Why It's Time to Level the Paying Field

I would argue that it was always time to level the paying field.

We’ve spent the last few years carving out our place in the market, understanding what the market responds to, and what it really needs. We had a pretty good idea of what it needed because we started out as merchants ourselves, not as bankers trying to solve a merchant-consumer problem. We learned a lot, and delivered game-changing solutions to merchants in a range of verticals, all with slightly different issues that grind their gears.

But there’s a particular confluence of factors accelerating the payments revolution right now. These last few years we’ve all become accustomed to living remote, online lives where we’ve had to change many behaviours. Shopping and transacting look very different to many of us now, and consumer expectations have shifted. We expect just about everything to be as fast and frictionless as sending and receiving text messages.

Behind the scenes, there’s foundational change pushing the revolution along. With awareness that legacy payments infrastructure and financial systems were not built for a modern, on-demand economy. Australia’s New Payments Platform [NPP]–led by the RBA in an extraordinary display of coordination between financial institutions–built the real-time payment rails the digital economy needs where speed, data and precision are central to success.

The pull-factor of customer and merchant expectations, and the push-factor of the NPP have aligned at this moment in time. Throw in open banking frameworks and a thriving, creative FinTech community, and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the way money and value move through an economy.

Now all of that might seem pretty exciting but, for merchants, there’s still significant expense and impediments to overcome to take advantage of the opportunity directly. But, what Zepto really does is break down those barriers to entry. We make real-time payments technology and open banking capability super accessible through a simple, modern and standard API. Design your payment experience, plug it in, and away you go with lots of automation and flexibility. 

And why is that important? Ultimately, it unlocks payments innovation which–in turn–loops all the way back around resulting in both better consumer and merchant outcomes.

For me, the key word right now is accessibility. Prior to Zepto, these options weren’t particularly accessible, if at all.

When we set out as Split Payments, we barged our way into this market pretty naively. We knew there was a problem, we had an idea of how to solve it, but we didn't anticipate all the roadblocks that would be put in front of us. We didn't really understand the shortcomings of the payment rails that existed at the time. As entrepreneurs and ex-merchants, we had never let someone saying “that can’t be done” stop us.

A few years ago, I would have said that we just didn't fully get the bigger picture, but we're at a stage now where we do. That’s why it’s time for our business to have a new face befitting our maturity and evolution. Zepto is an order of magnitude, and a zeptosecond is the smallest measurable unit of time, and that idea captures accuracy, precision and speed which are the backbone of Zepto’s offering.

Welcome to Zepto. 

Let’s level the paying field.