Continuing to build a winning record with Tranche two of the Golden Ticket Program.

We started the Golden Ticket program to support promising fintech businesses through their start-up or scale-up journeys. After a successful Tranche one with Kernel Wealth, we welcomed our second Golden Ticket holder, Catalist, to the program. 

Put simply, Catalist is a platform that connects investors with growing businesses. Led by Colin Magee, their team has been busy developing what will be New Zealand’s only licensed and regulated stock exchange designed for small and medium-sized businesses— exactly the kind of Fintech concept the GT program set out to engage with.

With their first generation product platform firmly in place, supporting private trading for businesses and investors alike, the Catalist team are now looking to the future with plans to scale-up their platform, launching the Catalist Public Market when they have the necessary government approvals in place.

We called in the experts.

The GT partners were able to zoom in on different parts of Catalist’s scale-up plans, offering design and advice around the software platform, heuristics, AI and the legal side. These partners include Alphero, Arcanum.AI, YouDo Limited, MinterEllisonRuddWatts and FinTechNZ. 

The entire program was delivered remotely, showing again that we can deliver outstanding value to any Fintech across New Zealand.

A streamlined approach.

The GT program is not just another incubator — it’s designed to fit realistically with the demands of a growing business. We’ve honed the delivery process so ticket holders aren’t pulled away from their day-to-day scale-up activities. According to founder and CEO Colin Magee, this was critical for their team.

“There was enough time to engage with the partners to consider what each side needed to move the project forwards, but didn’t take away too much time from delivering what you need to deliver day-to-day to keep the business moving forwards.”

In designing the program, it's also been important to make sure the right amount of time can be committed by the delivery partners, as well as the ticket holders. It’s built to last, after all, so it needs to be a sustainable model for everyone involved.

For Catalist, it offered a fresh perspective on future-proofing.

According to Colin, the program’s been a good opportunity to get input from some diverse perspectives that they wouldn’t necessarily have sought out at this stage of the development. In particular, future-proofing the way they collect data. 

“We had a really good session with Arcanum.AI working out how we could use AI in the future for automated assessment of trading, and building out how we might do that when we have a bit more data. That should save us time and money down the line when we decide to implement something like that.”

For the Catalist team, input from and engagement with each of the different partners has been really useful, and they’ve come away with some good output, too. 

“We were wanting to improve the user flow; we improved the user-flow with some great advice from Alphero. We were wanting to get comfortable with a few more things on the legal side, which we did with the MinterEllisonRuddWatts team. We wanted to make sure we were using best practices on some of the market side of things, which I think we are comfortable with now that we’ve had some of those conversations. On the YouDo side, our tech guys had some really useful deep dive conversations on platform aspects. It’s actually providing some valuable input to the business whilst also feeling like you’re developing a relationship with the partners for future collaboration.”

For prospective ticket holders, Colin advises lending some forethought to the process to make the most of it. 

“Commit the time and think through how these businesses can help yours - for some it’s going to be obvious how they can help but there are probably ways that all of them can.”

Supporting the fintech industry through Tranche three and beyond.

It’s been wonderful to help Catalist out, and this is about more than just one Fintech — we’re starting an industry-led circle of support. At the end of the day, we want to see the fintech space thrive, and with the support of the GT program, Catalist can help small to medium enterprises (including other fintechs) to scale up their funding.

This is only the beginning for the GT program. We’ve been stoked to see it working well through the first two rounds, and are grateful to be able to keep engaging the most promising players in the Fintech space.