With all this talk of PayTo replacing traditional direct debit, Zepto Founder and Executive Director, Matt Cheers, says there’s plenty of life yet in Zepto’s standard-setting direct debit solution.
One of the first things we did at Zepto — when we were still called Split Payments — was revolutionise direct debit for Australian merchants. Even today, our offering still delivers the fastest direct debit settlement in the market. We’re incredibly proud of it, but what else makes it so special?
For starters, our automated, real-time enduring consent framework lets merchants manage fully-compliant digital Direct Debit Request Service Agreements — so no more paper forms completed by hand and kept in a folder somewhere in the back office never to be seen again.
Add a few layers of Zepto smarts over the top of legacy direct entry collection mechanics, and our merchant partners have better control of payment initiation, can confidently collect one-off and recurring payments.
But the biggest point of difference has always been that Zepto’s direct debit solution provides access to every banking exchange point. What that enables is for merchants to select the exchange point that will most likely deliver a successful collection for any given customer — not just the one [or two] exchange points offered by their bank. Build in some open banking capabilities on top of that, and you’re able to create a picture of every customer’s credit events and real-time financial position.
You can't collect funds if there are insufficient funds in the target account, but align your collection attempts with credit events and the nearest exchange point, and you can reduce failed collections and dishonour fees. Zepto's direct debit is a clever, nimble and reliable way to collect funds with confidence.
And now more than ever before, with real-time payments, NPP payouts and instant wages, Australian consumers are getting paid between the exchange points. They're getting paid on-demand, after hours, even on weekends and public holidays.
So if you're a merchant and you’re restricting yourself to a single daily, weekday-only direct debit collection attempt, you’re up against it. You can only imagine the impact on cash flow of all of those failed collections. Not to mention customers furious at copping another dishonour fee.
So how do we enable access to each of those exchange points?
Put simply, that’s the way we built our infrastructure. It seemed obvious from the earliest moments of our payments journey, that merchants should have access to every exchange point, every day. That way, they could create the payment flow that suited them, not their banking partner.
Our purpose is to give our customers access to the most flexible and modular paytech toolkit available anywhere to create their own perfect payment flow solution.
Matt Cheers
We are fundamentally a customer-centric solutions creator. We don't ever tell our merchant partners when to direct debit, they have complete control over whether they access the first exchange or the last exchange of the day for any given customer, they craft their own story.
We just give them the tools and the access to all those exchange points, and they can time their direct debits to maximise the likelihood of success, and squeeze more out of the traditional direct debit lemon.
Lemonade, anyone?
The author
