it came to like the quality of the output We're putting out there the quality of the ads the quality of our um of our Socials, etc.

Part of that was hiring Well, so like i'm i'm more as you can probably tell data driven than than a creative . Um, I've, you know, I know what looks good and what doesn't look good, but I hired a team of people that are very talented in that space. You know, they're, yeah, they have graphic skills, they've got good eyes for things, but giving them the opportunity to test and, and be creative.

And then, you know, like if they come to you with an idea, Hey, can I use this tool to try and do this? Like, unless it's, uh, illegal. You know? Yeah. . I'd say, why not? Why not? Yeah. You know, just manage your risk and, and put it out in the world and just make sure you're not completely copying and pasting from an AI tool.

You don't want Google to penalize you, but, uh, true . No, but

I mean, you, you're so right. I mean, even the things you're saying then it's, it's. These, these are the fundamentals of any business coming up and you guys are early, obviously, and a lot of smart people, you know, driving, including yourself, but these have to become fundamentals in your business now.

Like it's the same with the ridiculous of not, you know, signing up with you guys because there is no, there is no downside unless you don't want to use it, grow, whatever, each their own. But it's the same thing with these tools, right? If why on earth would you not be at least experimenting because the upside is so.

Exponentially different

It's also the great equalizer because what would take a team of people like team of three four people You know a couple of weeks to do absolutely years ago a one two person show can spin up to Something very similar, reasonably quickly. Now, it doesn't completely replace creative by no means, but it enhances the skill sets people have.

I mean, we've been, even, as you said before, we, you know, some of the creative stuff that we work across our businesses, the fact that you can even put in your current creative and go, Hey, if you had to tear this apart and give us 50 other ideas of how you do it, just the provoking of ideas and thinking for a team with that, you get, you're always working on core, you know, core.

Ideas that are moving something forward rather than just chatting about something that could be. For us, it's been game changing.

That, that, that reminds me of one way that I, um, so I, I dabble in building my own little AI applications. Just, just when you've got time. Just when you've got time. But, um, one tool that I built for myself, and I haven't given anyone else access to it, is something that, I can basically be out walking my dog and I'm talking to, yeah, so I'm using the, again, that voice to text functionality.

But it's, I'm training, I've trained the AI to challenge me. So I'll be walking down the street thinking about an idea for the business or, you know, maybe it's just an idea personally. I'll be like, hey, here's my idea. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's the reason I'm thinking about it. Uh, and then it's programmed to go, well, have you thought about this?

Or what about, what, what if this happens? And actually having that, you know, using it as a bit of a sounding board can be really useful.

We, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I, we, we take the position, there is no future where every person in a professional environment doesn't have some form of AI agent with them.

Now, for those who are playing at home, an AI agent is basically someone you can talk to that knows you and what you want to get out of it. But that's essentially what you've built, right? It's, it's a game changing thing to have support on tap whenever you need it or at least train it for what you need.

Yeah, I mean we're all very excited about it until

it becomes Skynet. Well, it's That's like two years off at least, right? No,

no, I mean the next three weeks will be wonderful until it all takes over, but perhaps it already has. Perhaps, yeah. Um, where do you see the future going for pay. com. au, but particularly in this space of marketing?

Because I'd love to get your, your thoughts of if we If we pulled you out of it and we put you in another business, I would imagine that business would equally start to grow exponentially from the type of thinking you would bring to it. And I'm not just trying to You're pumping my tires. But it's, but it's a process now, right?

It's taking fundamentals. Where do you think the future is in, if you were to step out right now and into another business, where would you start from a marketing growth and I guess focus for yourself?

It all comes down to. The motivation behind the product, so if you think of pay. com. au, like, even in its name, pay, it's a payments business, right?

Functionally, it's what it does. But the reason that people use pay. com. au, um, isn't so much about the payments or the facilitation of the aspiration, the, ability to go and do things that I perhaps would need to have to pay full price for myself, or I wouldn't do otherwise. So, you know, it's the same if you go to go hospitality, because I know a lot of you listen to it in the hospitality space.

It's very easy to think that, okay, My customers are coming to me for a meal, but what are your customers really coming to you for? They're coming to you for an amazing experience, you know, or, uh, sometimes it is just a meal, but sometimes it is that experience of the atmosphere, the ambiance, the, the, the dream that you've put forward of, Hey, this, this, this is, this is, you know, come, come have a taste of this.

Um, and driving that emotion is. The actual product itself will follow. So in the loyalty space, there's a term called, uh, earn, burn, yearn, and it's almost, if you think of it as like a, a self fulfilling cycle, like an Ouroboros snack, it eats itself. But, um, so if someone goes and earns a bunch of rewards points, they go and use those points and they, they yearn for more, the most, the critical point in that cycle is the burn.

It is the, it is the, the act of fulfilling. It is, you know, setting that expectation, setting that desire, and then as soon as you meet that desire, and you do it once, you do it really well, then the momentum is there for that to keep fulfilling, to keep self fulfilling. So, if I was, if you were going to take me out and put me into another business, that's where I would focus.

It is, it is. You know, you want to remove barriers within the product space or whatever, or whatever it is that you're selling and how you're selling. You want to make sure that that's as streamlined as possible, but then you want to put your focus on that. Like, what, what is the problem you're solving?

What's the aspiration that you're creating for that, for your customer and how can you best enable them to meet that aspiration? Because once you do that, it'll just keep ticking along. And that's the, that's probably the, that's my gold nugget. That's what I'd say. Uh,

It's absolutely a gold nugget because I think the things that even that idea for most of our listeners sitting there and go, well, it, it makes sense from a theory, right?

But it is so important because most businesses don't institutionalize that idea. Only one person might carry it, but it's actually doesn't transpose across any aspect of it. And I suppose when you're working with your team, would they all be crystal clear on that and what we're trying to achieve when you're, when you're talking to them and leading, um, I mean those sort of aspects is everyone's crystal clear on that goal achievement.

I think so. I think you know, we're fortunate with pay that um, You know that aspiration is quite visceral, you know, it's quite obvious but um, there's a there's a term that I think I've used, I use quite a lot, um, called, I just call it the what's our minimum standard here, right? Um, so when we're delivering a product, we're delivering a service, we're delivering, you know, marketing to customers.

Um, our minimum standard has to be very high. Like it has to, it has, we have to be, um, put ourselves in the customer's shoes and go, okay, well, if I received this communication or I had someone talking, like, Talking to me about a product or a service. Are they, are we saying it in a way that I would, that I think, yep, you guys actually know what you're talking about.

Like you're, you, you're not putting out typos. You're not putting out too much text, too little text. Your, your visual design is on point. I mean, even from, you know, from day one, you know, we, we built a payment, we're up the payments platform of pay. com. edu. Like it's processed. Billions of dollars since we launched it a few years ago.

So, you know, yeah, it's not millions Not hundreds of millions of billions and some of the payments that go through pay are huge, you know Some some businesses baz bills are insanely high.

Yeah

and the confidence that a customer needs to have to To do that You can't come across as janky. You can't come across as um, like how do you instill trust and You The one of the best ways that we found to instill trust is through tightness of design, tightness of delivery.

Um, you know, emails not broken in their formatting, uh, website is tight and on point. Yeah. Because as soon as you, as soon as like, you know, and you're probably the same, you go to a business's website and something looks broken, something's, you know, that happens sometimes, but something, and it hasn't been touched in ages and you look at it and go, okay, that looks a bit janky.

Yeah. Just immediately I've lost a good chunk of trust for that business because you're not keeping your backyard clean. It's not even that, it's just that natural, like, in my gut, it doesn't feel right.

You're right there. I'm reflecting on, you know, using the platform and, and, and, My experience there and it's um, it's interesting because we always got to think about those in our own business and where our, where our touch points and where is it not projecting what we're trying to do.

And I suppose everyone listening here that, that comes in many forms, albeit presentation of, you know, we've, we've gone to some great restaurants where food's great presentation, not just plating up and stuff like that, but literally the way it's delivered that, that the globe that's wrecked in the side there, the door, that's a bit of creaky when you walk in it, it all sets a perception.

And thinking about it now, it's, How the hell did you make a website feel solid? Cause you're right, even when I was going in there, there was never a question of Is this dodgy? Not that it would be. You get this idea when it's around payments. But it might be. But it felt solid, which is actually an achievement thinking about it now is, there is a subtlety and a, actually quite an amazing thing there.

So we've done things like, you know, there's a lot of colour theory when it comes to you know, you notice a lot of payment businesses are blue. Um, blue in and of itself instills trust. Uh, but it's also, it's caring. It is, you know, it is taking that time and attention and We haven't always been perfect, but we've, you know, we've come leaps and bounds, but design is so critical.

Not every, and you see this, not every business thinks this way, but from what I've seen and the way that we've managed to grow the business, design is so critical to, to the perception of your business and perception can mean so many things, but, and to your point around going into a restaurant and every little element adds up and most.

You know, patrons will go in and everything, it was amazing, they'll walk away with that warm feeling in their stomach, but as soon as you have one thing that is like, just clearly broken or clearly wrong, it just eats away at the back of your head and, and you might walk away and everything else is perfect, you're like, that's all, all you think about is that one thing that, that wasn't there.

Now, you're not always going to get that right all the time, but, but, but, but, but, but, You need to have, like, as a, as someone who's running the business, you either, if you don't have the skillset yourself to have someone with a really sharp eye on how things look, feel, operate, what might be wrong, you need to get that skillset in your team because, and then empower people like that to be able to make change because, um, you're not gonna be able to catch everything yourself, but if you have the, if you sort of build this culture of, you know, A, pride would be like optimization, tweaking, um, and just like obsessing is the wrong word, but like thinking about, okay, well that doesn't look right, we've got to fix that, like that feels wrong, um, like that, empowering your team to think that way can have a huge impact.

I think it also is an opportunity for people in teams because when someone takes that initiative on to behave like that in a consistent way, it stands out. It is. So much in a team, right? Absolutely. And especially when you're, you're working through, you're working way up or you're, you're, you're a young member of a team, it's holding that standard becomes such an asset.

I mean, it's a fast track, right? It's a fast track hack in any environment you're

in. It absolutely is. Cause if you're a team member in a fast growing business, usually what's, you know, leadership is looking for in that business is someone else to think about the things that they're thinking about at the moment.

Couldn't agree more. The cognitive load of thinking about everything is. Like that, that starts to become the, the funnel that's become the choke point. You, you, you, as you build your business and more, you have to have other people think about things. And if you have members of your team where you know, they've got good critical thinking and they've got, they care and they've got an eye for detail.

You're completely right. Absolutely. Like that, that skill set is very, very valuable to a business.

I was speaking to a young person who was starting their career the other day and we're just talking about they were worried that they're in an organization where there wasn't opportunity. And we, we got into a similar conversation.

The conversation ended with this, there is always opportunity. Why aren't you creating opportunity? And that means that you're not doing enough where opportunity is coming to you because when you're behaving in that way, either you realize your real value and you can put yourself in front of opportunity or.

The C's will part and it will come to you and I think that's to your point It is so rare for people to keep a standard like that that it just it's it's changing, right? It's momentum change for a business but for people that do that make yeah,

I mean no need them We've seen it at pay. We've we've had a number of the team that have come in at various points and as the business grow Like people grow with it and you know, if you're thinking the right way again Critical thinking, attention to detail, like, you stand out.

Where to from here, David? Where's the, what's the future look like in the next few years for you guys and yourself?

It's pretty exciting, like, so I sort of said before, if we think about pay fundamentally, what are the two things that we're looking to do? We're looking to, uh, We're looking to make the rewards proposition even more enticing for business owners.

So give more flexibility, more ways to use your points. Um, you know, so that probably, that likely means more transfer partners for your pay rewards points, um, new ways to use your points, new, um, ecosystems, use your points in. So that's a lot of, a lot of work happening in that space, but at the same, at the same time, um, what are other ways that you could be earning points?

Uh, we've got some, we've got some interesting ideas cooking at the moment that should be out in the world in the next, uh, probably nine months to a year. I'm not sure the product team will, will, uh, have words with me when I get back into the office. We'll just stay tuned, right? You'll let us know. Stay tuned, but, um, you know, fundamentally we're looking to, you know, You know, make the rewards proposition even more promising.

We want to make the payments experience even better and, and broaden the scope of it.

I think that sounds extremely exciting and, and for those listening, um, As I said, first of all, Dave, thank you, because um, you guys have supported Poe and the transition that's happening and the support that's needed in the hospitality industry at the moment.

I just think that anyone who owns a business in any field, hospitality or otherwise, you need to just be speaking to these guys anyway. You need to just understand that this is a thing, because when you're sitting there, Boarding the next plane and you're looking over the left and going why are they boarding first?

It was literally because you don't understand the process not the fact that these things are ridiculously unachievable Absolutely, and

the the great thing as well is that the the the name is very easy to remember So, you know pay. com. au just in your Google search bar. You'll find us

David thank you again for your support and your time.

I thought the insights into how you guys have approached the growth of the business is going to be invaluable for all our listeners. And, um, yeah, thanks again for spending some time.

Thanks so much for having me and, uh, looking forward to chatting more about AI after this. Thanks, man. Thanks.

Thanks again for tuning into another episode of Principle of Hospitality. I hope you enjoyed it. And as always, this is a business to business podcast. So please like, comment, share, and subscribe. But most importantly, share with your friends in the industry. We're making this content with the industry in mind, and the reason why we can keep doing what we do is if you share along.

We really appreciate the support. Till next time, stay well everyone.