Foreign exchange company OFX has acquired payments start-up Paytron Holdings, which has a business handling accounts receivable workflow, multi-currency accounts and card capabilities. OFX earns most of its revenue from corporate customers but chief executive Skander Malcolm said it was missing out on many of its clients’ small cross-border payments. For those, clients are using corporate cards. OFX hopes the integration of Paytron’s platform into its business will allow it to capture the small payments part of its corporate clients’ cross-border transactions. OFX released its 2022/23 financial results yesterday, reporting strong growth in revenue and profit. Net income rose 43.4 per cent to A$201.2 million over the 12 months to March on a 17.9 per cent increase in transaction value to $39.1 billion. Net profit rose 25.6 per cent to $31.4 million. Revenue from the corporate segment rose 89.4 per cent and made up more than 50 per cent of total revenue. Malcolm hopes the investment in Paytron will allow it to continue that growth. “Paytron will give us the ability to issue cards and win the enterprise business that goes to corporate cards now,” he said. “Paytron will also allow us to provide invoice management solutions.” Other parts of the business did not perform as well. Revenue in the online seller segment fell 6.9 per cent “due to fewer transactions, in line with e-commerce market softness”. Consumer business dropped off in the second half of the year and revenue from consumers was flat year-on-year. Malcolm said OFX targets the high end of the consumer market, and rising inflation and volatile markets dampened activity in areas like cross-border property transactions and wealth management flows. The company also suffered a big increase in bad and doubtful debts, which rose from $116,000 in 2021/22 to $2.5 million in 2022/23. Malcolm said most of that loss came from fraud activity in North America. He said the company has invested in fraud detection and prevention systems and had a record level of fraud prevention during the year. “Bad and doubtful debts below 1 per cent of revenue is a good outcome for this industry. We think our systems are working,” he said.