Australian Fintech, Australia

PYCO Group, based in Vietnam operates a BOT model which allows companies to launch overseas development subsidiaries.

The group recruits and sets up the business usually for a company to develop a specific product and has worked with tech groups like Atlassian and yellowpepper in the past.

PYCO Group Ventures president Pieter van Diermen said his company had seen an increase in Australian companies approaching them for their BOT services.

“A lot of our clients for BOT are coming from Australia. The problem a lot of clients have is being able to scale their teams fast enough and there is a shortage in Australia of good engineers and we can set all that up,” he said.

Mr Van Diermen said that PYCO chose Vietnam as their base of operations due to the high level of education in the country.

“The reason for Vietnam is that they have very good universities. We can test coding engineers globally through an online tool and in that test, Vietnam came in third in the world so they are very good coders which proves there is a high level of technicality here,” he said.

Mr Van Diermen said that while Australia had some skilled workers there were not enough for the growing demand in the tech sector.

“There’s obviously a tech boom in Australia and the same problem as anywhere else once they got the real product and they need to go into the production cycle they need to be able to scale their teams,” he said.

PYCO Group does not take any jobs away from Australians; instead, Mr Van Diermen said it was about having a skilled team ready to go.

“It’s really just being able to scale your teams and being able to produce fast enough to become competitive on the market,” he said.

Roughly 60 per cent of the PYCO Group consulting arm works with fintech but the BOT services is seeing that number grow said Mr Van Dierman.

“Fintech is brewing here. We get more and more interest for the model from Australia,” he said.

Mr Van Dierman expects that number to grow given the ever-growing industry in Australia.

“A lot of fintech companies are being developed. In Australia, technology is a mixed bag but it is a lot of fintech, it is the fastest growing sector when it comes to setting up apps and new ideas and new developments,” he said.