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There’s one thing we hear all the time when we tell business owners just how easy it is to open an account with Emerge: “it sounds too good to be true.” Every business owner has at least one horror story about getting set up with a traditional bank. Paperwork. Branch visits. Endless back-and-forth. Weeks (sometimes months) of waiting. It’s an admin nightmare that no one enjoys.

So, when we say “you can sign up to Emerge in 7 minutes” (the fastest we’ve seen is actually 4 minutes), eyebrows go up. Doubt creeps in. A slow, sceptical head shake. And that’s when we lay down the challenge. Prove us wrong. Because it really is that easy.

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No gimmicks. We're just better.

Some businesses are complex and require enhanced due diligence. So we do things properly. We're as compliant and diligent as they come. Even in complicated cases, we're still faster, more efficient, and infinitely better to deal with than the alternative. If you've got the right documents handy, we back ourselves to get pretty damn close to that 7 minute promise.

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Putting our money where our mouth is.

When everyone tells you something is too good to be true, you have two choices:

1. Keep harping on about it.
2. Prove it.

So, how do we prove that signing up for Emerge is so easy, so fast, and so effortless that it can be done anywhere? We put a business owner in a drift car and challenged them to sign up to Emerge while going sideways at 100km/h.

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From a mad idea to the track.

We knew we needed a small-business advocate who gets it. Cue Mad Mike and his legendary drift cars. One quick email later, he was in.

Now, who would we throw into the madness? That’s when Simon Bridges, CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber, came up. The guy literally represents business owners. He knows their struggles, their pain points, and - most importantly - how broken the system is.

When Jovan (our co-founder) met with Simon, we made a simple request: “Mad idea, you in?”. And just like that, Simon Bridges was about to become the first business owner in history to sign up to a business banking alternative… while sideways in a drift car (fact unverified… but gotta be close to true).

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Why this matters (and why we’re not stopping here).

This wasn’t just about making a cool video. It was about proving a point. Business banking doesn’t have to be painful. It doesn’t have to be slow. It doesn’t have to be broken.

For decades, small Kiwi businesses have been treated as an afterthought by the big banks. Not anymore. Emerge exists for our customers. The founders, the builders, the operators, the side-hustlers-turned-empire-builders. They deserve better.

Time is precious. Every hour wasted on admin is an hour stolen from growth, from creativity, from impact. That’s why we do what we do. We built Emerge to put power back into the hands of business owners. To give them a financial platform that works at their speed. To create a system that doesn’t just extract profits—but actually supports the people driving New Zealand forward.

And if we have to throw a few more CEOs into insane situations to prove it? You know we will. We can't promise a drift car, but we can promise you'll have as much fun with Emerge as Simon did.