Entrepreneurs create our future growth: Zeller CEO Ben Pfisterer

Ben Pfisterer who heads up payments platform says now is the time to double down and invest.

CEO SURVEY 2025: FULL COVERAGE

Economy

How would you rate the momentum of the Australian economy as we head into 2025? Official forecasts have Australia trimming interest rates from the first half of calendar 2025, is that consistent with your view? What are you seeing around inflation in your own business?

Although the Australian economy continues to be relatively resilient, it has unambiguously been a difficult period for certain sectors due to a clear deterioration in consumer spending patterns.

Despite Australia retaining positive levels of employment, lower consumer demand has been coupled with material price rises for a sustained period, which has resulted in a protracted dampening effect on the broader economy. Businesses across the board have been heavily impacted by rising costs without a commensurate rise in consumer spending, which has resulted in some difficult trading conditions.

The general sentiment from the businesses we serve is that there’s been an overall decline in same store growth, with average transaction values down on prior years. It’s common to hear from some sectors that their customer traffic is relatively stable, yet businesses are clearly noticing a change in how their customers are spending their money. In general, there’s a clear shift in consumer sentiment to being more ‘value driven’ via smaller basket sizes and more conservative price selections.

As it looks increasingly unlikely to be a hard landing for the Australian economy, the signals for the RBA on when to cut rates is more obfuscated than normal. Any form of interest rate cut in 2025 could see a relatively quick return to improved consumer sentiment, which would offer much needed respite for Aussie businesses – yet the RBA is clearly hesitant to move too soon. If the government doesn’t provide some form of relief or stimulus, a protracted delay to the next rate cut will prove very challenging for many businesses.

Outlook

What excites you heading into 2025? Are you likely to increase, hold steady, or trim your investment spend?

Despite the ongoing economic conservatism, we remain bullish on now being an opportune time for Zeller to maintain reasonably high levels of investment spending.

Zeller is proud to provide a unique set of innovative financial service products to help businesses lower their costs and run their finances more efficiently, yet the payments and business banking space requires ongoing investment. To ensure our customers get access to the most innovative solutions, we have continued to develop and deploy new products to accelerate our growth during 2024 – the year ahead is unlikely to be different.

If our optimism regarding economic improvement next year proves correct, such conditions do tend to stimulate entrepreneurs to open new businesses and foster growth opportunities for existing ones. We believe now is an excellent time to invest in our current capabilities and infrastructure to further position Zeller to assist Australian businesses to weather the current conditions and position their business for further growth as the economy improves.

Reform

As we move into an election year, in your mind, what’s the single biggest lever that can/should be used to lift Australia’s competitiveness or productivity? This could be across any area from labour market, tax reform, training or other areas to encourage investment.

Without a doubt, the deployment and utilisation of innovative technology is the best way any businesses can boost their competitiveness and productivity. Whether it results in improving their operational efficiency, cutting costs or enhancing their products and services, businesses that fail to utilise technology will become less competitive.

That said, with Australian small businesses arguably struggling more than most, the inherent difficulties with getting any new business up and running are being compounded by rising costs across the board. Now is the opportune time for the federal government to assist Australian businesses by providing them additional (much needed) relief in the form of further tax breaks and increasing the eligibility for further concessions.

Entrepreneurs in all sectors form the backbone of employment and create the future growth engines of our economy. If they can retain more of their earnings to help them withstand the ongoing inflationary cost pressures, they will be better placed to succeed. further tax deductions, along with maintaining or increasing access to instant asset write-offs, will ensure they have the tools required to set their business up for sustained success.

As a whole, our corporate tax rates remain too high. With competition continuing to increase globally, we need to ensure Aussie businesses retain more of their earnings to continue to innovate and grow.

With the corporate tax rate for Australian businesses who are eligible as a ‘base rate entity’ being more competitive, I would like to see the eligibility criteria further expanded along with the statutory tax rate decreased further.

Comparing corporate tax scales globally, Australia has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, which is not a position we should be content with. A material downward move from the current 30% to sit below 25% would enable our companies to be more competitive on a global scale, while providing them with additional capital to reinvest into our economy.

Geopolitics

Will a Donald Trump presidency have a potential impact on your business or sector (tariffs or streamlined regulation)? Does geopolitics drive a bigger part of your decision-making?

Clearly the Trump administration will return to office with an obvious mandate of change, so we can expect to see a significant impact on the global landscape. As governments around the world proactively brace for the impact that might be felt in their jurisdiction, Australia is certainly no exception. Although geopolitics is likely to impact Australia’s economy more than it ever has, at Zeller we are unlikely to be directly impacted by movements in tariffs or streamlined regulation.

That said, as we increasingly service thousands of Australian businesses who could be impacted by such changes, we retain a close interest in such matters. Probably the highest impact will be felt by those who export products overseas and those that compete locally with global entities.

We have been encouraged by the Albanese government’s recently renewed commitment to multinational tax reform tax laws to ensure the world’s largest multinationals pay their fair share of tax when operating in Australia. Such reform is likely to generate increased debate across countries, yet well-implemented changes would be extremely positive to not only ensure multinationals pay an appropriate level of tax, it would also help local and international companies can compete in a more balanced manner.

Although Zeller currently operates solely in Australia, we continue to hold global ambitions, so we retain a strong interest in how other markets are faring.

People

Has your organisation’s approach to flexible working – including working from home – evolved during the year. Is this likely to change further into 2025?

Our policy has been consistent for a number of years and is unlikely to change. Since we exited the Covid-era, we prefer to see people in the office as much as possible, and employ a structured minimum four-days-in policy to ensure a degree of flexibility that can be utilised by staff.

We hold a strong preference for in-person work, and believe it’s the best approach for the stage and size we’re at.l This is not to say remote working isn’t viable, as our international employees provide immense contributions to our business, yet it’s not the model we prefer for the majority of our teams who are based in a common city. On a daily basis we enjoy the benefits of close in-person collaboration gained from all being in the office. Whether it’s relationship building, culture development, project collaboration, team bonding, instant problem solving, passive learning, mentoring or shared experiences, we believe there is a vast tangible upside to staff being located together.

Technology

Where is your organisation along the AI journey – is it in the developmental stage, or are you now using the technology at scale across your business? If so, are benefits matching the promise?

Although we are proactively ramping up our utilisation of AI across our business operations and customer experience, I would say we’re relatively early in our AI journey. Nonetheless, we are inherently a data heavy company, hence we will always be staunch advocates for what AI can bring to Zeller and our customers.

Currently we’re taking a targeted approach to deploying generative AI tools in our workflows. From the significant amounts of unstructured, complex and disparate sources of information we ingest, our growing capability to summarise, or query quickly to provide answers or general guidance is immensely valuable to our business.

At Zeller we’re proud of our streamlined onboarding process, yet we’re always looking at ways to onboard complex entity types more seamlessly. We continue to explore how AI can assist by analysing documentation that would otherwise take significant amounts of human synthesis.

With customer support being the most common issue facing large financial institutions, although more work is required, the positive impact AI can have to complement and enhance existing models is clearly one of the more imminent developments AI can offer.

Although the broader banking and payments space still has a long way to go to realise the potential of what an optimal customer experience could be, the recent development in AI has certainly accelerated the likelihood of the benefits being realised in the near term. From improved customer service, enhanced data analytics, personalised business insights, targeted business advice through to faster engineering development and product deployments, the potential is widespread.