Fintech founders, are you building for the future?
PLUS: NBR Rich List drops, Icehouse putting great series on for founders and Anthropic quietly kills 'Claude explains'.
Good morning startup land,
Happy Tuesday!
Hope the week has started well and Winter is cooling anyone’s startup ambitions.
We’re almost exactly halfway through the year so if it’s been going great so far, let’s keep that rolling and if it’s been a bit crap, well, we have time to course correct.
It is another stuffed newsey today, including a special offer for Caffeine subs from our friends at Notion which could save you $14,000k to spend on all the other startup essentials.
We’re leading with a guest Q+A with Paul Quickenden, Chief Commercial Officer at Easy Crypto with some advice for fintech founders on how they build for the future.
In your Daily Shot of news:
The future of money is programmable - so, are you building for it?
Podcast Pick: NBR rich list is out - what does it tell us?
Event: Brainwaves to breakthroughs with Icehouse Ventures
Apple WWDC25 plays it safe
Anthropic’s ‘Claude Explains’ blog dies an early death
As always, keep your stories, subs and updates coming. Got a press release, startup story, resource or founder you’d love to connect with the Caffeine audience? Drop me a line to finn@caffeinedaily.co
Finn and the Caffeine team
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The future of money is programmable - so, are you building for it?
with Paul Quickenden, Chief Commercial Officer, Easy Crypto
The fintech ecosystem in Aotearoa is nothing short of extraordinary. For a country of our size, we punch well above our weight, from smart accounting innovations like Xero and Hnry, to platforms like SquareOne that are reshaping how Kiwi kids and business owners build wealth. There’s a scrappy brilliance to the way we build here - our fintechs are fast, lean and put customers first.
But Chief Commercial Office of Easy Crypto Paul Quickenden cautions that “If our vision begins and ends with speeding up domestic payments or making it easier to split a bill, we might be missing out on the even bigger opportunity playing out globally…”
Paul believed the future of money is becoming increasingly programmable, borderless and blockchain-based and the rails we lay now as builders, founders and fintech strategists are going to determine just how fast, fair and future-proof our financial system becomes in future.
He challenges Aotearoa’s fintech community to ask: are we building for that future? Or are we solving today’s problems using yesterday’s tools?
What’s the biggie with blockchain?
Paul: Behind the scenes, blockchain infrastructure is becoming the layer powering secure, real-time permissionless value transfer. No, it won’t replace every system but it is rapidly becoming the preferred foundation for anything that needs to be fast, transparent and interoperable. This isn’t about riding the crypto wave but about recognising a smarter way to move value - one that’s auditable, modular and increasingly composable.
If you’re designing for the next five years, building with blockchain gives you access to speed, programmability and network effects that simply don’t exist in traditional architecture. We need to shift our thinking from ‘What is blockchain for?’ to ‘What’s already working, and how does it fit into my stack?’
Could stablecoins be the new fuel behind an AI-driven economy?
Paul: At Stripe’s 2025 Sessions conference, co-founder Patrick Collison didn’t mince his words: “There are not one, but two, gale-force tailwinds... reshaping the economic landscape around us: AI and stablecoins.” In a world increasingly run by AI’s, programmable stablecoins are the natural currency and could become the financial fuel behind an AI-driven economy.
Stripe has just rolled out stablecoin-powered financial accounts to businesses in 101 countries which allow companies to hold, receive and send stablecoins and crucially, to hedge against inflation and plug directly into the global economy. All of this without needing a traditional bank account. And its not just Stripe, Worldpay, Mastercard, X and even Apple are exploring how to turbocharge their business using Stablecoins.
This isn’t theory; this is infrastructure and entrepreneurs in high-inflation countries can now operate in stable, digital USD. What’s more, startups can pay contractors in stablecoins, skip wire transfer fees and move capital in minutes via lower-cost cross-border transactions .
Stablecoins have quietly moved from the fringes to becoming the go-to method for paying global contractors (instantly, with zero FX fees), cross-border commerce (settling USD payments in mere seconds), accessing savings (even in inflation-prone regions) and plugging into on-chain treasury and lending protocols (without needing a bank account).
So if you’re building a NZ payments platform, now is the time to ask yourself: can my product evolve with how digital finance is actually being used? If the answer is no - it might be worth reconsidering your architecture because what works here must scale there.
That sounds a lot like ‘money, but faster’...what else is cool?
Paul: Think of smart contracts as ‘if this, then that logic for money - basically code that executes financial actions automatically when certain conditions are met. There’s no middleman, no lag and no manual work. This is where money stops just moving and starts doing.
Imagine if paying contractors happened the moment work is verified; if refunds were triggered instantly when goods didn’t arrive; if cross-border trade ran on rules baked into your code, not your paperwork.
This is already happening globally - programmable finance means stablecoins that plug into automated workflows and APIs that react to real-world events. For Kiwi fintechs, this is the real unlock: not just speed, but smarter, truly global, rule-based money.
The question now moves on from can we move money faster? .. to can our money move smarter?
Ok, what’s stopping us?
Paul: New Zealand has the talent, the ingenuity and the credibility. What will separate good from game-changing companies is vision. The winners in fintech will be the ones who design for what’s coming, not just what’s current right now.
If you believe that money will be programmable…
If you see that global commerce demands truly global rails…
If you know that the rules of infrastructure are being rewritten in real-time right now…… then now’s the moment to double down. Build with stablecoins. Plug into on-chain rails. Create APIs that are blockchain-ready. It’s time to think like the internet: borderless, open and lightning fast.
Let’s not just build for today’s money; let’s help define tomorrow’s.
Airwallex is awarding two $5,000 grants to lucky Kiwi founders to put towards attending a global conference of choice – in 2025 or beyond. Entering is simple - just think about what global conference you want to attend and how it would impact your business. Apply here.
Podcast Pick: NBR rich list is out - what does it tell us?: It’s always an event when NBR’s richlist drops, giving us all a handily ranked list of the richest Kiwis and a general dose of financial voyeurism. Some reading this will probably get inspired to be on there one day (good for you) and some will be reminded just how far away they are from adding any commas to their net wealth (poor me). This year NBR found the wealthiest Kiwis are collectively worth more than $100 billion, up around $5b from last year, bucking the tough economic trend. There’s about a dozen new-comers but Zuru co-founders Nick and Mat Mowbray retain the top spot.
If you’d like a audio rundown of the detail with some great analysis , I recommend checking out the latest episode of The NBR Podcast with Simon Shepherd. He interviews NBR Rich List editor Hamish McNicol about what our country’s most successful business people think about being on the NBR Rich List 2025 and how they think New Zealand's economy and society could be ‘elevated’. Listen here (non paywalled)
Event: Brainwaves to breakthroughs with Icehouse Ventures - Our friends over at Icehouse Ventures are running a great series of events educating founders with the tools they need to get their startup off the ground. Each session brings together industry experts and founders who’ve been through it all and have plenty of wisdom to share. Whether you’re already working on an idea or just curious about starting something, this series exists to help you learn from the best.
Each session brings together industry experts and founders who’ve been through it all and have plenty of wisdom to share. Whether you’re already working on an idea or just curious about starting something, this series exists to help you learn from the best.
Details:
Funding Your Startup | 1-2pm,Thursday 24 April
Founding Your Startup : Legal 101 | 1-2pm, Tuesday 20 May
Building Your Startup Team | 1-2pm, Thursday 19 June
Hear from:
Miriana Lowrie (1Centre) & Jono Ring (Zincovery) on the key things to consider when it comes to funding your startup
Becca Gaunt (IV) & Murray Whyte (Avid Legal) on the foundational legal knowledge you need when founding a startup
Anna Liumaihetau Darling (Sharesies) & Samantha Gadd (Humankind) on the best practice when it comes to hiring your startup team.
Check it out and register here.
Apple WWDC25 plays it safe: Looking to the biggest of the big tech players now and its annual developer conference has just wrapped up. The Big Apple has been on the back foot in the A.I race so eyes were on Tim Cook this week as he took to the stage for Apple’s WWDC keynote. The announcements were many and varied but from my perspective were often more aesthetic than anything else, new ‘liquid glass’ design language and new naming conventions for operating systems, etc.
Let’s not knock the importance of design language, it’s what got Apple where it is, in large part. But with how significant the perceived gap is between Apple and OpenAi (and hence, Microsoft) in the AI race, I think most pundits were hoping for more. In saying that, the company announced did announce it will let third-party app developers to create tools of their own using Apple Intelligence, which is a positive step forward. allowing them to create tools of their own. Verge has a good breakdown of the announcements here.
Anthropic’s ‘Claude Explains’ blog dies an early death: Well, so quickly after we brought you news of this blog’s existence, Anthropic has quietly retired its A.I generated blog.
The reasons are a little unclear but maybe the general rising sense of A.I dread, headlines of imminent widespread job replacement and embarrassing L’s posted by company’s using A.I for content creation in recent months made them think twice about giving their model this kind of voice.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co