The infrastructure enabling the payments industry – as in what goes on behind the scenes of millions of cards and billions of transactions – is complex, not always very secure or convenient, and difficult to change.
But payments are like the bloodstream of the body or a transport system – when they are highly functioning, everything is made better and more innovation can be enabled.
Group Chairman and CEO of Australian payments
start-up Verrency, David Link.
Group Chairman and CEO of Australian payments service provider start-up Verrency, David Link, believes his company’s technology has the potential to bypass many of the problems associated with adding features or making changes to the legacy systems of issuers and processors.
The problem for many of these organisations is that their legacy systems are often old – the result of not wanting to disrupt a banking or financial system – and the fallout that would result.
“The beauty about Verrency is that we can connect to a bank’s existing payments network quickly and cost effectively to enable them to provide innovative new services to their customers,” Link says.
“In many aspects – including the ability to provide ‘invisible’ rewards or loyalty point spend anywhere, without any merchant integration whatsoever – this is something the industry has not seen before.”
Because of this, Link believes Verrency will open a plethora of opportunities for banks to provide businesses to innovate.
Imagine, for example, being able to buy your $5 morning coffee with your frequent flyer points or via discounts from the merchant but without any merchant technical integration?
The same if you want to use Ether or Bitcoin at your local news-agent.
Lost or stolen cards usually means canceling your entire card.
Not with Verrency. Verrency’s fraud offering means that most fraud is blocked before it occurs and also that you don’t lose full usage of your card if it does occur!
Verrency can activate lock, block and spending limit controls” before “ “and also issue virtual cards to enable consumer bill payments – putting the consumer in control of their payments.
Link is the driving force behind Verrency and has spent the past year putting together a strong executive management team in Australia.
Its London-based global HR manager is now looking for executives in the US and UK to expand the business globally.
“Australia is an important market for us given the advancement of payments technology and consumer behaviour, however, our target markets as we expand globally will be the US, UK, Europe, and other Asia Pacific geographies.
Verrency’s value proposition is highly applicable to the US market, for example, which is where a lot of our forward attention is focused.”
Group Chairman and CEO of Australian payments start-up Verrency, David Link.
Working with a global organisation is nothing new for Link. As a Managing Director, he spent 26 years with global professional services company Accenture working in the US, UK, Europe and Asia. The US-native, who was raised in Washington DC, is using that global experience to drive Verrency and his experience that he garnered in the payments space.
“I wanted to create a business that could truly drive innovation globally at scale, a global team that I was incredibly proud to be a part of, and to do good for society all at the same time. I think the payments sector was ripe for this type of innovation and that Verrency has the potential to achieve all these objectives and more.
“Pace can be slow in the payments sector however Verrency enables change through its Innovation-as-a-Service in a fast and cost effective way.
“Already we have multiple high profile clients in our commercial pipeline and have signed several initial agreements.”
Link puts a lot of the company’s early success down to CTO Euan Walker and Commercial Director Michael Moore.
Walker brings more than 20 years of complex technology delivery to the business, having worked across the banking, insurance and telecom sectors. Most recently he was a technology executive at ANZ so understands the hurdles large banks encounter.
Moore is a seasoned executive with more than 15 years experience in Australasia, North America and Europe. He has been an executive at MasterCard Australasia in the digital and emerging payments space. Link said Verrency has already undertaken a successful pre-commercialisation funding round – raising $US4 million.
Recently it launched its Series A funding round, seeking a minimum $US15 million.
For more information go to www.verrency.com.