Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Asantha Wijeyeratne from PaySauce.

Recently, local employment solutions provider PaySauce announced it had raised more than $5 million in a recent rights offer to allow it to grow its offering here and around the world.

Its CEO, Asantha Wijeyeratne, has built multiple million-dollar businesses in this space since coming to New Zealand in 1988 as a young accountant. Wijeyeratne saw that the payroll system could be done better and launched an early technology solution in 1995 called SmartBooks. Later know as SmartPayroll it grew to process a good portion of New Zealand business payrolls before eventually being sold to local tech giant Datacom in 2013.

But there was still an itch to innovate in the space again with a mobile-first offering that took advantage of emerging tech. So in 2014, PaySauce was born.

PaySauce has been in the news lately with its offer of a free “essentials” payroll solution, PaySimple, for New Zealand businesses affected by Covid-19. Its successful rights issue brought on board its first institutional investor.

To talk about the journey, what this disrupted world means for business, and how his work in the community helped lead to a Queen’s Service Medal, Wijeyeratne joined us by Zoom from Sri Lanka where he was visiting family at the beginning of lockdown.

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