Global tech giant Worldpay has officially launched in Australia after a two-year process of obtaining a local licence.
The payment processing service is now available to Australian businesses, with its customers already including ASOS and Expedia.
Worldpay is a platform to help businesses manage the complex payments landscapes and allow them to accept as many payment types as possible.
It now has 400,000 customers worldwide and posted revenue of £29.8 million in 2015.
Worldpay completed a massive IPO on the London Stock Exchange that valued the tech company at $10 billion (£6 billion).
The Australian launch is another important milestone in Worldpay’s path to global domination, global head of product development Kevin Dallas says.
“It’s another step along the way,” Dallas tells StartupSmart.
“This is the next one along the journey and it is still an important gap for us here in Asia which is a focus of a lot of our expansions.
“It’s an important and attractive market both for merchants selling globally and for global markets selling locally here.”
Dallas says Worldpay offers an unrivaled service to Australian businesses.
“What we’re able to offer them is a different type of payments partner than has been here in the past,” he says.
“We have a very global footprint and payment is all that we do. We’re very focused around optimising the experience for them and their customers, and driving better transaction acceptance rates than anybody else.
“We offer a very focused and integrated solution with access to the world and now we’re offering them their home market as well through one connection.”
Worldpay won’t be setting up an Australian office until the product has gained traction locally, he says.
“We typically get the product in first and as the customer need grows we consider putting people locally on the ground,” Dallas says.
“What we would like to see in a year is a well-established Australian customer-base in addition to the international brands already working with us.”
Dallas says that the Worldpay offering is especially useful for Australian startups looking to rapidly expand globally.
“Our natural customer acquisition point is when a business is expanding into multiple markets and realising how complex global payments can be,” he says.
“Our advice to startups is that they should start thinking about the infrastructure in terms of payments and other systems they’ll need right from the start.
“You need to put the right infrastructure for international growth in place from the beginning rather than expand rapidly and discover that all the back-end systems are holding the business back.”
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Denham Sadler is a former editor of StartupSmart. He was previously a journalist at the publication and has worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, the Saturday Paper and the ABC. In his spare time he likes puns and jaffles.
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