Westpac strikes deal with Assembly Payments

Westpac Banking Corp has bought an equity stake in Assembly Payments and will work with the Melbourne-based fintech to integrate the bank’s merchant terminals with customers’ point-of-sale (POS) software, removing the need for transaction amounts to be entered into retailers’ systems twice.

For workers in the nation’s restaurants and coffee shops, entering the dollar amount of a transaction into a banking terminal to complete a sale might be a small frustration, but the extra process can add up to real dollars for business owners.

Westpac estimates that for a typical Sydney CBD cafe – which completes between 1000 and 1500 transactions a day – the three to five seconds of time taken to rekey the transaction amount into the merchant terminal adds up to $100 a week for the business owner in extra staff salary, a cost that will be removed once the two systems are integrated.

“Time is money,” says David Lindberg, chief executive of Westpac’s business bank. “Banking is not just about selling debt – we want to offer professional services too.”

Neither Westpac nor Assembly Payments would discuss the size of the bank’s investment, but it is understood to be more than $10 million. Westpac hopes the deal will open up a new revenue stream as it seeks to export the integration to global banks. Westpac’s venture capital fund Reinventure Group already has a stake in Assembly, which was originally known as PromisePay.

The bank plans to have the integration completed this month with the 40 biggest point-of-sale software providers, and within 18 months for all of the 200-odd POS systems.

Westpac hopes the deal with Assembly gives it a leg-up against rival bank payment systems such as Commonwealth Bank’s Albert and ANZ’s Blade, where integration with POS software is more limited.

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Source: Westpac strikes deal with Assembly Payments | afr.com