Centricom, the operators of online payment service POLi, have found a new investor in the form of Neteller, a relatively new payments group that claims to be the biggest non-bank related online money transfer business in the world.Neteller paid $5 million for a one quarter stake in Centricom. Centricom revealed the investment, made last month, in a newsletter to customers on Friday."Like us, Neteller thinks that POLi has a global future," said Simon Warner, chief executive of Centricom yesterday. "Their strategic investment in us increases our value significantly above $20 million."Neteller began as a customer of ours, they recorded top-up growth from Australian customers of 45 per cent in six months directly attributable to their implementation of POLi. They liked the product and have made a straight cash investment."POLi has struggled to expand its merchant numbers in the face of competition from scheme debit cards. Centricom at first contracted marketing of the service to Unisys.  Recently the company moved hosting and operations from Unisys to Macquarie and took distribution in-house.  "POLi is a volume driven business, the issue is viability, the sales have to justify the implementation" said Warner."A POLi implementation is similar in many ways to a credit card API. It can be done in one to three days from receiving the code, but there are hurdles particularly with the big e-tailers."Warner says those hurdles often relate to scheduling the web site changes and testing the system, once it is live.For the smaller merchants, those hurdles also exist says Warner, so commercial viability for the merchant and for Centricom is a key issue in the SME segment."Do you go for 1000 merchants with 100 transactions per month, or some big brands with thousands every month?" said Warner. "While we are focused long term on the middle market, we are now signing up high volume e-tailers first, so we are talking about airlines, ticketing, strong brand names that help us establish consumer trust."POLi has its highest market penetration in the online betting and gaming space, where Neteller has also traditionally operated."We find that once one big merchant in a field comes on board, their competitors pretty quickly want to sign up too, that's how the gambling market worked for us."Warner says volume is also the reason behind the lack of POLi functionality for customers of the smaller ADIs."We'll get to them eventually and a number of credit unions have been in contact with us, but realistically, with Bendigo for example, you are talking about 40,000 or so internet banking customers, compared to some two million with CBA."Warner says the injection of capital from Neteller will be used to grow the Australian and New Zealand markets and in raising brand awareness. "The cost of scheme debit is something we are always keeping an eye on, we don't have the resources of Visa and Mastercard so we have to build volume organically."Neteller have appointed the former president of MasterCard UK, David Gagie, to the Centricom board. Centricom's other major shareholder is Jagen