Online payments facilitator Monoova believes that small ecommerce retailers are now able to lower their acceptance costs by as much as 50 per cent by leveraging the New Payments Platform and side-stepping card-based schemes such as Visa and Mastercard.
Monoova has been operating in Australia since 2017 and claims that the Covid-19 emergency has helped to stoke a sharp increase in its transaction volumes.
Since the start of the year payments platforms linked to Monoova have generated around A$1 billion worth of transactions.
The company, which is owned by the MoneyTech Group, markets itself as a “deep payments provider” that offers ecommerce-focused clients access to a suite of payments methods including NPP, BPay, credit cards and direct debit.
The main attraction for clients using Monoova’s online portal or API is that all payments are automated and reported in real time to subscribers.
Monoova was one of the earliest overlay providers to secure access to the NPP last year and is trumpeting the benefits of customers using PayID-based services to lower their costs of acceptance.
Small businesses generating sales of less than $500,000 a year typically incur average card acceptance costs of more than 1 per cent.
Monoova’s head of growth Tyson Hackwood believes that NPP-enabled services can deliver savings of around 80 cents on transactions valued at $100.
That equates to a 50 per cent discount to the cost of accepting credit cards for small merchants.
“We provide a number of services in real time that look and feel like a credit card service,” said Hackwood.
Almost $3 billion of transactions have been processed through Monoova’s platform since it launched in 2017, but Hackwood said there had been an acceleration in activity since the start of March when the pandemic began hitting Australia.
“We have seen a huge chunk of the offline economy moving online,” he said.
“Many merchants are coming to grips with the reality that online consumer expectations are different to consumer behaviour in the physical realm.
“Online consumers are more impatient and most do not think of the payment as a separate experience to the purchase.
“For that reason we’re seeing ecommerce merchants shifting to specialist payments providers like us and others we provide services to.”
Monoova’s client base is heavily skewed to digitally-focused companies such as cross-border money transfer provider TransferWise and ASX-listed instalment payments company Splitit.