Global payments gateway Braintree has appointed former PayPal executive Tyson Hackwood as its head of market development in Australia. Braintree set up shop in Sydney in November 2012, and has so far lured a number of local companies to its payments platform, including the ABC, 99designs and Microlancer. Established in the US in 2007, the company claims it processes around US$8 billion of payments for 4000 clients each year through its "gateway". It says a quarter of these are outside the US.Hackwood declined to say how many clients the company currently has in Australia.The focus for the company, he said, was on meeting the payment needs of Australian start-up businesses. These are traditionally overlooked by the major banks because of their risk profiles, said Hackwood. Unlike PayPal, which is a closed payment system requiring participants to have PayPal accounts, Braintree can accept payments from Visa and MasterCard.The company charges a merchant fee of 30 cents per transaction plus 2.4 per cent of the transaction value.Braintree provides an application programming interface to its customers. This allows online businesses to integrate the Braintree payment platform with their online sales application. it is also available for mobile applications - a quarter of the payments (by value) handled by the Braintree platform originate on mobile devices.The system is able to accept payments in more than 130 currencies - it is up to Braintree's users to decide whether to install a website widget to reflect current exchange rates or to set prices in the local currency.