Today on episode 41 of the Cloud Stories podcast I’m talking with Jessica Ellerm who is the Partner Development Manager for Tyro, Australia’s nextgen bank. She is responsible for the rollout of Tyro’s deposit account with Xero and Tyro’s first growth funding solution, launching mid-year. Jessica is also an active commentator in the Fintech space, writing regularly for her own blog jessicaellerm.com and international blog Daily Fintech. She also guest reports for global Fintech podcast Breaking Banks and is an online broadcast journalist for the Finance News Network, where she presents the Monday and Friday Market Outlook.

Tyro Payments, Australia’s first independent EFTPOS provider, has been granted a general banking authority by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority that allows the company to take money on deposit and to advance money to Australian businesses. This is the first time a challenger has been authorised to compete head-on with the banking establishment. Today Tyro has close to 16,000 EFTPOS customers and processes nearly $8 billion dollars annually.

Subscribe to Episode 41 of Cloud Stories on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/cloud-stories-heather-smith/id908333807

Today’s episode is kindly sponsored by Spotlight Reporting. Scroll to the bottom to download your free white paper The Perfect Advisory Relationship.

In this episode I talk to Jessica about:

Jessica maintain’s her own blog at jessicaellerm.com. It’s focused on growth hacking, fintech, banking and payments – topics that are of interest to her. It contains medium to long form articles. Jess shares the benefits of publishing her own blog. This included connecting with people all over the world, and recognising topics people engaged with.

Jessica has worked in FinTech before they even used the terminology FinTech!

A good way to explain what you do – when no-one really understand what you do - is turn it into a story and relate it back to a person’s life and how it affects them.

Breaking Banks is a global podcast run by Brett King a futurist who is focused on disruption in Financial Services and the emerging FinTech sector.

Jessica shared what’s happening across the world, in terms of peer to peer and peer to consumer, Challenger and Tandem banks. The next areas of disruption will be around regulation and insurance. #RegTech #InsurTech. UK and US leading the way in this area. UK is embracing Fintech.

Blythe Masters CEO of Digital Asset Holdings(ex JP Morgan) has just made a significant investment in partnership with the ASX around blockchain technology. She has pointed out that FinTech has been able to flourish because the banks are so focused on cleaning up the mess after 2008. Innovation is happening outside of the banks essentially.

Malcolm Turnball our Australian Prime Minister has a strong banking background and has established the FinTech Advisory panel – one of the goals is to make finance more accessible to small business. Malcolm Turnball and Scott Morrison have come out and openly stated that they want Australia to lead FinTech in Asia Pacific region. They will probably be pretty aggressive about making that agenda happen.

Jessica is also broadcast journalist with the Finance News Network an online TV show.

We talk about different publishing platforms and how people are monetising it. People hardly watch real TV shows.

Working in blogs, podcasting and visual mediums Jessica thinks blogging has the most impact – because you can read it on the train! Jessica thinks we need to re-look at old school marketing – such as direct mail outs and simply having a chat on the phone.

If someone wants to seed a story with Jessica email her directly or approach her by twitter.

Tyro built a new payments infrastructure they built a bank solution from ground up – on the cloud. It integrates with POS – which is a big differentiator. Tyro Payments, has been granted a general banking authority by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) that allows the company to take money on deposit and to advance money to Australian businesses. The bank account offers two-way integration with Xero. The money goes in and can be pushed out. This concept is focused on batch payments. The whole batch is sent through to Tyro bank account, and the Tyro user taps an app on their phone to approve the payment.

With Tyro bank there is a clear separation of responsibilities. The administrator person can do all of the admin and back end processing. The small business owner has full control over payments out of the business bank account. He or she is sitting on his yacht in the Bahamas and see the notification come through. He can think I know a payment is coming out today, and click to approve the payment.

For this model to suit your business - you have to have enough supplier invoices to benefit from batch payments.

Ideal Tyro client is a business who (1) needs a physical EFTPOS device: Retail, Hospitality, Medical, (2) using Xero (3) an iPhone.

It takes about 7 – 10 days to set up Tyro.

Xero Advisors can train and educate clients around batching, integrating with other add-ons in the eco-space like Receipt Bank.

Climb a few hills rather than climb Mt Everest slowly roll out solution improvements for clients.

Jessica thinks more Challenger banks like Tyro will emerge.

Overcoming trusting people and business online.

Initiatives around technology and transparency to help address the culture problem in banking. In Netherlands bankers take a Hippocratic oath.

Gender balance in FinTech. FemtechLeaders is a global meetup group for female in this space.

Jessica loves small business, technology and finance – it’s all about helping people at the end of the day.

 

Ideal Tyro client is a business who (1) needs a physical EFTPOS device: Retail, Hospitality, Medical, (2) using Xero (3) an iPhone.

With Tyro bank there is a clear separation of responsibilities.

From publishing her own #Fintech blog @JessicaEllerm has connected with people across the world.

Today’s episode is kindly sponsored by Spotlight Reporting. Scroll to the bottom to download your free white paper The Perfect Advisory Relationship.

Resources mentioned in this interview include

• Tyro
• Receipt Bank

Connect with Jessica Ellerm

• @JessicaEllerm
• http://jessicaellerm.com/
• Tyro

 Thanks for listening! What’s been your biggest learning from today’s episode? Share in the comments below.

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