SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Deon Nobrega: he is CEO of Paymenow. Deon, I appreciate the early morning time. I want to chat around earned wage access. Before we do, in a note you put out you’re talking around employee incentives. … I suppose it was happening before the pandemic, but post pandemic it seems that [given] flexible working arrangements, maybe even hours, mobility, health wellness [employee incentives involve] so much more these days than just that base pay that you receive.
SIMON BROWN: I take your point. I hadn’t thought about that. Of course in some markets, in the US, I think pay is typically a fortnightly process which to me in one sense seems weird. But our life is happening. Our life doesn’t sort of revolve around calendar months. But we are using technology to actually disrupt that market, with things like on average being 10 times cheaper than a payday loan, which is something that we are very proud of, and something that we’re able to do through technology. But also other services, through services like Paymenow, come at zero fees: like the ability to top up electricity, the ability to buy food and groceries.
DEON NOBREGA: Yes. So very much Paymenow, or the industry, we are software as a service platform. We are a service provider to the corporates. They are able to enable earned wage access to their staff using a service like Paymenow. These are not massive loans. This is not money to pay for holidays or pay off a car. It’s really just that on-demand requirement for goods and services that we are now so used to making use of as we need.
SIMON BROWN: Ahhh, okay. So I go back to my first point. This is almost nothing like the payday loan. I’m going delete that out of the process. You make the point, I suppose, that you could do it with large corporates. But … [the] average person [is] taking R350. This is really the lower end of the employee space. These are people who are finding it tough. And, to your earlier point, the idea that we get paid monthly is just sort of something that exists for perhaps no real reason.
PaymenowGroup SimonPB True.