Westpac has partnered with Melbourne fintech company Assembly Payments to launch Presto, a payments solution for small businesses, to its business customers.
The solution will allow for the sharing of transaction information between point of sale systems (POS) and merchant terminals, removing the need for staff to re-key card transactions – that is, that step where the staff member has to manually input the figure to be paid onto the payment terminal.
With 45 POS providers on board, Westpac and Assembly Payments believe Presto can save a typical city cafe taking 1,200 orders a day 3 seconds in re-keying each card transaction, or up to an hour a day.
Simon Lee, CEO of Assembly Payments, said Presto is “about building better experiences and better businesses”.
“We’re really excited at the prospects of being able to extend our services to a huge variety of business owners through this flexible and scalable technology which we believe will provide better customer experiences, better insight, and more functional ways for businesses to improve sales,” he said.
David Lindberg, chief executive of the business bank at Westpac, added that the bank is looking to provide businesses with “holistic, professional” solutions such as Presto to help them drive productivity and profitability.
“Rapid innovations in payments technology have fundamentally changed how consumers interact with businesses but for the opposite side of the counter, numerous payment streams are creating new complications for business such as extended settlement times, multiple system management, and harder-to-reconcile payments,” he said.
Presto will over the next two years incorporate further functionality, including multi-channel payment capabilities allowing businesses to view, settle, and reconcile transactions across their in-store, online, and app channels.
The partnership with Westpac follows Assembly Payments in 2016 raising a $16 million Series A round from, among others, Carsales, rampersand and the Westpac-backed VC fund Reinventure. According to the Australian Financial Review, the bank itself has now taken a stake in Assembly Payments.
Founded in 2013 as PromisePay with a focus on developing a secure payment system for marketplaces, managing things including escrow and fraud detection, the company last year received backing from the Victorian Government to base its global headquarters in Melbourne.
It also in September won a challenge run by SWIFT, a global provider of financial messaging services, in conjunction with 30 global banks aimed at encouraging collaborative innovation between fintechs and banks.
Lee said the startup has been “fielding a lot of interest” from banks since the win and is “looking forward to bringing more banks into the Assembly family soon”.
Startup Daily had a chat to Cathy Kovacs, head of Business Development at Westpac, about the bank’s approach to innovation and its collaborations with startups on a recent episode of the Startup Meet Corporate podcast:
Image: Darren McMurtrie, Simon Lee, Simon Jones of Assembly Payments. Source: Supplied.
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