Greg Symons is the co-founder of SocietyOne and founder and CEO of Clearmatch. A driven lifetime entrepreneur, Greg has been highly focused on the financial technology space for almost two decades. Greg founded his first technology business in New Zealand where he and his engineering team developed the first online retail lending system in the country in 2000. Greg continued to evolve the platform into a comprehensive banking solution when it was licensed to a number of banks and finance companies in South Africa, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia. Clearmatch is now a unique multi-award winning SaaS lending marketplace ecosystem powering SocietyOne and its partners.
The panel discussed the differences in fintech across the Tasman. They mostly agreed that the NZ government is taking proactive and helpful steps for fintech.
Neil Roberts said he found the application process to be robust was constantly talk to the government. He noted that unlike in Australia, negative bureau reporting in NZ has been around for a while.
For Heussler, the main difference between the two countries is that the NZ market is parochial. “We have a sales team in Auckland and the Kiwis don’t like hearing that the service team is in Australia.”
Stanish added that NZ has very simple and clear legislation. You should be doing the right thing regardless of the regulation.
