Fix the Product or Fix the Person: How NZ Fintech Founders Disagree About Money
Four NZ fintech founders, two theories of why people are locked out of money. One camp rebuilt the products. The other set out to teach.
"Democratising money" is the phrase every fintech reaches for and it sounds like a shared mission. Look closely at four of New Zealand's and you find it hides a real disagreement. Everyone agrees that ordinary people are locked out of the financial system. They do not agree on why. One camp believes the barrier is the products themselves: too expensive, too complex, too intimidating. So they rebuilt the product. The other believes the barrier is the people, who were never taught how money works. So they set out to teach them.
Both cannot be the main lever and that is the argument worth having.
Fix the product
Sam Stubbs spent a career inside the system he now needles, running Tower Investments and a decade at Goldman Sachs, before founding Simplicity in 2016 as a not-for-profit KiwiSaver and fund manager built on one idea: the barrier was fees. New Zealanders were handing fund managers a slice of their retirement every year for returns a low-cost index fund could match for a fraction of the price. Simplicity charges some of the lowest fees in the market, gives 15 per cent of them to charity and now manages more than $11 billion on behalf of more than 190,000 members. Its bet is structural. Lower the toll and more people get through the gate, no financial education required.
Janine Grainger made the same bet in a wilder corner of finance. She co-founded Easy Crypto in 2018 with her brother Alan after watching New Zealanders pay markups of 15 per cent or more simply to buy Bitcoin, on platforms most people found baffling and many found unsafe. The pitch was never "understand crypto"; it was that buying it should be as easy and safe as anything else you do online. The company processed more than NZ$3.5 billion in trades across New Zealand, Australia and South Africa before being acquired by Australian platform Swyftx in 2025. The exit validated the theory: Grainger built a product simple enough that a larger company paid to own it. Same theory as Simplicity, the opposite end of the risk spectrum: fix the product and access follows.
Fix the person
Simran Kaur started from the other premise entirely. With only a small share of women investing, she and her friend Sonya Gupthan reasoned that the problem was not the products but who felt invited to use them and that the fix was knowledge delivered by people who looked like their audience. Girls That Invest (since rebranded to Friends That Invest) became a media company rather than a financial one: a podcast with more than ten million downloads, a best-selling book with more than 100,000 copies sold and courses reaching students across more than 150 countries. Kaur is not lowering a fee or simplifying a platform. She is closing a confidence and information gap, on the theory that an informed investor can navigate any product put in front of her.
Kendall Flutey (Ngāi Tahu) took that theory to its logical starting point, which is childhood. An accountant and economics graduate turned software developer, she co-founded Banqer in 2015 after a Startup Weekend in Christchurch where a conversation about how little school teaches kids about money turned into a prototype. Banqer turns a classroom into a simulated economy where children earn, spend, pay tax and borrow in a safe environment. More than 340,000 students have used it so far, with a target of 600,000 by 2026. The wager is long-term and unashamedly about the person rather than the product: if financial habits form early, the real leverage is teaching them young, not selling a better product later to an adult who was never shown how one works.
Which barrier actually matters?
Put the four side by side and the disagreement is clean. Stubbs and Grainger believe the system was the problem and that the honest move is to make the products cheaper and simpler until access stops being a privilege. Kaur and Flutey believe the gap is in people and that no product is cheap enough to help someone who was never shown how it works. There is a sharper edge here too: "teach people to be better with money" can quietly suggest the fault lies with the individual rather than with a product built to confuse them, which is precisely what the product-fixers reject. All four would probably agree that both barriers are real. What makes them worth reading together is that each one bet a company on which one matters more. If you're trying to make money work for more people in this country, the first question is which barrier you think is doing the most damage.
Sources: Simplicity · Easy Crypto · Girls That Invest · Banqer · Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu
