The business plan for what became one of Australia's biggest fintechs was drawn on butcher paper in a hotel bar.
Larry Diamond had an idea: a credit line that lived inside your phone and let you pay for a bike, a couch or a pair of shoes at checkout, without a plastic card. What he lacked was someone who understood consumer credit. So he found Peter Gray, a credit specialist, and the two began meeting at a North Sydney hotel. For roughly six months, they talked, drew and argued. Diamond later said that although Zip was just an idea, a bond was formed.
Friends and family backed the first loan book, a leap of faith with no history to point to.
Diamond had trained in information technology at the University of Technology Sydney, graduating in 2004. What he had was a belief that the bank card was a clumsy way to borrow small amounts.
The company was incorporated in June 2013 as zipMoney. Friends and family backed the first loan book, a leap of faith with no history to point to. Diamond has since credited those early investors for believing in the team rather than the numbers. In December 2013 the first customer signed up. It was not a giant retailer. It was a bicycle shop called Chappelli Cycles.
Then came the part nobody plans for. Listing on the ASX in September 2015 changed the company's trajectory, as Diamond has put it, and growth turned feverish. By 2017 Zip was onboarding about 1,200 new customers a day. A A$260 million debt facility arrived, A$200 million of it from NAB, and Westpac put in A$40 million of equity. Diamond has been candid about the cost. His hardest problem, he said, was moving from a small, close-knit team to a structured organisation, and he called hyper growth incredibly chaotic. Being the driving force of a company for the first time was new to him too.
Expansion followed in a rush. Pocketbook, PartPay, Quadpay in the United States for A$430 million, Spotii, Twisto. Then the bill. Zip pulled out of Singapore and the United Kingdom in 2022 and shut Pocketbook the same year. In May 2026 the High Court sided with Firstmac in a fight over the very name Zip.
What survived was the American bet. For the year to June 2025 Zip reported revenue of about A$1.08 billion and cash earnings of A$170 million, with the US arm contributing most of the profit.
The lesson is a modest one. The company that conquered a continent started with two people, some butcher paper, and a willingness to sit in the same bar for six months until the plan was good enough to ask strangers for money.