Small Business: Feijoa founders aiming to make KiwiSaver contributions easier

Ben Davin (left) and Mark White-Robinson (right), co-founders of Feijoa, aim to help facilitate small, regular, frictionless transactions into Kiwis' KiwiSaver accounts.

Ben Davin and Mark White-Robinson, co-founders of Feijoa, talk to Tom Raynel about how the business started from a hallway conversation, and what their hopes are for the business ahead of its launch. Each Monday, we interview a small business owner, which is now a regular feature of NZME’s editorial campaign On The Up, showcasing uplifting stories of success, inspiration and possibilities.

What is Feijoa?

We describe Feijoa as New Zealand’s pay-save company, and that’s a bit of a play on Pay-wave. What we do is help facilitate small, regular, frictionless transactions into your KiwiSaver account.

How we do that is we round up your transactions to the nearest $1, $2, or $5. Say you buy a coffee for $5.50, we would take that transaction and round it up 50 cents to the nearest dollar, and initiate a payment from your existing bank account and put it in your KiwiSaver account.

It can also go to other people because you can share it with your family and your loved ones. So we say if you can spend, you can save.

What inspired you to start the business?

Ben and another one of our co-founders were having a hallway conversation, mostly about how big an impact KiwiSaver has in New Zealand and how important it is. They thought there must be some way to build a business around it that hasn’t been done before.

The model we’ve used works overseas, where people act as their own fund managers, but obviously KiwiSaver is a lot bigger, and everyone’s in it. The more we explored it, the more we saw that there was so much opportunity there to help people. KiwiSaver is good at the moment, but we think it could be great.

Feijoa works by rounding up your transactions to the nearest $1, $2, or $5. The rounded amount is then paid from your existing bank account and put into your KiwiSaver account.

How do you encourage people to contribute to their KiwiSaver?

There’s 40% of people who don’t contribute to their KiwiSaver at all. They’re self-employed, they’re out of the workforce, they can afford it some parts of the year, or the paperwork puts them off because it’s too much hassle. The question was how do you actually get people engaged, and it’s the idea of something really small that you don’t notice.

We’ve called them the “missing million”, and that really jumped out at us when we started iterating through the ideas. All of these people who have done all the work to get into KiwiSaver now don’t take advantage of it, and they’re missing out.

So we tried to build an app with as few roadblocks as possible. We did a lot of work on the regulatory side to make sure we weren’t having to get you to scan your passport and find a phone bill and things like that. We’ve actually got an exemption under the Anti-Money Laundering legislation which requires those checks.

When did you start the business, and what’s been the biggest challenge?

We started the company in May 2023, so it’s been over about two-and-a-half years we’ve been working on it. The first few months was actually going through ideas and figuring out what we could do, before we settled on the idea of what became Feijoa.

We’ve spent the last year building it from a technical standpoint, working through all the regulatory issues, and figuring out how we pull a business around it. The biggest challenge has probably been how do we go to market with it, how do we actually tell New Zealanders who we are and what we do in a really succinct way that people from all walks of life understand?

People get put off with the idea of investment if there’s 1000 new apps on their phone every day, and they don’t know which one to pick.

What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

Mark: I think, come up with a plan and just start working on it. You’ll change that plan 10,000 times, but I think that’s really helped us. The other bit of advice, I think, would be to ask for help. There are so many people who are willing to give their time for people who want to do something.

Ben: My one would be, even if your idea doesn’t work, you learn a lot along the way. With every setback you learn heaps, and you can apply it to the next thing you do.

Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.