Car registration is an unpromising holiday companion. It cannot surf, contributes little to dinner conversation and still expects to be paid. In December 2017, Jonty Hirsowitz took a surfing trip to Western Australia with his colleague Mat Blas. His registration renewal came along too. Blas had his own unwelcome company: an insurance bill and an electricity bill that were higher than usual.
Both worked at a finance company. Both had budgeted for the holiday. Both expected the next month's salary to replenish their accounts. The difficulty was the interval between an expense arriving and the money arriving to meet it. A trip planned around waves had produced a discussion about payment dates.
That is a modest beginning for a financial business, which is part of its interest. Hirsowitz and Blas did not need to invent a new appetite. They had found an old obligation with an inconvenient timetable. The question they brought back from Western Australia was how many other people were dealing with the same thing.
A lawyer meets a registration renewal
Hirsowitz had arrived at that question through a fairly conventional professional route. He graduated from the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor of Laws/Commerce, worked as a corporate lawyer and moved into finance. His career included private M&A work at King & Wood Mallesons and corporate strategy at Optiver. He had also interned in investment banking at Credit Suisse.
Those jobs place him inside the institutions that arrange, assess and move money. A household bill asks a smaller version of a familiar financial question: when will the cash be available? Seen from a desk, the problem can become an exercise in forecasts. Seen on holiday, with a registration renewal to settle, it acquires a less abstract character.
He and Blas had been sitting beside each other at work, talking through ideas. A shared interest in surfing helped take the conversation out of the office. The eventual division of responsibilities was clear: Hirsowitz would lead the business as chief executive, while Blas would oversee the product. Hirsowitz's remit included corporate decisions, operations and resources; Blas's included technology, analytics and the customer experience.
There is something pleasingly practical about that pairing. A founder may enjoy the sea and still need somebody to think about the loan book. In this case, the conversation could accommodate both. Their subject was already waiting in millions of households, generally in an envelope or an inbox nobody was particularly excited to open.
The invoice was already there
Deferit launched in 2018. Its organising idea applied installments to bills people already had to pay. The founders chose a subscription model, with a recurring membership rather than a retail checkout as the centre of the relationship. That choice put the company close to utility accounts, phone services and car registration, away from the seductions of a shopping basket.
The distinction matters to Hirsowitz. Asked about the business, he has repeatedly returned to the fact that customers arrive with obligations already incurred. An electricity bill does not require a persuasive product photograph. The electricity has been used. The household needs a workable way to settle the account.
For an illustrative $200 bill, four equal principal repayments are $50 each. The arithmetic is elementary; the scheduling is the service. Fees sit alongside that principal, and moving a deadline does not reduce the amount owed. What changes is the pattern in which money leaves the customer's account.
There is a useful restraint in beginning with a document. Customers upload a photograph or a file containing the bill. The document supplies an amount, a recipient and a deadline. Product design begins with the paperwork the customer already possesses. For Hirsowitz, the grand business proposition can therefore start with something as ordinary as finding the right PDF.
First prove it. Then rebuild it.
The early product did not arrive fully furnished. The founders first tested demand with a website and backing from friends and family. When they brought in development company Launch Lab, they already had a working minimum viable product and evidence that customers wanted the service.
Launch Lab helped develop a second version intended to support growth. Its work included a React interface, a Python/Django backend, a move to AWS Lambda and a React Native mobile application. The subscription system was part of the build too. Behind the friendly promise of smaller repayments sat the less photogenic business of making software dependable.
That sequence gives Hirsowitz's career change some texture. A lawyer moving into a startup needs more than an idea and a willingness to resign. There are payment routes to understand, customers to acquire and a product to improve while people are using it. Hiring outside expertise was one of the concrete steps between a test and an operating service.
By March 2021, Deferit announced an A$15 million Series B led by Carthona Capital and Alceon Group. At the time, it reported 250,000 users and more than A$100 million in bills paid. Hirsowitz said the funding would support marketing, partnerships and hiring. The cheque bought the means to do more of the work.
The persistence problem
Hirsowitz's account of working hard contains an inconvenient qualification: persistence can keep a bad idea alive. In a 2021 conversation, he described the fear of pushing a product that people did not want. Evidence of demand gave him a reason to keep going. Endurance became more useful once there was something worth enduring for.
He also described leaving the office around 5:30 to set an example for staff, despite his own capacity to keep working. The detail is revealing because a chief executive's hours can become everybody else's implied instructions. Even an unspoken expectation can keep a room full of people watching the boss's chair.
Surfing offered him a different discipline. He said it was an activity that could take his attention away from the business, something he sometimes struggled to do even during dinner conversations. On the board, the next wave has a reasonably persuasive claim on your concentration.
“You have to learn to be uncomfortable throughout the journey”Jonty Hirsowitz / 2023
Success did not remove the discomfort. He has described the lift of receiving a large investment followed, a few months later, by another difficult stretch. His account allows room for the anticlimax after validation. A cheque can settle the fundraising question while leaving a substantial queue of other questions untouched.
America adds a second question
Deferit expanded from Sydney into the United States, establishing a New York presence. America offered a larger market, but Hirsowitz also saw a different relationship with credit. The ordinary act of paying a bill could have implications beyond keeping a service running. It could become information about a person's reliability.
That idea appears in Deferit's credit-reporting service, which reports payments to TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. Customers can pay upfront as well as in installments. The company says reporting happens monthly. The proposition gives an existing household expense a possible second use: contributing to a recorded payment history.
A payment record and a credit score are different things, however. Reporting does not promise a particular score increase. The company explicitly says results vary. The interesting part of Hirsowitz's direction is the question it raises about recognition: which ordinary financial behaviours get recorded, and which pass through the system with little trace?
A pebble in the payment system
In December 2024, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling announced a six-month pilot with Pebble, identifying Hirsowitz as its CEO. Participating member agencies would incorporate the service into their counseling work. Pebble's role was to report on-time household bill payments to all three major credit bureaus.
The proposed partnership connected a payment product with organisations already helping people work through their finances. NFCC chief executive Mike Croxson described it as an opportunity to add support within counseling services. The announcement set out an intention and a pilot, rather than a completed account of outcomes.
“By recognizing on-time bill payments, we’re giving people the credit they deserve for their financial responsibility.”Jonty Hirsowitz / Pebble pilot announcement, 2024
Hirsowitz returned to Pebble in an October 2025 Fintech Combine interview with host Kris Kovacs. The conversation covered consumers with limited credit histories and the potential for credit unions to offer embedded credit tools. His work was moving into distribution through financial institutions, carrying the household payment into another setting.
The promise has to survive the bill
The commercial terms matter as much as the founding story. Deferit's current US product lists monthly memberships from $14.99 to $24.99, plus application and processing fees. Approval, state availability and possible security deposits also shape access. The useful promise of flexibility has a price that customers must weigh against the benefit.
Hirsowitz has faced questions about the distinction between budgeting and borrowing. In a 2021 exchange with CHOICE, he defended Deferit's approach and said customers could not buy things through its platform. Consumer advocates questioned whether third-party payment services might obscure assistance available directly from billers. That disagreement belongs beside the company's chosen purpose.
It also returns the story to Western Australia. Hirsowitz and Blas knew another salary was coming. Their original problem had a foreseeable end. A business built around that experience must continually distinguish a temporary mismatch from an obligation the household cannot afford. The interface may show four manageable amounts; the customer's next set of bills will still arrive.
Hirsowitz's work keeps circling the same unglamorous object. First, arrange its payment. Then consider whether the payment should count towards something else. There is plenty of ambition in those questions, but the starting point remains wonderfully ordinary: a car registration renewal that refused to respect a holiday.