Tyro bankers cash in early
A grey, or pre-IPO, market in shares for Tyro Payments sheds light on insiders' views on the value of a niche payments processor recently elevated by APRA to fully fledged bank status.PrimaryMarkets, a platform for trading unlisted shares, has for some weeks promoted securities in a "payments bank", clearly Tyro. The shares have changed hands at A$1.25, with around $12 million already traded on the platform. This is up from a share price of around $1.04 when Tyro raised around $100 million to support its growth in early 2016.Gerd Schenkel, chief executive of Tyro, said he understood the trades reflected employees transacting via the platform, following the allocation of shares under staff share option schemes."We're totally hands off in secondary markets," he said, adding that "at this point we don't need any more capital."Schenkel declined to discuss Tyro's options on any mooted IPO.At December 2016 Tyro had net assets of $128 million, with $136 million in contributed equity, $11 million in reserves and $19 million in accumulated losses.A widening of the product set of Tyro was the cause of a $3 million loss over the half year to December 2016.Schenkel, who joined Tyro in October 2016 from Telstra (and worked for NAB before that) said "we're looking forward to turning from a one product company to a three product company."Once an entity solely focused on "acquiring" and switching credit card and debit card payments, Tyro - known in the early days as MoneySwitch - gained entry to the MasterCard and Visa system, via a limited licence from APRA - more than a decade ago.It's second and third products have been in soft launch since late last year, being a deposit product and business loans, both tailored to appeal to a merchant customer base Tyro put at 17,000 at the end of 2016. In the bank's interim report Tyro said this number was 18 per cent up on a year earlier.Schenkel said the deposit product "interacts with accounting platforms" - he singled out Xero - and allows the business owner "to do payroll easily."He said the "Eftpos product for merchants allows them to take out a small loan to invest within seconds."?For now, this product mix is sufficient for Tyro, an entity yet to more than nibble at the customer base of the big banks that have long dominated the merchant acquiring sector."We're really busy" with the deposit and lending roll-out, Schenkel said. "If we succeed, which we hope we will, we'll then need more capital."Schenkel also shared a crumb of detail on one lively topic.Mobile payments, he said, such as "the usage of digital wallets and watches across our network, make up well below two per cent of total transactions and they have roughly doubled over the past six months."