Spaceship soaring with a modern payments engine

Spaceship was founded in 2016 with a single mission: to transform the way people think about and invest their money. 

With the Spaceship app, Aussies can invest in Spaceship's investment and super accounts, and manage their money on the go.

“Spaceship is aimed at younger Australians. We exist to support young people on the start of their investment and wealth journeys. Our content and educational offering really speaks to that, and also to the simplicity of our offering,” says Katrina Sly, Chief Operating Officer at Spaceship.

As an investment platform, Spaceship’s payment experiences are core to delivering a positive customer experience, and integral to differentiating its offering in a crowded vertical.

“It's a very competitive space. Particularly for a startup given the large incumbents. Ours is a slightly different product offering. Differentiating ourselves is something we constantly assess. Disruption is important, as is offering a better customer experience,” says Katrina.

That’s where Spaceship’s focus on payments as an enabler of both comes in. As the Spaceship team assessed its incumbent payments infrastructure, it was clear that the modernity of offering just wasn’t there.

Partnering with Zepto meant that Spaceship could fast-track the delivery of enhanced customer payment experiences on the real-time payment rails of the NPP in a commercially viable way.

“We were able resolve multiple issues with the solution Zepto created for us,” says Katrina.

Zepto’s API was the key to the door of payment modernity that Spaceship had been looking for.

“We've been able to overhaul our payments infrastructure such that we are now almost entirely off the incumbent banks. We've upgraded our operating environment, and managed to take out two or three layers of counterparties which has been a major positive for us. Commercially, the savings have been material, and the ability to manoeuvre much more quickly has been a major benefit,” says Katrina.

Accessed via Zepto’s simple-to-use API, two modern payment tools in particular have had a massive impact on Spaceship: Stored Value and PayTo.

“Zepto’s stored value product made great commercial sense. Operationally, it enabled the collapsing of multiple layers that we were trying to do away with. And PayTo will offer such ease of access and transparency to both us and our customers, as well as the speed that real-time payments bring,” says Katrina.

Payments innovation ain’t easy. Partnering with Zepto meant that Spaceship was accompanied by a trusted guide every step of the way.

View our Pioneer Perspectives video interview with Katrina Sly below.

Zepto’s founders started their entrepreneurial journey together operating a large skydiving enterprise in Byron Bay. 

Despite managing dozens of aircraft, buses, skydive drop-zones and hundreds of staff, the biggest business frustration they experienced was the tangle of legacy payments infrastructure, systems, tech and — worst of all — legacy thinking. The status quo was slow, expensive and unfit for modern businesses. 

Their experience as merchants have given them a unique perspective on the daily payment challenges Australian businesses face. They have unpacked a real-life merchant experience into a payment solutions tech-infrastructure company on a mission to enable businesses like Spaceship and Fetch to freely devise their own innovative, account-to-account payment experiences.