As a founder and CEO of Slyp, I am often asked, “why has it taken this long for someone to invent the smart receipt?” While this is very flattering, as it demonstrates the ability of Slyp to sell itself, it’s also an incredibly intricate question to answer.

The Slyp Smart Receipt solution appears very simple on the outside, yet it is ultra-complex on the inside. Bringing paper receipts into the smart world – beyond just the digital world – has been a challenging but very rewarding journey.

The hardest thing when taking on the impossible is knowing where to start. Below, I have outlined what our team has leant into over the past four years to launch the Slyp platform and how we got the stars to align, making Slyp the first fintech start-up to be backed by the big four banks in Australia.

1.Technical solve: Slyp's platform is 100% proprietary. Globally, nothing like this had existed before. This meant we needed to build a bank-grade platform from the ground up. But before we could even begin building the platform, we needed to solve several "deal-breaker" technical challenges. The most pressing was finding a way to match a receipt to a bank card when the receipt data is stored in the POS. These two siloed data pipes are constrained by legacy infrastructure and are highly fragmented, meaning there were no consistent data structures and standards.

To solve this, we built a single connecting pipe to unify the data flow into one central location. Consolidating the merchant (receipt) and bank (payment) data in one central platform in real-time was the tip of the iceberg. Next, we set out to build an algorithm to auto-link the receipt to a customer’s card and banking app in literally “4 seconds from beep to receipt.” By mapping the customer journey, we knew there are instances when a customer needs their receipt in real-time, for example, showing security proof of purchase when walking out of a retail store. Building a platform that enabled zero customer friction is critical because happier customers are returning customers.

Learning:

It’s important to find scrappy ways to validate your technical solution as quickly and cheaply as possible. Often these solutions are not scalable, but that’s okay! For example, the first-ever Slyp receipt was matched manually at the end of each day using a spreadsheet by our one and only engineer – fast forward to today, and our platform ingests and processes over 30M transactions a month in real-time.

2. Cross-industry collaboration: Early on in our journey, we pitched the concept in a PowerPoint deck to the banks. Slyp’s customer and merchant value proposition was easy for the banks to buy into but using us as the central partner to deliver the solution was much harder. We were a team of two people at the time and hadn’t yet written a single line of code.

It was here that we realised that the customers and merchants’ voice was much louder than ours, so we funded third-party consumer research to substantiate the reasons why there needed to be one industry platform.

The research showed merchants didn’t want multiple integrations to each of the banks for smart receipts and that there were big advantages of having a single integration point. A unified digital receipt standard across the different bank apps would enable the merchant’s POS systems to process customer returns. And by having a common user experience across banks and merchants, consumers were more likely to engage with the smart receipt post-purchase as it was more familiar to them. This helped us to solidify the message that there needs to be one central partner, and by doing this together, we can unlock value across the entire ecosystem that could not be realised as individual players.

Learning:

Invest in research and prototyping to get customer validation. It took us two weeks to develop our prototype. There wasn’t a single line of code behind the prototype but seeing is believing. The prototype was a crucial part of our pitch and customer validation research process.

We also recognised that if we could get the venture arms of each of the major banks to invest, they would have skin in the game, and this ultimately would shift the dynamic of the partnership for the better.

3. People first: This is, without doubt, the most important piece in the puzzle. Early on, we had high conviction that we could solve this complex problem, but we knew it would take a small but mighty team with expertise in niche fields across payments and data. Having team members with deep expertise across niche areas helped our credibility, and great people build great teams and businesses.

Slyp's founding team was formed during the first 18 months. With banks being key in our solution, we needed a key addition to the leadership team who knew the playbook on how to influence banks, equipped with insights on how decisions get made in these large organisations. This is when Mike Boyd (ex-Group Data Officer of ANZ bank) joined Slyp as a co-founder.

Learning:

Focus on your weaknesses and fill these gaps with a diverse team that complement each other. You need an eclectic team that are as irrationally passionate about what you are solving as you are. Why? Because usually it is so hard that most rationale people give up!

4. Timing is key: “Why now?” This is one of the first and most important questions a venture capitalist will ask a start-up. There must be one or many compelling events that substantiate why now is the time for your technology to be adopted. For Slyp, open banking was coming, there was disruption on credit and debit cards with BNPL, and a clear need to deliver value-add around the payment. These factors, combined with the explosion of digital wallet adoption in response to COVID-19 and sustainability being a core business focus for banks and merchants, positioned Slyp with front row tickets to the digital payments revolution.

Learning:

Being the start-up that’s “first to market” and “ground-breaking” is a hard position to be in. Sure, there’s the glistening PR hook, but you’re laying the foundations for copier brands to enter your tried and tested category (e.g. BNPL market). On the upside, competition fuels category awareness. With Slyp, we are creating a new market where the winner takes all. With no opportunity for competitors to enter our category, we need to fuel our awareness.

5. Relentless “can do” mindset: There isn’t a week that goes by when the team doesn’t hear me say, “if it were easy, it would have been done before.” Slyp exists to solve complex customer problems. The harder the problem is to solve, the more it plays to our advantage because of our “can do” mindset. Where does this mindset come from? See point 3. People first.

Early on, we were told by most banks, merchants, investors, and industry people that “you will never get the POS to integrate. It won’t happen.” As CEO, I used this roadblock problem as fuel to engage and prove that there is a way if we collaborate. This quote from Confucius has always inspired me, “the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can't are both right.”

Learning:

One of the best ways to inspire people to believe in what most people think is impossible is by providing real-life examples. An example I use is the Google Street View product. Imagine the Google employee who came up with the idea to send a car with a camera on the roof down every street in the world. They probably got laughed at, and most people would’ve said it was too hard or not scalable. But by doing that hard work in as efficient a way as possible, Google built a significant unfair advantage and a highly defensible asset. This is not too dissimilar to the 30+ POS integrations that Slyp now have, creating a data pipe that delivers the economies data in a structured real-time format.

Final thoughts:

My motivation for sharing this blog is not to accentuate how hard the journey has been or how amazing our team has been at solving the complexities we faced along the way. This is about inspiring others to take on the impossible. It’s up to you to decide your limitations, not others. Remember, “the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can't are both right”

– Confucius.