Payment Expert’s Fintech Unwrapped delivers the latest and developing news that has shaped the sector over the course of the week.
This week, Westpac has partnered with Mastercard to provide virtual cards to Australian customers, Payhawk reports record growth from its finance orchestration services, and Paytently launched its own take of Pay by Bank.
Mastercard rolls out virtual cards in Australia with Westpac
Mastercard formed a partnership with Westpac to launch a new embedded virtual card for the Australian banking clients using Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
Westpac will leverage Mastercard’s virtual cards and Oracle’s Cloud ERP to gain real-time visibility of their system records, while also boosting control and improving working capital management for commercial payments.
The automated process also enables Westpac businesses to remove manual intervention and seeks to free-up more time for finance teams to focus on other payment priorities.
“By embedding our virtual card technology into enterprise workflows like the Oracle Cloud ERP, we are removing long-standing friction and empowering organisations and businesses across Asia Pacific to operate at the scale and speed of today’s economy,” said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial and New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific at Mastercard.
Payhawk sees growth in financial orchestration services
Payhawk has seen enhanced adoption of its finance orchestration services over the past year by achieving a 78% increase in annual recurring revenue to $46.2m (€39.5m).
In its 2024 financial results, net revenue retention (NRR) grew 173.5% as customers expanded their use of the platform. Annualised average revenue per account (ARPA) also increased 21% to €25.9k, reflecting sustained up-market traction.
Payhawk provides corporate cards, expense management and accounts payable services to its customers to automate their financial infrastructure.
“We’re scaling with quality.“With NRR at 173.5% and ARPA up 21%, customers are adopting more of the platform as we move from spend management to finance orchestration – unifying cards, payables, and real-time payments with intelligent automation,” said Hristo Borisov, Co-Founder & CEO of Payhawk.
Paytently launches its take on A2A payments
Paytently has launched Paytently Open Banking in collaboration with Mastercard, an account-to-account payment method to enable customers to pay directly from their bank account.
Powered by Mastercard’s Open Finance service, Paytently Open Banking is the company’s answer to the surge in adoption of the Pay by Bank method. The service is an end-to-end solution that aims to provide secure bank authentication and speed up the payment process at the checkout.
Paytently will unveil the Paytently Open Banking solution at SBC Summit in Lisbon on September 18.
Episode Six and Trustly bring Pay by Bank to US
In partnership with Trustly, Episode Six will deliver a Pay by Bank payment method to its US retail merchants.
Episode Six will integrate Trustly’s card rail plugin to connect merchants to customers’ bank accounts to perform Pay by Bank. The fintech company also emphasised the integration will cause no operational charges and ensures a smoother integration process.
“Merchants don’t want complexity. They want faster, safer payments that simply work,” said Brian Muse-McKenney, Chief Revenue Officer at Episode Six.
“By combining Trustly’s Pay by Bank leadership with Episode Six’s modern infrastructure, we’re showing how new payment experiences can scale on top of existing systems. Its efficiency and speed without tradeoffs.”
Shahbandr launches first GenAI e-commerce tool
Saudi Arabian e-commerce company Shahbandr launched the “first-of-its-kind” Generative AI kit to formulate videos, audio and more multimedia elements in the payment gateway.
The company aims to assist merchants to keep pace with global AI advancements by adopting Shahbandr AI’s features directly without additional fees. The new suite reduces costs for merchants by enabling them to create all forms of content with the click of a button, instead of paying high costs for marketing and content creation.
“With Shahbandr AI, we have provided an integrated studio and kit of AI tools in Arabic that helps merchants generate content and marketing ideas without any additional costs, whether for subscribing to external AI platforms or hiring specialists for these tasks,” said Shady Abdelsbaheed, Co-Founder and CEO of Shahbandr.
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