Listen here.In this interview with Irakli Rekhviashvili, Tyme Group co-founder Coenraad Jonker gives his take on what actually protects a digital bank once the competition catches up, and why he thinks the old rules of banking no longer apply. On competitive advantage, he says: "I'm saying to my guys increasingly, I don't think there is a moat. I liken it to the time when people lived in walled cities with trenches dug around them. And then airplanes arrived, and people could fly over cities, and those walls became totally irrelevant." On why so many banks still fail to serve the poor profitably, he states: "It's not the customer that's the problem, it's the banks that's the problem." Jonker, whose group counts Brazil's Nubank among its backers, also puts a number on the group's New York listing ambitions, revealing: "I think it's more likely we'll be ready in 2030 than in 2028." He traces it all back to Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, which he read during his MBA at GIBS in 2001. "I read the book in 2001 when I was busy with my MBA at GIBS... it lit a fire. It sort of started me thinking completely differently about the challenges of financial inclusion and financial exclusion.".Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Irakli (00:01.43)Coenraad Jonker leads Tyme Group, a fintech unicorn valued at $1.5 billion, that counts Brazil's Nubank amongst its backers and is eyeing a New York listing by 2028. He built it with his partner, Tjaart van der Walt. Trained as a lawyer, Jonker was already CEO of South Africa's largest law firm when in 2005 he walked away for Standard Bank. In 2011, he moved to Deloitte, where the two of them spun out a side project called Tyme. Today, that project is GoTyme Bank, backed by Patrice Motsepe. Coenraad, welcome.Jonker (00:36.492)Irakli, lovely to be on the show with you.Irakli (00:39.818)We just had Christo Wiese here at BNC9 talking about Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, the idea that the world's poor already hold trillions in assets. That same book inspired you too. What did you take from it?Jonker (00:56.694)Irakli, I read the book in 2001 when I was busy with my MBA at GIBS. And I remember sort of a Financial Times book review catching my eye, sort of just describing the basic premise. And the argument that Hernando de Soto makes in the book is that the patterns of wealth and poverty in the world are not determined by culture or work ethic, but by structural elements in the economy, and particularly by this question of whether people have the opportunity to form capital or to mobilize their capital in the economy.For me, reading this in 2001, it lit a fire. It sort of started me thinking completely differently about the challenges of financial inclusion and financial exclusion, and over the years that led to what today we know as GoTyme Bank.Irakli (02:08.735)You speak of structural elements. When you were thinking of a project like this, South Africa was vastly different in the nineties. Can you walk us through how that has since changed and in a way enabled GoTyme Bank?Jonker (02:25.112)Yes, you know, I would say we're very lucky in that in the last 20 years, all the different parts of the puzzle that enables a world where Hernando de Soto's ambitions can become true have come together. And if you think about when we started out thinking about this in the early 2000s, there were no smartphones. The banking regulation did not allow you to open a bank account without a wet signature, without income paper. There was a long and protracted process to open bank accounts. And people weren't adjusted to the idea that you can actually manage your money digitally.And in the last sort of 20 years, all of that has changed. Smartphones and affordable access to data has been a big enabler. Changes in regulation and more progressive regulation around banking and customer onboarding has been a big enabler. And then people's behaviors have changed. And even events that on the face of it look like bad news, COVID as an example, these events have actually accelerated behavioral change in customers.And what's now happened is that all these behavioral changes, technology changes and regulatory changes have come together to create almost a perfect environment for the digitization of financial services. And we see the pace of that transition, from old technology or old operating models in financial services, very rapidly evolving, and the pace of change actually picking up.Irakli (04:30.109)Walk us through what happened during COVID and how it changed for your group.Jonker (04:37.07)So of course COVID was a very challenging time. Our bank was only a year old when COVID hit, and it had some very immediate adverse consequences. One of it was that we had just opened up the taps on our first lending product, and a month into COVID the president announced a moratorium on repayment of loans.So COVID on the one side was very challenging for fintechs, and particularly for high growth financial services businesses. On the other hand, what it did is it forced people out of their comfort zones in the world of branch banking in particular. It forced people to think differently about how they're going to do their banking. People had a bit more time, and they had a few more reasons to really get more digital.And so people started shopping more digitally, they started trusting their apps more, they started socializing more digitally, and worldwide they started banking more digitally. And there are many, many examples of this kind of acceleration of transition. A good example is the Philippines, where we also have a bank, also called GoTyme Bank. And in the Philippines, before COVID, almost 80% of people had never had a bank account. And there were two small, I would say struggling wallet players called Gcash and Maya. Gcash and Maya were not profitable, struggling to get scale. And what happened in the Philippines in COVID is there was just this explosion of digital money. These wallets became so big. I think Gcash now has in excess of 40 million customers on their platform. And that was all as a result of this kind of behavioral change. Essentially, people did not have the option to continue to operate in the cash world. Irakli (06:56.091)This project started off at the heart of it with respect to remittances, and it seems to me that the Philippines project echoes that. Is that a natural progression or evolution of this product that you've seen repeated over the course of its journey?Jonker (07:13.527)Yeah, I think it's interesting to now watch the progression of digital banks over the last decade. And I would say typically digital banks have three starting points. One set of digital banks start in the transaction banking and savings space, and as you quite rightly say, with remittances often as the first use case. In our case, domestic remittances was the first use case that we used.There are other digital banks that started in the lending space. A good example is our shareholder Nubank. Nubank is now the most valuable business in Brazil. They're a digital bank, they're only 14 years old, but they started with credit cards. They started by democratizing access to credit cards. So a different starting point. And then there are digital banks, and a good example are the big digital players in China and South Korea, who start as sort of ecosystem players, on the back of a mobile operator or e-commerce network.But what we're seeing is that these different starting points are now almost all converging in a space I would call daily use platforms. So more and more, the space that we are all competing for is: can you become the platform of choice where the customer goes every day to do their everyday financial services activities, which would include remitting money, paying for things, buying airtime and electricity, lottery tickets and other sort of e-commerce activities. And increasingly what we see is a conversion of mobile network activities as well, where the best digital banks in the world are starting to actually get into the MVNO space, where they start operating like customer-facing mobile networks for their customers. So we see this interesting confluence of the different starting points into this sort of daily use space, as a way to try and escape commoditization of financial services.Irakli (09:44.926)And we're seeing Sanlam skipping those steps and going straight into phase three as you've put it, or even phase four. Walk us through what that looks like for them, and to your point, fighting commoditization.Jonker (09:59.49)Yeah, we're very excited about our partnership with Sanlam. I think we announced about a year back that we are partnering with Sanlam in both the personal loan space and the transaction banking space. And what we're in the process of building, to be launched to the market early next year, is a setup where Sanlam has a Sanlam app for their customers.And we actually embed inside the Sanlam app a GoTyme banking app, so that the Sanlam customer can go to the Sanlam app, see all their insurance information, but also do banking inside that same app. Now you would ask the question, why would an insurer want to embed banking in their app? It comes back to this point that insurance is not something you think about every day. You buy an insurance product, and if you keep paying it, possibly the next time the insurance company speaks to you is when they speak to your spouse, after you've passed away. So Sanlam, like all other financial services companies, is asking themselves, how do I deepen the relationship? How do I find an excuse to engage with my customer on a more ongoing basis? And we know that the one product customers use on a continuous basis is actually transactional banking.So it makes a lot of sense for them and us to think about it this way. It makes a lot of sense for us to be associated with a Sanlam brand, giving us access to customer segments we wouldn't naturally attract as a newcomer in the banking space, while they augment the functionality they can offer their customers with the typical functionality we have on our platform.Irakli (11:57.857)The space is becoming increasingly competitive. We see Revolut also looking to step into the banking space in South Africa. We have Discovery Bank. We have other players as well looking, Old Mutual included. Now, in your view, what is the moat at the heart of GoTyme Bank in building its defense and growing its base? And you spoke around daily habits and engagement with consumers.Jonker (12:27.54)Irakli, that's a fantastic question, and the way you characterize the landscape, I think, is absolutely accurate. It's becoming very noisy, it's becoming very competitive, and that's fantastic news for consumers, for customers, because we have historically had an oligopolistic industry structure in South Africa, where these big banks could fly information, protect their fees and so on. Although I would say the quality of banking in South Africa is fantastic, the value for money I don't think is that fantastic. I think that banking is expensive relative to the rest of the world, and there are many studies confirming this view.Now the question is: what is the moat? I'm saying to my guys increasingly, I don't think there is a moat. I liken it to the time when people lived in walled cities with trenches dug around them. And then airplanes arrived, and people could fly over cities, and those walls became totally irrelevant. I think we're exactly there. I think that the mental model of moats is probably something we will use less and less as the years go on.So the way we think about it now is not so much what is the moat, but what are the characteristics, the operating model features of a business that will allow it to outrun its competitors. And we increasingly think that the two most important superpowers any bank can have are speed and quality. With speed, I mean how fast can you bring new functionality to your customer. At a conceptual level, I actually think retail banking is very simple: can you delight your customer? Can you create a customer experience that is meaningfully better than the experience they can get from your competitor, at the same price or a better price? That price performance, that customer experience, will in the medium to long term predict market share, and the research on it is very clear. In our business, the headline thing we look at is net promoter score: do customers love our proposition more than they love the competitor's proposition? And this is hellishly difficult.But what enables that is your ability to respond fast to what the customer tells you, through data and through customer engagement. Now, in the past, there's been this idea that there's a cost-quality trade-off in life and in business, that the faster you go, the poorer the quality. What we're seeing is that that is not true, that in fact speed and quality are mutually reinforcing. The way it works is that if you can go fast, you can learn fast, you can fix your mistakes fast, and you can get better fast. And if you can do that, what results through multiple iterations is a much better customer experience at the end.Irakli (16:11.914)How do you inspire that in the company?Jonker (16:16.822)So, in a very complex environment, what we believe is that this comes down to one thing: the quality of the talent you attract and retain, and whether you actually give them the space to do their best work. A concept we think about often is this idea of purpose, autonomy, mastery. It all starts with purpose, with people being very clear on why we're doing what we're doing, not just in a general philosophical sense but in a very specific sense. Why am I doing what I'm doing? What is my job? And what is the context in which my job has to produce an outcome?Once somebody has purpose, you can actually give them more autonomy, because they have the context they need to make good quality decisions. And as you give somebody more autonomy, they can achieve mastery, and mastery and autonomy again are mutually reinforcing. So what we're trying to create is a business and environment that is hugely supportive of people, that really cares about their growth, and is serious about this cycle of purpose, autonomy and mastery.Ultimately, the pattern that creates, the cultural pattern it creates, is a business that becomes better and better all the time, with people who are not motivated by fear or so much by career ambition, but who are motivated by the joyful process of being part of something amazing, contributing to something amazing, and getting better and growing as a person all the time.Irakli (18:24.618)You speak about cultural patterns. And if we just take a moment to step back and look at your time at Standard Bank and contrast that with your position today, there's a quote from your old boss at Standard Bank, Sim Tshabalala, who put it quite bluntly: that it became clear you couldn't run a cult on the side of the bank. That's how he described GoTyme Bank's predecessor when it was forming inside the institution. And in your book, they mention how Standard Bank is a process-driven, compliance-driven institution. How do you grapple with scale, as the company scales, ensuring those processes don't combat that cultural pattern you just mentioned, looking back at your experience at Standard Bank?Jonker (19:24.171)You're right, you ask all the best questions. This one is, I think, at the heart of the battle for ongoing transformation. Sim is a good friend, an old friend of mine, and he and I have had this conversation over the years. And I think it's still almost the case that the jury remains out on whether it's possible to become a large institution and yet retain agility, retain speed.I think it's a combination of things. Firstly, culture is extremely important, particularly in financial services and banking, which I think, after aviation and medicine and drug trials, is the most regulated industry in the world. Setting up your business for success from an operating model perspective is very important, so we spend a lot of time thinking about the operating model: how do we make sure people work together in the right formations to maintain speed?We think a lot about culture, particularly culture around risk, compliance, internal audit, what they call the control functions, appointing the right people into those jobs, and then thinking very deeply about how those jobs contribute to the competitive advantage of the business rather than become permanent handbrakes. Our group chief risk officer is a Zimbabwean. In the first part of his career, he was a chief risk officer in Zimbabwe when the Zimbabwe currency went to hell in a handbag. What I love about him as a chief risk officer is he knows what real risk looks like. He's not the kind of guy who thinks his job is to tick boxes, he knows his job is to keep the business safe while keeping the business competitive.He has introduced this idea of targeted friction into our business. Not all risks are the same, he says, you have to be very surgical about where you introduce friction in the business and where you don't. And you have to build a culture of thoughtfulness around risk, where it's not one tool used with the same strength everywhere in the business. So as I'm giving you this answer, I realize it's not an elegant or simple answer, it's a complex problem to solve. But it's one worth solving, because I think the institutions that get this right will be meaningfully more competitive than the ones that don't.This is something I think people miss in terms of competitiveness over the medium to long term. If you can just constantly be one or two percent better and faster and better quality than your competitor, and keep doing that for a long time, you don't end up one or two percent better than them, you end up 30 or 40 percent better than them. This kind of obsession with mastery, with reaching mastery in every aspect of banking, is what over time patterns a business into becoming exceptional, becoming world class, and becoming clearly differentiated from the competition.Irakli (23:25.78)You mentioned risk, and at the heart of the equation of success for your group, it seems, is the cost of acquisition for a client and bringing them on board. And yet when we engage those who have not been banked in the years leading up to the formation of the group, and your passion and desire to make capital accessible to those who have been unbanked, how has that balance played out in assessing risk, that surgical approach, but also provision of capital, in a way that allows the cost-of-acquisition numbers to be low enough for it to become a profitable and scalable venture?Jonker (24:20.061)Yeah. So, Irakli, the cost of customer acquisition is an incredibly important enabler that many people do not fully understand, particularly when it comes to financial inclusion and to profitably banking previously unbanked customers.The starting point, when we think about the element of cost in an operating model, is that when people start talking about cost and business, most people glaze over. They think it's an extremely boring, technical topic. And frankly, if you're operating in the private banking world or the investment banking world, or even in the mass affluent market, it's not a big deal. But if you're trying to meaningfully move the boundaries of an industry into serving customers who have not been served before, obsession with cost is extremely important. I always say the problem with places like South Africa and the Philippines and other emerging markets is not that people are too poor for banking, it's that the operating model of banks is not well suited to serving those people. So it's an operating model problem, not a customer problem. It's not the customer that's the problem, it's the banks that's the problem.Now, people look at it glibly and say, well, you know what you can do, you can just cross-subsidize that segment, so don't worry so much about cost. You have wealthy customers, they'll pay the bills, and you can use that money to cross-subsidize those segments. The short answer is it actually doesn't work, because over time your shareholders, the people who provide you with capital, will not tolerate you doing a big portion of your business unprofitably. At some point they're going to say to you, you should stop doing that business, you should stop doing other business. So if you're serious about running a business that democratizes access to finance, you have to make sure you can serve even the poorest customer profitably. That means your unit economics have to work.And so we continue to be obsessed with it, and we continue to look for ways to reduce that operating cost per customer, to get our unit economics more and more efficient. Now, of course, technology is a great enabler. We have no hardware in our business, we have no server rooms, we run the entire business in the cloud, and that saves us an enormous amount of money. We have no branches, no bulletproof glass, no cash vans, no ATMs, and that saves us an enormous amount of money. We have no middle office where paper gets pushed around, that saves us money. We choose not to do products that are super thin margin on our own balance sheet, like home loans, and that saves us a lot of money too. I can go on and on.But ultimately, what we realized is that to be truly efficient, you have to build a business at larger scale, not millions of customers, not tens of millions of customers, but ultimately a hundred million customers or more across multiple markets, to really operate at the scale that gives you longevity in your unit economics. That was the main driver for us becoming a multi-country digital bank, because South Africa simply wasn't big enough for us to get the kind of scale we think will drive sustainable inclusion into the future. So that's why we went multi-country. But there's an interesting point about scale: it's not just economies of scale that you want, you also need economies of scope. What I mean by that is you need to be big enough to attract enough of the smartest people in the world to solve the difficult problems you have to solve in banking, and amortize those costs amongst many customers.Take financial crime as an example. The world is suffering under a financial crime epidemic at the moment. To solve that problem, we need to employ the smartest people, and we need to find the best people in the world to help us solve it. But you don't want that cost to be shared by only five or 10 million customers. You want that cost shared amongst 20 or 30 or 40 million customers. That's the kind of economies of scope you're also trying to get by building a very large scale institution.Irakli (29:30.848)So when you look at your unit economics, you look at it across countries?Jonker (29:36.094)Yes, absolutely. You look at the unit economics at a group level. To give you an example, we employ about 900 designers, engineers and developers in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and they design, build and run product for us across South Africa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. That's the kind of economies of scale that allow you to become very cost competitive in the countries in which you operate.Irakli (30:15.702)And the growing protectionism we're seeing globally, is that not affecting your market?Jonker (30:23.641)That's a big one to unpack. It is a trend we are watching. There's no doubt that there is more protectionism, and there's also no doubt that there are geopolitical trends forcing players like us to think about picking sides. Do you run on a US stack? Do you run on a China stack? To what extent can you afford to use AI models from both worlds, as an example? How do regulators respond to that? How do governments respond to that?So far, what we're seeing is that governments really care about financial inclusion, and about giving a good and affordable service to customers, so generally we have found regulators being very friendly to our multi-country model. There are some things regulators would typically ask of you. One is they never want their customer records to leave the country, they don't want their citizens' personal information to be vulnerable. But there are now increasingly very good and sophisticated technological solutions for that. As an example, we run our customer records in country for South Africa and the Philippines. A lot of data flows to our central Ho Chi Minh City hub, but all customer data gets anonymized before it flows out of the country. So you never have the risk that governments worry about, that the Vietnamese government will somehow know things about Irakli's personal life that the South African government doesn't want the Vietnamese government to know.Irakli (32:27.198)And in light of these requirements, you've said that the target is a New York listing by 2028. Walk us through that.Jonker (32:35.347)Yeah. What I would say about a listing is that certainly, a listing is not an aim in itself. There are lots of different views about whether it's good for a company to be listed, and different views about when's the right time to list. We are maintaining a very open mind about this.If you ask me today, I'll probably say I think it's more likely we'll be ready in 2030 than in 2028. So there's no rush to get listed. But the reason we often say our plan A is to do a listing is that it's healthy for a business to progress along this maturity curve to be listing ready, because a lot of the things companies have to do to be ready for a listing are things that are good to do in any event, in order to become a strong, large, globally competitive company. So we almost use this conversation about listing readiness as shorthand for the maturation of the business from a governance, talent, scale and profitability perspective.So the way I'd put it now is: the job is to become listing ready, rather than to be obsessed with listing itself as the outcome.Irakli (34:18.324)I'm curious about your meeting with Nubank. I believe the connection was through Endeavor, and it was a chance meeting, wasn't it?Jonker (34:28.413)Yeah, people often ask me about this, and I just say I can't believe how lucky we are as a business. So me, my co-founder, and Nate Clarke, who's our CEO in the Philippines, attended an Endeavor event at the end of 2023, December 2023, at the annual gala. The guest speaker was David Velez, who's the founder of Nubank, and he got a lifetime achiever award for the amazing job he did building Nubank. We bumped into him in the lift on the way down from the event and started chatting, and he said, listen, we're keen to stay in touch. A few months later, when we started our series D capital raise, I reached out to him and said, we're doing a capital raise, it would be really cool if you guys were interested in investing. And he said to me, funny you should say that, because we've just done a piece of analysis about the 10 best digital banking markets in the world, and the two markets where you have banking licenses are both in the top five, South Africa and the Philippines. So this is interesting, let's have a chat. And, as they say, the rest is history.Irakli (35:54.305)And what does it mean to have their backing? Is it a vote of confidence? Is it a partnership in data analytics? What does it look like for the consumer? Jonker (36:04.413)Now, listen, Nubank's been very good to us. They've now been a shareholder for maybe 18, 19, 20 months, it feels longer, like they've been part of our world for a long time. One of the things we agreed when they came in is that we would have a free flow of intellectual property and knowledge between the two businesses. The way I describe it to my team, it's like having an older brother you never knew existed. They're roughly double our age, we're seven years old, they're 14, so they have in recent memory the stage of growth we're going into now.They've been incredibly generous in sharing knowledge and experience. They've been seconding people to us, particularly in the risk and compliance areas, and we've been seconding people to them to learn from them. They sit on our board, their outgoing group Chief Financial Officer, Guilherme Lago, has been sitting on our board, making an enormous contribution. You can imagine the credibility of a guy like that on a board, he's literally led a business successfully through the phase we're in now. So from a knowledge transfer perspective, it's been wonderful for us. They've helped us with procurement, we think we've saved somewhere upwards of a hundred million dollars in procurement spend by working with them, learning from them and mobilizing their buying power to negotiate better deals with our large suppliers. And there are two areas in particular where they are world-class: the one is customer experience, where they're pushing us very hard to get better and better; the other is unsecured lending in emerging markets. I think it would be reasonably uncontroversial to say they're probably the most sophisticated unsecured lender in emerging market banking today. On the back of what we've learned from them, we fundamentally changed our operating model around lending, and we're seeing the results coming through in our business in terms of accelerating our path to lending at scale.Irakli (38:54.576)And what does that look like in South Africa? How are the recommendations fitting our market? Is it translatable in most cases, or are there challenges compared to Brazil?Jonker (39:14.682)It's two sides of the story. There are some aspects that we find incredibly consistent across markets. And the one thing I'd say, which I think will be controversial, but I'll say it anyway: humans are pretty much the same everywhere. It is astonishing, human behavior, the tricks people try, the things they do. And the data, I'm not saying this as a philosophical point, tells us that humans are incredibly similar country by country. We all suffer from a false exceptionalism. I hear South Africans say South Africa is the most corrupt place. No, it's not. I operate across many emerging markets, everyone has that problem.Jonker (40:11.945)You know, Johannesburg is the worst place with the most bottles. No, not really. I've just come from Manila, the drains aren't working, the place is flooding, there are bottles everywhere. We're not that special. The world looks in some ways very similar everywhere.On the other hand, I think the thing that does shape industries very differently is regulation. Whether there are caps on lending, interest rate caps, that can shape a lending industry very differently, it determines which lending products make sense and which don't, for which markets. So I'd highlight regulation as something that can be very different. Industry structure too, I mentioned before the oligopolistic industry structure in South Africa. As an example, our South African business is a lot more profitable from a transaction fee perspective than our Philippines business, but the Philippines has more than 160 banks, so the ability of the big players to charge more is a lot less than in South Africa. Industry structure makes a big difference.And then, of course, the other thing that can differ a lot is fiscal and monetary policy between countries. Exchange control in South Africa, for instance, is a massive complicating factor for us. We don't have that in the Philippines, and we can clearly see how doing business there is easier than doing business in South Africa, with this overlay of old school, very outdated exchange controls, putting basically a blanket over the entire economy.Irakli (42:21.044)And how are you pushing back on that? How are you managing that regulatory risk as a company?Jonker (42:28.104)The answer is: very carefully. We see our job as operating very much in partnership with the regulators, and the relationship we want to foster is one of respectful collaboration, where we always make sure we are as compliant and responsive as we can possibly be in terms of the rules as they stand, while at the same time hopefully having helpful and sophisticated conversations about how things should change and get better. Mostly, I'd say regulators have been amazing. They listen, they respond, they understand perspectives. It doesn't mean they necessarily change at the rate we want them to, but I think the thing we should all have significant humility about, in financial services, is knowing that financial services, this is banking and insurance, and I'd say it's even more true for banking, operates under a social contract where you are trusted to take people's deposits and to deploy those deposits into the market.That is an enormous responsibility, and it's not something you can take lightly. So it's important to understand that the regulator plays an important role in your life, and in the life of the country, to be very thoughtful about how that social license to intermediate money and assets in a market is actually deployed. So a lot of my energy goes into thinking about how we have the right conversations at the right time with our various regulators.Irakli (44:42.582)Does it keep you up at night? Or does something else keep you up at night more? Jonker (44:49.319)The short answer is it doesn't keep me up at night, I actually sleep quite well. But if you ask me what I worry about when I wake up in the morning, I think cybersecurity is a big topic. The evolution of technology at the pace it's evolving now makes that sort of a moving target, and I think one of the reasons we need scale is to be able to put enough money and resources into getting our cybersecurity stance right.Financial crime, as I mentioned, is something to be really worried about, getting that right for our customers, making sure there's this balance: you want to keep your customers safe, but you don't want to create a frustrating experience for them. How do you make sure your response to financial crime is as enabling for your customer as possible? That's a big area of concern. Credit risk, always, is the kind of thing that if you get it spectacularly wrong, you can put the business at risk, so we worry about that too.And then, from a competitive perspective, I worry a lot about the competitors who aren't even on the playing field yet. You mentioned Revolut, I'll mention PEP, we know PEP is applying for a banking license and working on something. I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand, from a purely competitive perspective, I worry about it. On the other hand, thinking about what's good for the country, for our customers and for the industry, I'm actually super excited about it. I hear people say there's already too many competitors, there isn't place for another player. I'm like, no, that's nonsense, the more the merrier, because we will all get better, we will all provide better services to customers, and ultimately customers will be the winner. So yes, I worry about competition, particularly about the new guys coming in with new technology and new thinking, that will keep us on our toes and keep us sharpening our blades as we go.Irakli (47:24.118)And it sounds like the through line through all of those worries or concerns is AI. How is GoTyme Bank playing along that fold?Jonker (47:37.541)Yeah, you're right. I'm not in the school that says AI is overhyped. AI is not overhyped, we're on the brink of a massive sea change, and this thing will affect every aspect of how we do business, engage with our customers, and so on. I think it's important that we think about AI philosophically, as something that requires us to be very deliberate in our thinking, our strategy, our values. One example: we do not see AI as replacing humans, we see AI as enabling humans. So I don't want to fire two out of three engineers, I want the three engineers I have to operate as if they have an IQ 20 to 30 points higher than before, because they know how to use these tools well. I don't want AI to become the interface with my customers, I want to enable my customers to have a more human, more empowered experience, not to be handed off to a machine. So the key to success will be in how we think about this and how we implement it.I'll give you one example. We now know that for AI to work in our business, it is extremely important that AI becomes contextually aware, that it actually knows what's going on in the business, that we enable the AI systems within the business to actually understand the business the way we do. That requires us to make implicit knowledge explicit, and that requires us to do very boring things, like making sure everything we do and say in the business gets recorded and gets ingested by AI. That can sound a bit dystopian, a bit scary. You then also have to think about how you do that in the right way, one that is not disempowering for people but empowering for people.But I can see a world where AI essentially becomes like your ERP system. It becomes the connective tissue that allows you to run a business that is significantly more effective, significantly smarter, and makes significantly higher quality decisions than we've made before. Our Chief Operating Officer, Dieter Botha, talks about system one and system two: system one is the customer product, the system that gives the customer everything they need. System two is the product that builds the product, it's the factory. We increasingly think the highest leverage for AI is actually in the factory, using AI to create a business that is more deeply and richly connected, coming back to this idea of purpose, autonomy, mastery, where you can actually accelerate everyone's path towards higher autonomy in their decision-making, in their expert role, and higher levels of mastery, through reducing the frictional cost of figuring out what's going on in the world around them.Irakli (51:15.521)Fascinating. It speaks to your emphasis on attracting the right talent and developing mastery. Coenraad Jonker, thank you for joining us. This is Irakli from BizNews.