By Mark White-Robinson, Co-Founder Feijoa
Most Kiwis are better at spending than saving. That’s not a discipline problem, it’s a design one, and it’s the problem we built Feijoa to close.
Feijoa rounds up everyday purchases and sends the spare change straight into an investment. We are currently growing KiwiSaver balances now, with new destinations coming soon. This builds savings in the background without our users needing to log in, transfer or schedule a time in their calendar. We built Feijoa so that saving happens as part of everyday life, safely, automatically and without friction.
Some of this will be familiar to FinTechNZ members. We received the Audience Choice award at the Kiwibank Start Up Pitch Breakfast during this year’s FinTechNZ Hui and were a finalist in the Innovation category at the INFINZ Awards. Since then, Feijoa has continued to go from strength to strength, with thousands of Kiwis actively saving through us every day, millions contributed each year, and new major features imminent.
Why Feijoa?
The feijoa fruit is distinctive, and sometimes divisive. I’ve not met a single person who is indifferent to them, people either love them or hate them, but they all feel something. For our team it’s the image of the bag of feijoa’s that would be dropped in the office kitchen in late-May with a sign saying “help yourself”. The image of abundance, sharing and generosity that feijoas means to Kiwi’s sits at the heart of what Feijoa wants to be for our users.
The gap Feijoa is working to close
The average KiwiSaver balance is just $41,000. Only half of registered KiwiSaver accounts contribute enough to receive the full Government contribution each year. A sobering 44% of self-employed Kiwis actively contribute to KiwiSaver compared with 78% of employees (The Retirement Commission, note 1).
There is a problem in wealth building in New Zealand, and we don’t think its due to a lack of willingness to save. We have a system built on an assumption that no longer holds: that most people are in stable employment on a regular wage. That’s not how working life looks for a growing number of New Zealanders. Other solutions are centered around encouraging change in behaviour. But achieving the outcomes needed requires decades of disciplined financial decision making and its unrealistic to assume that people can keep that up when life gets in the way without help.
The insight we had early on was that technology and simple **tools could make the effort of wealth building disappear. That was the key idea behind Feijoa and is our mission today… ‘To build a world where saving is as simple as spending’.
We launched with round-ups that help contributions happen automatically, with every purchase, regardless of how or when someone earns their income. We are working on new solutions that make it safe and frictionless to build wealth everyday over decades so everyone can have a brighter financial future.
There are early signs it’s working. Current active users are collectively contributing around $3.7 million a year to their KiwiSaver balances through round-ups alone. Remove the friction, attach savings to something we already do and and it adds up without effort.
There’s a structural benefit too. Because contributions are triggered by spending rather than by timed investment decisions, users end up investing through all market conditions, buying a little more when prices are low and a little less when they’re high, without ever having to make that call themselves.
How we built Feijoa
The genesis of Feijoa was a hallway conversation between two of our founders, Sam and Ben, about how important KiwiSaver already was, and how it was only half way through growing up. They dragged in Jared and myself with the passion to use KiwiSaver to do something good for New Zealand.
This was about May 2023, and we bootstrapped Feijoa from Wellington from then, with no funding, no established network and no prior experience founding a company. We didn’t even really know what we wanted to build.
What we did have though was a founding team with a core of technology experience. Sam and Jared as software engineers, and Ben a financial markets technology professional. We knew that we didn’t want to build just another investment scheme. So we asked what “cool” tech we could build and scale into a business that could plug into the existing KiwiSaver ecosystem to supercharge it.
After a few false starts and about 6-8 months of iteration, we thought we had a brilliant idea. It was complicated, would be heavily regulated, and depended on securing multiple partnerships to drive a new product to market that didn’t exist, and nobody knew if anyone wanted.
Alongside it is what would become Feijoa, a feature meant to sit on top of that core idea and add value for users. It also happened to be the thing we could build with no permission. So Jared and Sam built it, Ben and I started shopping it around, and the response received made it obvious that this was actually the business… a simple and frictionless way to build wealth everyday through everyday behaviour.
We pivoted, and launched to market in late September 2025. Almost everyone we met wanted us to succeed, early users gave honest feedback, advisors opened doors, other founders shared what they’d learned. That same spirit carried into our recently completed capital raise, with investors backing a credible idea and a credible path forward.
We’re building something for every New Zealander, so we want to hear from New Zealanders, honestly, candidly and often. We’re only getting started and our goal is to change how people build wealth in New Zealand, making it easier than it’s ever been for someone to start.
Four ways Kiwis are putting Feijoa to work
Growing everyday wealth. For most users, Feijoa sits quietly alongside their existing KiwiSaver contributions, nudging the balance up a little further with every coffee, grocery run or tap of the card.
Self-employed. By decoupling contributions from payroll, Feijoa gives contractors, gig workers and small business owners a way to build KiwiSaver savings that doesn’t depend on a payslip.
First home savers. For those working towards a deposit, small daily round-ups add up steadily over months and years, without requiring a change in spending habits.
Retirees sharing with whānau. Feijoa lets users direct round-ups to other KiwiSaver accounts, so grandparents and parents can put their everyday spending to work helping children or grandchildren build a head start.
Feijoa is a registered financial service provider. It does not hold or manage KiwiSaver funds and connects to users’ bank accounts using open banking infrastructure.https://assets.retirement.govt.nz/public/Uploads/Research/2026/KiwiSaver-demographic-study-MJW-2026.pdf