Curfew Day 1 Reflection: Lessons from Ag work in a Fintech

By Kelsey Miller - DelayPay

Curfews are meant to happen in other places aren’t they, not Melbourne the home of good coffee, the G and my house. I live in a pretty quiet part of town, but we still get a traffic hum and tram bells. Last night was eerily quiet, I couldn’t sleep so my thoughts turned as they often do to DelayPay.

Whilst I live in the city now and have done for a number of years, I have been involved in Ag all my life and it really feels like the lessons learnt in Agriculture over many years of droughts, bushfires and unfavourable trade conditions are more important than ever.

Running a Fintech business in the most uncertain business conditions seen in many years has its challenges, but just like a farmer getting through a drought, where there is hardship and need for resilience, there is also opportunity if you are ready to grab it..

In our case, a combination of an unavoidable price increase and the bottom dropping out of the fodder market led to a very quiet April and May. After a great start to the year, things very quickly turned into a Fintech version of a drought. This quickly became our first real test.

The resilience of DelayPay stems from four key areas:

• Having a reliable source of funding
• Good risk management practices
• Effective and versatile cost control
• Maintaining a good spread of Agri business customers to minimise our reliance upon any one industry segment.

Over the last 3 months our investment in these areas has really paid off. Within 6 weeks of our pricing increasing we were able to return to normal levels. This was partly due to our strong risk management performance and partly due to the great relationship we have developed with our funders.

The versatility of our model ensured that as fodder sales reduced, we were able to reduce our overheads quickly whilst shifting our focus onto machinery, livestock and crop inputs.

Just as importantly, as a spike in volume kicked in towards the end of June, our investment in infrastructure and technology really paid off. We pride ourselves on service and our ability to turn deals around quickly so it is critical that we continue to do this deal after deal, no matter how busy we are.

I know it is a short period of time and DelayPay is still new, however the ebb and flow of this period has been a great reminder of how the lessons learnt in one industry are transferable to another.

We have had our first real test, it won’t be our last given what is on the horizon but our experience in Ag has helped us to be ready for whatever comes along next.

https://www.delaypay.com.au/