Volley co-founders James McCann (left) and Jack Callister are being backed by Xero founder Rod Drury, who has taken a 20% stake in the business.
Xero founder Rod Drury is backing the makers of a new payment app, Volley, which is designed for peer-to-peer payments ranging from friends splitting a restaurant bill to settling up with a tradie without anyone needing to share or type in bank account numbers.
Co-founders James McCann and Jack Callister said Volley will launch in December and take advantage of the open banking changes being introduced that month by ASB, ANZ, BNZ and Westpac (the fifth major bank, Kiwibank, won’t have open banking support ready until May).
Callister said examples of its use could include someone in a flat who pays a power bill and then wants to recoup a share of the cost from flatmates, or someone who puts a restaurant bill on their credit card and wants to grab their dining companions’ share of the total.
If the bill payer has Volley installed on their device, they can send a link or QR code to everyone they want to collect money from. The link can be emailed, shared with a WhatsApp group or sent by another sharing method of the person’s choice. The payees then click on the link – no need to have Volley installed – and can pay as long as they’re with ASB, ANZ, BNZ or Westpac. The recipient will automatically have the details securely populated within their banking app, ready to be approved.
Volley’s founders said the app could also be used by small stallholders at farmers’ markets or by a householder to pay a tradie - or any one-off business payment.
Volley will be free for consumers.
McCann said once it’s built up its profile, businesses will be encouraged to also use it, with a flat 35c transaction charge because, as Callister said, “it costs the same to transfer money whether it’s $500 or $5000”.
Functionally, Volley is the same as Venmo, the popular casual payment bank in the US that most Kiwis know through pop culture.
But McCann and Callister said their app is closer to Tikkie in the Netherlands and Swish in Sweden, which have taken advantage of the EU’s open banking push.
The pair know the territory. Before co-founding Volley, McCann worked for UK-based Monzo, a “neo bank” that released a bill splitting app (earlier in his career, he was technical lead for a rebuild of Consumer NZ’s Powerswitch). Callister, a software engineer who joined Wellington City Council as a project manager, is a member of Payments NZ’s API Council – the body advising the industry on the nuts and bolts of open banking.
When open banking terms were first announced by the Government in May, some app developers screamed at charges of up to $5 per customer per month to access each bank’s payment systems.
McCann and Callister first met Drury two years ago through a mutual friend. The Xero founder, who has long pushed for open banking, kept in touch as, nudged by the Government, the banks started to tilt towards opening up access to their payment systems.
Drury’s family office took a 20% stake in Volley last month for an undisclosed sum.
“It would be great to see New Zealand regain its leadership when it comes to payment networks and encourage more onshore innovation in the industry,” Drury said.
“By backing Volley, we’re not only supporting a clever solution built by local talent, but also showing that world-class payment networks can be created right here.”
The Huljich family, which has backed marquee Kiwi software firms including Pushpay and Diligent (both $1 billion-plus plays) and the likes of Ideally and Valocity, has chipped in A$1.2 million ($1.3m) to an early-stage funding round for Sydney-based Nevam – maker of an AI tool for marketers to “visualise a customer journey”.
NZ investors Aaron Bhatnagar (whose family co-invested with the Huljiches in Pushpay) and Brand Fund (a joint venture between New and Improved Ventures and Icehouse Ventures) also participated in the raise.
Nevam was founded in January last year by Brittany Fox, whose career has included a brief stint as a Victoria’s Secret sales exec and an extended run as a senior manager for Deloitte Digital Australia.
After a decade delivering marketing campaigns for major brands including GAP, Oroton, and the Children’s Cancer Institute, Fox identified a critical blind spot plaguing enterprise teams, she says: “Complete lack of visibility into the customer experience across digital touchpoints.”
At Deloitte, where Fox led major digital transformation projects, the problem was pervasive across every client, she says. Fragmented systems, disconnected data, and siloed teams meant no one had a clear, live view of what customers were actually experiencing.
“We were spending days scribbling journeys on whiteboards, putting up Post-it Notes and manually updating as things changed. Immediately, things were out of date and needed to be done again,” she says. ‘Customer leaders are held accountable for journeys they can’t see, data they can’t access, and tools they don’t control. They’re flying blind.”
AI is making the problem exponentially worse, driving mass content creation across marketing teams, she says.
“The customer journey is compounding in an AI era of generated content and automated campaigns,” says Fox. “Teams are creating more touchpoints than ever, but can’t see how they connect. Marketers often feel like they are wandering in the dark, relying on reactive data to tell them if something is broken. Nevam takes the blindfold off”.
Fox says she’s “fixing AI’s chaos-induced blind spot”.
While on maternity leave, Fox decided to found Nevam. She says in just 12 weeks she built an MVP (minimum viable product); a real-time customer experience platform that gives marketing, product, and growth teams a visual map of the entire digital journey across web, email, SMS, and social.
She sold a prototype to BWS and was accepted into the Techstars accelerator.
“I’m part of the 1.5% of funding to go to solo female founders in Australia. This round highlights how ANZ investors are backing women founders who are tackling systemic challenges,” Fox said.
A mentor at Australian backer Techstars - Ideally’s Simon Gawn - told Fox they knew of a Kiwi VC who was looking for female entrepreneurs in MarTech, the founder tells Tech Insider.
That VC turned out to be Brand Fund’s Simon Pound, who, in turn, introduced her to the Huljich family and other local angel investors.
Times remain tight for many firms but Sir Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab is recruiting for 38 roles in New Zealand and a total of 156 overall when including jobs in the US.
The company is adding staff in California, Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, Mississippi, Washington DC and New Mexico – a spread of operations that reflects acquisitions and Nasa partnerships.
The Kiwi-American firm also recently announced it is issuing new shares to raise US$750m ($1.3 billion).
The new funds will go, in part, towards paying for recent acquisitions, including the just-closed deal to buy Arizona’s Geost, a maker of tech that can be used for missile-tracking, for US$275m – the better to position Rocket Lab to contribute to US President Donald Trump’s envisaged “Golden Dome” defence.
Rocket Lab said Geost’s 100 employees took its global headcount to 2600 – around 800 of whom are in NZ.
Pay isn’t listed for most roles, but a handful give salary bands, including a propulsion engineer based in Long Beach, California, at US$116,000-US$225,000 ($194,000 - $377,000).
Rocket Lab acquisitions
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.