By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

THE DATA shows that Aussies aged between 18 and 53 are owed $1.5 billion each month due to splitting expenses.

The hard part is divvying it up. The system for exchanging cash is imperfect with friends constantly having to remind each other to settle up accounts and check the money has actually hit the accounts. Then again, there are times when someone ends up a few bucks short every time group expenses are supposedly settled.

To save young Aussies time on the arithmetic, entrepreneur Iain Salteri has developed the KttiPay app to handle all that. It lets participants pre-pay directly into the app before an event. Like for example, group dining, sharing a taxi or Uber, event tickets, lending a friend some dough or even having a holiday together. 

It saves people from a heap of relationship trouble.  And with cost pressures, money disputes have the potential to tip relationships over the edge.

Ktti allows separate kitties

The app allows separate Ktties to be set up for different purposes. KtiiPay Visa issues debti cards linked to that Ktti.

“What we’re trying to do is solve the problem of expense splitting for young people, 18 to 30 year olds,” Mr Salteri told Talking Business.

“The problem is that people are out of pocket for expenses that aren’t necessarily theirs.

“So if we went away for a weekend, I might book the accommodation using my own personal debit or credit card and would ask you to pay me back, and through no fault of your own, you may have forgotten,” he said. “It may have been a busy week, you may not have sent me your portion of the accommodation for some time. And as an 18 or 20-year-old, where income is an issue, that’s an experience that isn’t particularly fair.”

Mr Salteri said the company is putting a fair bit of money into the app. 

“We’re on our journey. We’re aiming for 30,000 downloads in our first year and we’re well on our way there,” he said.

“We’re purely domestic in Australia at the moment but we obviously have ambitions to take this overseas and help solve this problem for young people globally.

“Top of mind comes to young people in the UK or Europe who might be travelling around. We know how accessible that is for someone in London to go to Italy or France with their friends. KttiPay is the perfect tool to help them manage that expense splitting.”

Setting up the ‘share-pay’ market

Mr Salteri said there were no direct competitors to KittiPay anywhere in the world. While some have the technology to help people work out how much they are owed, or how much they owe others, none actually facilitate the transfer of the money.

“That’s the problem we’re trying to solve,” he said.

“It’s trying to make sure that no one is left out of pocket and that the funds are there up front.

“It’s the complete opposite of an after-pay model where you get the product today and pay it off in the future,” Mr Salteri said.

“We think being able to pay up front and split the bill evenly is a huge selling point.” 

www.kttipay.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-15-interview-with-ian-salteri-from-kttipay

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

IMAGINE coming across something like the ‘Google’ for all investments. Or maybe something like ChatGPT?

That describes investmentmarkets.com.au, a company set up by Angelina Wu. Her background includes money markets, wealth advisory and media, including stints with Commonwealth Bank, UniSuper, Trustees Australian and Guangzhou TV in China – and the last 4.5 years with Investment Markets.

Ms Wu and her co-founder Chris Morton launched the service after years of testing and refining its functionality.     

She said the business plans to dominate all Australian investments.

“We have all the asset classes, all the industries, all the liquidities,” Ms Wu told Talking Business. 

“The idea is to cover anything, like shares in a company or units in a trust.

“We’ve got pretty much every asset class. We’ve got shares in equity, we’ve got property, we’ve got fixed interest, we’ve got cash, we’ve got term deposits, we’ve got everything. We’ve got alternatives as well and we cover all the industries.

“We’re starting to grow more of the alternative assets and the start-ups are coming on board as well.

Broadening investment choices

Ms Wu said the company seeks to “make it broad” for all investors.

“The idea is to make it brand agnostic and broad and a level playing field for everyone and to democratise this place,” Ms Wu said. “And that goes back to the idea of having investmentmarkets.com.au being a place for every product issuer for their books.

“It’s a marketing tool for our product issuers.

“We are brand agnostic. We treat everyone exactly the same and the commercials of the platform is we don’t charge investors. We charge the product issuers by listing on the platform.”

“We don’t charge a percentage of the capital raised. It’s not commission-based, it’s a level playing field.”

As a result, it’s a flat fee for all product issuers, she said.

“It can’t be a percentage of their earnings because that would require investmentmarkets.com.au to endorse them. That can’t happen in a system that has been deliberately set up a level playing field.

”We don’t vet our dues,” Ms Wu said

“We believe that the investors, which is the target audience of this platform, would like to make their own decisions. They do their own analysis and search.

“It’s a discovery tool for them. We don’t want to insult their intelligence so we let them go and make their own decisions.”

Shifting investment preferences

Ms Wu said in the last 6-12 months, property and income had been popular among investors.

“While this has been understandable, it would be interesting to see what will happen with interest rates tipped to come down.”

Investmentarkets.com.au doesn’t guide investors to physical properties. Instead, they are directed to property funds

“What we’re trying to build is a realestate.com for investments,” Ms Wu said.

“Our intention and ambition is to be a dominating platform for any investors who come from Australia. It’s to be the Investments Central to find any investment in one place.

“It’s the education element as well. We run investor seminars every year and we have smaller events as well,” she said.

“We want to get more than 1200 people registered for it and the number is growing about 20% each time.” 

www.investmentmarkets.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-7-interview-with-angelina-wu-from-investmen

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

FEMALE entrepreneurs have a problem these days. They can’t get funding from lenders. They’re regarded as ‘high risk’.

This is particularly true in the beauty industry.

Jessica Leonard and Ashleigh Potocki, who own the Sydney-based self-titled automated ‘glow’ studio called The Afterglow, say the big problem now is getting funds.

“If we’re talking from a sector perspective, women-owned businesses tend to be in the retail hospitality and beauty spaces,” Ms Leonard told Talking Business. “They tend to be more impacted by things like the cost of living, and the like, pandemics etcetera so we do tend to be running businesses in higher risk spaces.” 

Tough getting funded by banks

Ms Potocki said one of the biggest challenges for businesses owned by women was getting funding from banks and lenders.

“Some of the lenders don’t understand the space we’re in particularly in the beauty industry with equipment we may need,” Ms Potocki told Talking Business.

“I’ve often had to explain what the equipment is to certain lenders and they automatically deem it as a high risk purely because they don’t understand it.

“When we’re talking about laser equipment – and I’m talking to a gentleman on the other end of the phone who doesn’t understand the space – I have to therefore explain the equipment, and what it does and they automatically deem it a high risk.

“Or, in instances when payments aren’t made, they’re going to have to think about how they will re-sell that piece of equipment and things like that and they dump that into a category of high risk and potentially not lending that money to us.”

While there are other industries that use laser equipment, the beauty industry is notoriously difficult.

“Any lender will tell you that,” Ms Potocki said.

So how did they get the money?

Finding a way can be challenging

“We actually did require assistance by our husbands, who have no beauty industry experience whatsoever, in order to be able to meet the funding criteria for our businesses,” Ms Potocki said.

“Whilst I am the CEO, my husband is the director because people take him more seriously.  

“I myself did all the talking to lenders but my husband was the one who was required to meet the criteria.”   

“I’ve had a skin clinic for the past 20 years and every time I need funding, I’m met with these same questions.”

Ms Leonard said The AfterGlow was a new concept insofar that it is unmanned, automated and totally self-service orientated.

So it’s a very new concept.

“When speaking to lenders, when we wanted to get this off the ground, not only did we face that challenge that this is a new concept but it’s also that pre-conceived idea that the beauty industry is notoriously difficult to fund,”  Ms Leonard said.

Ms Leonard and Ms Potocki said there “were only six lenders out there” that were willing to fund beauty industry businesses run by women.

Without labour costs, as it’s automated and self-served, the running costs would be low.

But the capital costs of equipment and the high-quality fitout are high.

“To make a space accessible without a person being there, that is expensive,” Ms Potocki said.

www.theafterglow.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-3-interview-with-jessica-leonard-and-ashlei

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ALTHOUGH the Reserve Bank of Australia has reported that more than $9 billion worth of cash withdrawals were made in Australia during January 2025 – a new post-COVID record for January – the Cash Welcome movement is worried about the dramatic fall-off in ATM availability.

According to the Cash Welcome campaign, the numbers show banks are pushing people towards a cashless future “against their will”.

Research from the RBA showed $9.01 billion was withdrawn by Australians during January 2025, up from $8.92 billion in January 2024, $8.97 in January 2023 and $8.4 billion in January 2022. 

Meanwhile the number of ATMs in Australia has fallen from 25,663 in December 2021 to 23,518 in December 2024 – and this is happening while banks are steadily closing their branches.

“There is no decline in the use of cash in Australia since the end of the COVID pandemic,” Cash Welcome campaign spokesperson Jason Bryce said.

“There’s a big decline in the number of bank branches and ATMs, so banks are clearly pushing us toward a cashless future, against our will.  Since COVID there has been an obvious change in behaviour around cash and payments.

“Banks and the RBA need to acknowledge that there’s plenty of demand for cash in Australia and no reason to believe that cash is disappearing.”

Consumer group Choice reported last week that 97% of 13,000 Australians surveyed support a cash mandate and 80% use cash, according to Mr Bryce.

“Banks want a cashless Australia, not business or consumers,” Mr Bryce said. “Australians want the right to choose how we pay.

“Banks must stop closing branches and ATMs and pay for the distribution of our legal tender in every town and community,” Mr Bryce said.

Cash Welcome has created a Change.org petition which already has more than 200,000 signatures calling for a cash and banking guarantee:

https://www.change.org/BankingAndCashGuarantee

RBA data on ATM cash withdrawals post-Covid

These are the monthly ATM withdrawal numbers, cut and pasted from the RBA's C4 ATM Cash Withdrawals (seasonally adjusted). Supplied by Cash Welcome campaign.

Supplied by Cash Welcome from RBA reports.

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