When I was a youngster, I didn't know what to do with my life, so I decided to do a gap year and I went over to work at Disney World in Florida, USA. It was quite a transformative year in my life. Now everybody knows that Disney is globally recognised for giving guests an experience that they can't get anywhere else, and they are head and shoulders above the competition. What began to fascinate me there was how important of a component bringing the employees along on that journey was.

The problem is, as technology and the world have moved on, we're still relying on the 30-day pay cycle. A lot of people say, "Well, what's wrong with that? I get paid every 30 days and it's fine. And then my bills come and I pay them". But there is a huge payday lending industry that has emerged to give people early access to their income.

My co-founder had seen this working over in the UK and in the US, so the earned wage access concept wasn't our own idea. At the same time, we saw that no one was really doing this in South Africa. And in South Africa, we have a weird relationship with debt and payday lending.

In 30 seconds the employee has confirmation that the money is going to be deposited the same day. It's supposed to be really seamless and reduce that anxiety as quickly as possible. There's a fee attached to the withdrawal and we've taken as much care as possible to have that fee be around a 10th of the cost of the nearest regulated alternative, never mind the illegal alternatives to debt.

We're not answering the problems that we have in South Africa around employment and HR. So it's really great to think about knowledge workers and all those types of things, and that applies to some South African companies, of course, but I don't really blame HR. I think that the ecosystem around HR is not responding to problems.

We've seen some really interesting statistics. One of the trends that I've observed is a certain paternalism among employers around how they give employees money and how that money is then spent and treated. I've got quite strong views about where the responsibility of an employer ends and where the responsibility of the employee starts.

The key for me is around flexibility, information and choice. I very much believe in allowing the individual to manage their own financial situation. The elephant in the room is the poor financial system, of course, because we find that a vast majority of employees are in some kind of dangerous debt situation.

I will start with company practice I think, because we've also observed this. We have two clients that are essentially in the exact same business. They have the same size business, very standardised. The one has a person who is dedicated to communicating efficiently with the employees and the other has a slightly more chaotic support service structure.

So I went to ask people, "What do you think about receiving a team reward versus an individual reward?" And universally, every person I talked to disliked receiving an individual award. The irony was that we were driving most of the budget into those individual rewards because the assumption from our tower was that people wanted to be called out for being excellent and they wanted to stand head and shoulders above the rest.

If you are in debt and you owe a lot of money, you're not going to be engaged at work. You're not going to be productive and in certain industries, that can compromise safety as well because you aren't focused on the work you do. Your mind is elsewhere, on severe financial issues.