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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday.
[Ad]: Here's your host, Bushy Today Checkout features Anthony Seymour Walsh, CEO of Cash Rewards. Cash Rewards is an Australian cashback website with over 2 million members and partners including Apple, Amazon, Maya and Lickland. Anthony, we've learned a lot about Cash
Nathan Bush: Rewards, a great Australian business who are empowering customers. Already given away $165 million in cash back, helping retailers acquire new customers with some of the biggest names in retail, but also supporting organizations like the Starlight foundation with $2 million in donations. There some incredible things we covered in our main chat, but I'm here to learn a little bit more about you. We've got a hint that you had a finance background and a loyalty background. We don't know a lot about you, so I've got five quick questions for you.
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Great.
Nathan Bush: Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: I think the weirdest thing that I've bought online is actually I've got this sit stand desk in my home office and I find it quite a weird thing to have purchased online because I sit here for eight to ten hours every single day and it was something that I probably would have preferred to try before I buy, but it's been absolutely brilliant. It's a bit weird, but I absolutely love it.
Nathan Bush: Do you actually stand?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: I do. I stand regularly, yeah.
Nathan Bush: Well done. Well done. So many times people get the sit stand desk with the best intentions and it just stays in one position.
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: We also learn a lot about your shopping habits actually in the main episode where you've actually earned yourself $4,000 in cash rewards money both in your time as CEO but before you're even CEO. I think that's phenomenal. Which leads me to my next question. Number two. Who Is your favorite retailer, where are you earning all that cash rewards dollars?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Yeah, my favorite retailer is Amazon. The range, the prices, the experience, just the speed of delivery. It's a phenomenal business. I love everything about it. Yeah, it's brilliant to also get bonus cash back when you shop with Amazon via cash rewards.
Nathan Bush: Are they fun to negotiate with?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: They're actually brilliant. They're a huge supporter of the affiliate space globally and they're one of our strongest strategic relationships. So we love working with Amazon.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. Correct answer number three. Which e commerce practice do you wish was history?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Oh, the full screen takeover. Trying to get you to sign up, trying to get you, you know, give you a code to do something. I understand why it's there, but when I'm really close to purchase conversion or where I'm trying to navigate in a certain part of the experience and that whole thing pops up, I would love for that to be a thing of the past, but perhaps it's just me.
Nathan Bush: There's nothing seamless about it, is there?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Not at all.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Yeah, look, I'm an avid reader, as my team would know. I absolutely love reading. One of my favorites is the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. And I love that for a couple of reasons. So the central theme of that book is that very small changes can add up to be the tipping point to achieve some mass outcome to a significant impact. And I think about that in my life, in work, in almost every facet, and I see so many examples where that is true. So brilliant reading that book. But the second thing is I love his theory of mavens. So a maven being sort of an expert that educates and teaches others about a particular topic and why that really resonates for me personally and why it should hopefully resonate for retailers is when you've got a customer who's had a great experience and they tell their families and friends about it, first of all, it's free. And second of all, that's the most powerful convincing agent, if you like, for driving member conversion. So. And customer conversion.
Nathan Bush: So we're all after more mavens.
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Absolutely. I constantly talk about mavens with my team and you know, at Cashreaus we have a refer a friend mechanic and that is, I guess, culmination of mavens as a principal. And so we give the ability for our members to refer their friends and act as mavens in our business. And it's something that works really well for us.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. I'm going to throw a third one in there because in our pre chat before this we were talking about our voices and you've been sick and we've rescheduled this a couple of times because
[Ad]: you have been sick.
Nathan Bush: So thank you for joining. And we were talking about deep voices and he was like, oh yeah, I read something around those with deep voices are actually better negotiators and it's more likely to hit the points called the radio voice negotiation. I was like, oh yeah, I've read that too. And that's from obviously Never Split the Difference, another great book we both read and I can recommend that and sounds like you can too.
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Big supporter. Yeah, look, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He talks about his time as an FBI negotiator and this notion of having a late night DJ voice is something that's quite powerful in a negotiation setting. And I've been in all sorts of negotiations through different parts of my career and sometimes they get quite heated where there's passion. But that late night DJ approach can calm everything down and keep everybody centered. A really great principle from an amazing read.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Last question. I have for you Anthony. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is oh, it's
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: got to be retail media. So we've jumped into and launched our business circuit by cash rewards. And for us it just creates so many possibilities to merge awareness but also drive that purchase consideration and then right the way through to conversion. And so for us, retail media is the future. It enables great member experiences, it enables great clarity of investment value to retail clients. So for me, that's the number one topic.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Anthony, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Anthony Seymour-Walsh: Thanks very much, Nathan. Appreciate it.
[Ad]: To hear more from Anthony, jump back into episode 395 where Anthony shares cash rewards charitable beginnings. He tells us the metrics that retailers are using to measure success on the platform and shares the way in which Cash Rewards tailors benefits to customers lifestyles. Plenty of great practical tips for this channel. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
