“A ‘new’ can come from anyone”: Zeller’s Ben Pfisterer shares five tips for building innovative startups

Melbourne-born fintech Zeller is on a mission to change the way small businesses handle payments. Unsatisfied with the options provided by the big banks, and newer players like Square, Ben Pfisterer was one of four co-founders to launch Zeller in 2020. Its growth was meteoric: despite launching in the depths of COVID-19 restrictions, the firm garnered a billion-dollar valuation just last year, and continues to roll out new features for small and growing enterprises. 

In Pfisterer, Zeller also has a uniquely qualified CEO: having served at NAB, Visa, and Jack Dorsey’s Square, he has a firm belief in what drives true innovation.

In a candid chat with SmartCompany Plus, Pfisterer outlined several key factors to have contributed to his success, and Zeller’s ongoing progress.

Five insights from Zeller’s Ben Pfisterer

1. Give yourself time to find a calling

2. Don’t suffer from success

3. A ‘new’ can come from anywhere

4. Chase medium-term timeframes 

5. Charisma isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing

Give yourself time to find a calling

Zeller may have catapulted to a billion-dollar valuation in less than two years, but that doesn’t mean Pfisterer, nor the rest of the company’s founding team, instantly found their calling in the fintech arena. His undeniable focus on payments innovation took years to develop, and originated far from the traditional banking space.

Pfisterer called time on his early placement at Deloitte, when he decided real-world experience would serve him better than consulting. His thought process was simple: “I don’t actually know what I’m talking about, better go and go into industry,” Pfisterer says of his realisation. 

That led to a position in the nascent Jetstar Airways, as the Qantas offshoot was battling to win market share from the airline launched as Virgin Blue. 

“I wasn’t an aviation specialist by any stretch, but I looked at different growth opportunities, helped with mapping out internationalisation, new revenue opportunities, and mainly expand the brand beyond aviation,” he said.

Those expansions included an early multi-currency prepaid card for travellers, which Pfisterer described as an intriguing development in his fintech career.

Despite the seeming disparity between aviation and banking, Pfisterer drew likenesses between new airlines attempting to disrupt industry norms and innovators in financial services. 

Even so, his focus on payments was not fully developed by the time he joined NAB, a decision he says was partially motivated by the allure of another “blue chip brand on my CV.”

It was there that Pfisterer worked on an early contactless mobile payment pilot — and encountered what he described as institutional roadblocks, borne of the bank’s enormous size and scope.

Getting the program started was “very hard”, he said.

“Once that started, I got, for some strange reason, hooked on payment innovation technology,” he said.

“And I love that idea, where you could take a really established experience like making a payment, which everyone in society does, and completely change it.”

That experience guided Pfisterer towards Visa, Square, and eventually, Zeller. 

In his telling, it was a gradual process. Yet today’s focus on innovation may not have occurred had Pfisterer not naturally found his way to payment services over several years — and his skills may not have sharpened had innovation come easy.

Don’t suffer from success

The reluctance of big, successful institutions to adopt new technologies is a recurring theme in Pfisterer’s recollections, be it the chip-enabled debit card pilot or his later experiences at Square. 

“I think early on in my career, I was a little bit impatient in general,” he said. 

“And I think I suffered what a lot of people suffer, when you’re younger in your career, you always hit some glass ceiling, you know: you don’t know enough, you’re not old enough to be given the credibility to really run with projects. 

“That frustrated me in general.”

Major institutions have some solid explanations for their skepticism, he ceded, given the high-profile consequences of getting things wrong.

“For good reason, the banks are very risk averse,” Pfisterer said of his experiences at NAB, acknowledging that recent history has shown the benefits of “a very strong lens on risk mitigation” among the big banks.

“But what happens with a long period of being so risk averse is it just propagates through the whole company too broadly.”

The chip-based card pilot was a “no brainer” in his opinion, given the security upgrade compared to cards which relied on the easily-replicable magnetic stripe cards, yet he claimed “layering caution and hesitation and just taking things slow” was sometimes detrimental.

Even at Square, a major innovator in the payments space, Pfisterer felt institutional heft influenced the speed and deployment of new developments.

After his stint as Square’s Head of APAC, “the company just changed and it wasn’t as innovative or fast-moving as it once was.”

“I don’t want to just steer a slow-moving ship,” he continued.

“I want to make sure that I’m working in a business where you get challenged”.

A ‘new’ can come from anywhere

A commitment to new ideas also means accepting forward-thinking concepts from wherever they may arise, and Pfisterer claims Zeller champions an “extremely flat” hierarchy.

Flattening those strata means staff are empowered to bring their ideas to the fore.

“All the innovation we do is new, so a ‘new’ can come from anyone,” he said.

“And to be honest, it’s probably more likely to come from less experienced, younger people.”

Leadership would be “incompetent or foolish to not listen to people, no matter what age,” he added.

As Zeller grows in scale, the challenge will be maintaining that open-door policy, which Pfisterer says engenders innovation.

Pfisterer said another tactical decision will help it stay on course: a hardcore focus on medium-term opportunities.

Medium-term timeframes

Given his prior tenure at Square, it would make sense for Zeller to chase the diversity of Jack Dorsey’s Block, the entity now containing Square, Australian-born buy now, pay later innovator Afterpay, money transfer service CashApp, and music streaming platform TIDAL.

Yet Zeller, for now, is focused on medium-term innovation in the payments space, which Pfisterer says splits the difference between the iterative developments of the incumbent banks and truly long-shot projects with no clear path to commercialisation.

A focus on developments in the near future frees up the company’s long-term prospects, he said.

“I don’t want to work at a company, let alone be the CEO of a company, where I can tell you where we’re going to be in 10 years,” he said.

“I’ve no interest in that. I want to look in 10 years with everyone working here, and just for us to be amazed at where we started and where we ended up.

“And for me that ability to move the needs of our customers as that evolves, as technology evolves, that’s what sets us apart.”

Although the company appears obsessed with payments innovation, Pfisterer suggests the company is driven by the needs of its customers, instead of any dogmatic plans filtering down from Zeller’s head office. 

The value of charismatic leadership

For all of his focus on product development, Pfisterer also acknowledges the simple but profound power of convincing leadership. 

One key example: his former boss, Jack Dorsey, who did not micro-manage Pfisterer’s operations but commanded attention from staff at all levels of the business.

“Although I’ve worked with some highly regarded leaders and CEOs in my time, [working with Dorsey] was the first time I ever saw a leader have all the staff listening to them, on every word, he was saying,” Pfisterer recalled. 

“His ability to storytell, and his ability to capture that audience and build a narrative and then garner that mission-driven culture… I’ve never seen that before, certainly not at the companies in Australia.”

The ‘visionary’ startup leader has become a trope in headlines and pop culture, and for good reason: not every high-minded founder has good intentions, and those who do are often unable to deliver on their lofty ambitions. 

Yet effectively communicating with a team, and embodying the mission of your business, can be genuinely influential, Pfisterer said.

Hearing Dorsey speak was a “penny drop” moment, he continued.

“I just remember looking around a few hundred people, and every single person was listening to every single word.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s something that can go a long way in businesses’, no doubt.”