Tyro Payments CEO Jonathan Davey: Small business is feeling the pinch

Jonathan Davey says small businesses are key to the economy and they continue to feel the pinch, even with interest rates steadying.

Tyro Payments CEO Jonathan Davey

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?

Small businesses are key to the economy and they continued to feel the pinch in 2024, even with interest rates steadying. We do expect rate cuts in 2025 towards the second half of the year, which we hope will contribute to increased consumer spending confidence.

Outlook

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

We are continuing to build on our foundation of sustainable growth underpinned by cost discipline, investing in new product development to deliver an expanded offering in new verticals. Operationally, we’re well set up to innovate in-house with our owned tech stack, so we certainly feel momentum building heading into the new year.

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.

Surcharging has emerged as a contentious policy topic for 2024, culminating in the government throwing its support behind a debit surcharging ban. Consumers should not pay excessive surcharges, nor should businesses foot the bill for the rewards that come with high-cost cards and credit card loyalty programs. A total surcharging ban would be unfair on small businesses who would be forced to increase their prices. Rather than a blunt force measure, we would like to see a mandate for greater transparency of the costs and services of ‘simple’ software-inflated pricing models which obscure the true cost of payment acceptance.

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 hybrid working approach is here to stay, and this year it’s been great to see our teams commit to a culture of predictable flexibility, where in-office collaboration is balanced with deep work from home. A trend we have seen evolve this year is increased attendance at some of our fantastic panel and networking events at Tyro HQ. We will certainly be leveraging that great energy in 2025.

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?

We have been trialling the use of AI agents in our Health business and seeing promising results, particularly for customer support. This year almost 8,500 requests have been started using our online chat platform; 45 per cent of these involved an AI agent with 51 per cent of those resolved without human intervention. This has highlighted a great transformational opportunity across our business which we’re excited to leverage further.