US giant buys Canberra online transaction business eWAY for $US50m

Canberra multimillionaire Matt Bullock has sold his online transaction company for more than a thousand times the money in his bank when he started it.

When the Pearce man developed eWAY 18 years ago, he had $50,000 to his name. On Friday, he sold it to American payment technology services giant Global Payments for $US50 million.

Understandably, Mr Bullock feels a great sense of achievement from his brainchild that grew to doing 5.8 billion online purchases last year, or about a quarter of all internet transactions in Australia.

“What this shows is that you can do anything in Canberra,” he said.

“It is a beautiful place and there are a lot of smart people here, which is why I’m going to stay and build something even bigger and better than eWAY.

“True to the saying “you only have to get it right once”, Mr Bullock’s first entrepreneurial pursuit was trying to write software himself and sell it through PayPal.

But he soon discovered he could invent his own way of selling software, by assisting merchants to process online credit card payments.

When eWay kicked off, he set up his phone to beep with each new customer and would feel joy from each alert. Eventually, they became so frequent that he had to turn his phone off for some peace and quiet.

Years later, his customers would include Canon, Qantas, Puma and Nissan.

Source: US giant buys Canberra online transaction business eWAY for $US50 million