Founders corner

Jamie Jermain - Co-founder

August 21, 2024

Welcome to Emerge: Better business finance

We’ve heard so many stories of the single office expense card being shared across the team… the wait times to make changes to your account… the lagging tech... the pain of having to do the most basic tasks.

These are the fundamentals of any business, but they continue to be a massive struggle on a daily basis. Time for a change. 

The origins of Emerge (because we all love an origin story)

Emerge is brought to you by the same team that brought you SquareOne. When we set out, we knew there were challenges with finance across every sector in NZ.

The lack of financial capability among Kiwi kids was the biggest priority we saw. There was no one doing anything meaningful to address the lack of skills or tools our kids had to be great with money in the real world.

So we solved it. And we’re so proud of what SquareOne is and will continue to grow into.

But that wasn’t the only challenge Kiwis faced. 

At every level of finance - NZ is trailing behind the rest of the world. We’re still heavily reliant on outdated & slow-moving technology and processes. We see interesting banking innovations coming out of Europe and the States, but we’ve yet to see anyone take up the torch in NZ.

We’re stoked to start talking externally about Emerge - a little secret we’ve been perfecting for a while.

What is Emerge?

Emerge is our next step in changing the financial landscape for Kiwi’s. It’s a business banking alternative that is here to fundamentally change businesses' relationship with money.

We’re not a bank - we’re a registered financial service provider - but for our customers, we’re everything you need from your bank to go further, faster with your business. It's more than that though. We want to become a hub of small business success - to help foster, grow and make successful as many businesses as we can up & down NZ.

Long-term, we’ve got huge aspirations. If you’re familiar with the challenger banks popping up all over the world, you’ll know what to expect. But, we’re building this in a uniquely Kiwi way - for uniquely Kiwi challenges. 

Businesses are just the start of our journey, but they’re our focus for the time being. Our whole ethos is to build this for Kiwi businesses, with Kiwi businesses. To do that, we’re opening up for early access to a handful of teams. If you want to help reshape business finance in NZ - get on board.

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