Assembly Payments rolls out Westpac partnership while announcing international expansion
Leading Australian fintech Assembly Payments has today announced the next stage in its partnership with Westpac and its international expansion.
Assembly’s Westpac partnership has seen its unique in-store solution approved by POS companies serving more than 50% of Australian retailers. The solution, which supports
Westpac’s Presto payment device, was highlighted by Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer in his result statement in November.
The success of Assembly’s first partnership with a major financial institution has drawn global attention from similar finance behemoths, which the Assembly team is moving rapidly to capitalise on.
“Australia was only the beginning,” co-founder and CEO Simon Lee said. “We have been working with a range of international clients over the last two years to refine our international offering and now we’re ready to take on the world.”
Assembly is one of Australia’s best capitalised fintechs, having raised more than $30 million in venture capital from Rampersand VC, US fintech fund Cultivation Capital (founded by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey), Reinventure and Carsales, as well as Westpac. Assembly’s initial international partnerships such as Gumtree South Africa and Asia’s Swift, which enabled the team to explore how to roll out the Assembly platform in more than 60 countries. This preparatory work has enabled the company to hone its international offering, enabling its founder and CEO Simon Lee to stay based in Melbourne to begin building out an international team.
“I am expecting to spend a lot of time on planes over the coming months and years, but my focus is on ensuring both our product and team are world-class,” Mr Lee said. “We will be launching an international office in 2019, we’re just still triaging all the interest to work out the best location for that.”
The Assembly team has more than tripled to almost 140 staff in the past 18 months as the team expanded the modular, entirely customisable platform so it could be used by financial institutions as well as online platforms. As the company prepared for its international expansion, Mr Lee appointed key team member, Victor Zheng, as co-CEO to ensure the team continues to work as efficiently and effectively as possible.
“Victor was Westpac’s head of payments and is a very thorough leader used to working in big teams. I’m delighted he’s agreed to step into this new role, as we work incredibly well together and have for some time now,” Mr Lee says.
Assembly launched in 2015 as a payments platform for marketplaces, with a range of features that enabled platforms such as carsales and Gumtree to manage the entire payment process, from the movement of funds to fraud protection, escrow, chargebacks, dispute resolutions and detailed analytics. In 2017 the company opened its platform for financial institutions who were interested in using the API-enabled digital wallets, security and fulfilment.
Now a fully customisable payments platform, Assembly was selected by global top 20 bank
Westpac, in Australia, to deliver API-based solutions that significantly enhance the bank’s services to merchants.
“Financial institutions move slowly, but they are facing an extremely disrupted decade and need fast moving partners who can help them adapt for huge changes such as the end of credit card fees, the end of the terminal, as well as emerging innovations such as closed loop payment systems,” Lee says. “Assembly moves fast and we’re excited to see what we can do globally, especially given the almost overwhelming volume of international inquiries we’ve been fielding since the Westpac partnership.”
The five-year old company has recently passed a record number of point-of-sale partnerships in Australia, many of which have global footprints as well. These include Erply, Mobipos, Advanced Retail, Microsoft Dynamics, Futura, Kounta, and Menumate.
