Tyro Payments, a specialist payments acquiring bank, is pursuing a dream of evolving into a fully fledged small business bank.

The Sydney-based firm is "backed by A$100 million from prominent investors including Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes and Tiger Global," the Financial Review reports.

At a notice at its website today Tyro declared that its "share register [is] open" and that "the company has put in place a $100 million capital raising in fully paid ordinary shares at a price per share of $1.0361."

Tyro list three new shareholders, with $59.5 million from US fund manager Tiger Global Management, $30.0 million by TDM Asset Management and $10.0 million by Cannon-Brookes.

At present Tyro has $28 million in net assets and has $15 million in accumulated losses reflecting its drawn out entry into the acquiring side of the payments card market from the early 2000s.

It made a net profit of $960,000 over the year to June 2015 down from $3 million in 2014.

TDM Asset Management is the underwriter of a $5.5 million tranche in which "shareholders will have an opportunity to participate ... for fully paid ordinary shares at the same price in early 2016."

Tyro is the operator of a secondary market in its own shares. It enforced a trading halt from 22 November.

Jost Stollman, CEO of Tyro, told the AFR it has 14,000 small and medium-sized business operating 550,000 of its payment terminals.

"But that doesn't do justice to this window of opportunity, which is we can create in Australia the next-generation bank," Mr Stollman said. "We're the only tech company that has been given a bank licence."