SpendAble

Hi, I’m Reece from SpendAble and we're making payments safer, supported and accessible for people with disability.

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One in two vulnerable bank customers will be victims of financial abuse or fraud in their lifetimes. That's one of your grandparents, brothers, sisters or predominantly people with disability. Every time I dig deeper I keep finding the stat crazier and more normal for banks. As customers it is rare to get the trilogy of safe, supported and accessible use of a debit card. This is the most prevalent for people that are in care. 

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This is John his money is managed by his mum and he relies on other people to buy his groceries, clothes and movie tickets. His current process is slow because it relies on his mum transferring money or dropping off cash to his house, it's risky because you support workers just pick up the cash or his card from his wallet and so nobody knows who buys what, and it's not accessible because John needs to ask every time he wants to buy something. We've built a payment and debit card platform to help John buy the things that he needs, wants and loves we create safety by giving access to support workers without the need to connect them to his bank account they can spend it's all tracked, and they provide evidence like receipts and notes. We empower the people around John to support him, his mum helps him with his budget and keeping track, his support workers helping pay and the managers of the service providers make sure that the support workers are building his capacity and keeping his money safe. We make John's money accessible by putting up the guard rails to prevent fraud and financial abuse so that his Mum is more confident to keep him greater access to his money. 

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We've been working like crazy to get and we think we are there with the SpendAble platform with more than seventeen hundred wallets created on the platform this year. We're sticky with an MPS of more than 60 and a customer satisfaction score of over 80 and we're processing more than 250,000 dollars worth of transactions each month. And also we're efficient we're easy to use with low support ticket requests to us each month. 

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So what's that challenge? Not enough people have heard of us we only reached to really small number of people in Australia and New Zealand through our small team’s hustle and a small amount of digital spend. If we really want to help 100,000 people manage their money then we need two million people to hear about what SpendAblel actually does. To reach the people that really need SpendAble we're working with some of the biggest service providers in Australia as customers and referring partners. We know they have strong connections with the people they support. All of these are innovating, finding efficiency and improving the quality of money handling between them and their clients. This is not just an Australian problem or an NDIS thing it exists in any part of the world where people disability rely on others to pay and manage money for them. SpendAble can truly go global solving this problem. 

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If we jump to the USA you'll see that some of the biggest banks fail on simple website accessibility. What hope do they have of delivering products that meet the needs of vulnerable customers? As branches close and call centers are replaced by AI the question of discrimination comes up ‘Are these banks shutting people out and risking discrimination lawsuits?’ 

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With a problem so big you’re thinking why is this the team that can pull it off? We have vast domain expertise in the disability industry with founding members, people with disability and on the NDIS or having worked extensively on the provider side. We have successfully built, scaled and sold a company in the Human Services industry, we have diverse experience meaning we can listen to the customers, build products, sell and market them and operate at a level that our customers expect. 

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To help us reach more people we need your help. The simplest thing you can do is connect with our socials and amplify our message to the banks, service providers and people with disability in your network.