Canberra’s fintech entrepreneur and mobile money pioneer
mHITs Rocket Remit founder Harold Dimpel
Meet Harold Dimpel, founder of mobile payments fintech mHITS Rocket Remit.
Jennings German background
Dimpel was born in Canberra to German migrant parents. His father was a Jennings German: one of 150 carpenters that AV Jennings brought to Canberra in the 1950s. Their job was to build around 2,000 homes in two years.
“The conditions when they arrived were pretty rough,” said Dimpel. “They were promised comfortable accommodation, but they ended up in pretty basic hostels. And in summer, there were a lot of flies.”
In addition, there wasn’t much to do in the new city. Many couldn’t even speak English. And then there was the recent history of the war. “Many of the Jennings Germans had served in World War II, so only ten years prior, they had been shooting at each other over ditches,” he said.
A photo of a group of “Jennings Germans” taken by Harold’s father, Konrad Dimpel. The tools all belonged to Konrad, with Harold inheriting them. This, and several other photos taken by Konrad, were featured in an exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery.
But from those early tough years came strength. “My dad had that Protestant German work ethic – you just work your arse off,” said Dimpel. “He came here with pretty much nothing and built a nest egg for himself.”
This work ethic influenced Dimpel – and led to him starting his first businesses. As his dad was often working, they didn’t go on holidays a lot. Money was always tight and so he made his own money looking after people’s homes while they were away. “I was always looking after all the neighbour’s pools, gardens, mowing their lawns, and looking after their pets,” he said. “This taught me a valuable lesson in life – trust”.
From failing at computers to starting a fintech
Dimpel didn’t grow up with computers. While he fiddled with electronics, mechanics, pyrotechnics and loved cars, bikes and gadgets, computing was still new, and he didn’t have a computer at home. It was only when he decided to be an engineer that he first sat in front of a computer. He even failed his first two computing assignments.
“We thought we’d be magically, wonderfully rich from this idea”
He worked for several SME companies in the 90s before moving to work at larger technology companies. And he was involved in developing early GPS vehicle tracking technology. “We’d have a little black box and put it into a taxi or truck and track their location,” he said.
That technology pioneered the use of mobile phones for data communications, which led to Dimpel becoming interested in mobile phone ringtones. His first startup was a ringtone download site. “We thought we’d be magically, wonderfully rich from this idea,” he said. And they succeeded with it, and went on to be the first company in Australia to provide downloadable JAVA games. But while they had traction, they didn’t have enough experience to deal with the growth and were eclipsed by larger multinationals.
The problem with online payments
“Credit cards have been band-aided for twenty years to work online, which is why there is so much online card fraud”
While developing the ringtone business, Dimpel realised it was hard to pay for things online. “How do you pay for a $1 ringtone?” he said. “You can’t do it online with cash, so you have to do it electronically somehow.” And while many of us use credit cards for online payments, Dimpel says cards are the default payment method simply because there is no other viable alternative: they were never designed with the Internet in mind. “Credit cards have been band-aided for twenty years to work online, which is why there is so much online card fraud” he said.
Dimpel felt that there needed to be a better solution. So he developed what is now Rocket Remit.
He started it initially as a person-to-person electronic wallet using SMS to make a payment – essentially a mobile wallet. “Your mobile number was your account number, and you’d use a text message to pay someone – just like PayPal was in the early days except they did it via email,” he said.
Over nearly 20 years, after many many failures and a lot of persistence, mHITs evolved into what it is today. It wasn’t an easy process. “We failed and pivoted and pivoted and pivoted until finally, we developed what we have today,” he said.
No bank? No problem
“Remittances is a $1 trillion industry that is five times larger than the world aid budget. ”
mHITs developed a system known as mobile money. While not the first in the world to do this, mHITS was the only service in the Asia-Pacific region. Mobile money is popular in developing countries where the banking system doesn’t penetrate to the degree it does in Australia. While many people worldwide don’t have bank accounts, they do have mobile phones. The mobile money platform works through mobile phones only, with the phone company requiring a special license to run a payment system.
Well before smartphones and apps, Dimpel struggled to gain large-scale traction in Australia for his mHITs mobile money service. However, when he connected his Australian mobile money service to counterpart mobile money services overseas in Ghana, Kenya and the Philippines, use cases and needs converged. Mobile money was starting to take off in developing countries. By connecting mHITs to these systems, it allowed people to send money from Australia to these countries instantly and far cheaper than any other method. mHITs was the first in the world to demonstrate instant cross-border money transfer via mobile money.
Remittances is a $1 trillion industry that is five times larger than the world aid budget. It is the hidden force in the global economy. In countries like Australia, we have many migrant workers, seasonal workers and new Australians who regularly send money home to their friends and family overseas.
“In many emerging markets, you have one breadwinner that supports a whole family or a relative overseas that’s earning money and sending home money,” said Dimpel. “In Australia, it can be seen as shameful to rely on someone else working. But in many countries, the unemployment rate is 60 or 70%, so many people are unable to work.”
Now rebranded as Rocket Remit, it is an emerging regional major player. While there is giant competition in the sector, Dimpel’s fintech is growing from strength to strength with mHITs chosen as a winner in the ACT Chief Ministers Export Awards for 2022 in the eCommerce category.
mHITs is also working on some new world-first projects in the Pacific that will improve the quality of life for millions of people.
Canberra’s innovation scene
“More people should invest in a founder, in human capital”
According to Dimpel, Canberra is small enough that it’s easy to connect to or be referred directly to people. And it’s big enough to ensure you have diversity with many different segments -plus it’s close enough to travel to Sydney for events if possible. As there are not many people working in fintech in Canberra, Dimpel would regularly travel to Sydney for networking events in the early days of operation.
“The launch of CRBIN saw a massive positive change for start-ups in Canberra,” Dimpel says. “Now there is a permanent presence, strategy, plan and a team of people consciously creating and supporting entrepreneurs and their businesses in Canberra. There is even some local investment happening as Canberra founders who have achieved an exit are paying it forward by supporting and investing in the next generation of founders. It’s so much better now than it was in the early 2000’s”.
Dimpel said the Innovation Connect (ICON) grant rounds also marked an important point in changing Canberra’s innovation culture for the better. “Once the grants were launched, there was a viewpoint that anyone could be a founder,” he said.
Dimpel had an angel investor, who after a successful exit, chose to invest in his startup — a move that sent a significant signal of support. But he feels many Canberrans are still risk-averse when it comes to investing in startups with Canberrans traditionally preferring to invest in property rather than human beings. “More people should invest in a founder, in human capital, like the Americans do. We don’t tend to have that attitude.”
The five-year plan
“We’ll just keep growing because we can, and it’s fun, you know”
mHITs has a five-year plan to grow internationally. It has just completed year one and is on track. “We’ll just keep growing because we can, and it’s fun, you know,” he said. “And we’ll show that we can do it from Canberra.”
