On 07 September 2023, we hosted our 5th Zepto Connect webinar. It took attendees under the PayTo hood, and answered some technical questions about this exciting real-time payment method. Here's what went down.
Australia’s newest real-time payment method — PayTo® — is taking off as businesses engage with its possibilities, and consumers embrace its benefits.
In previous Zepto Connect webinars we’ve looked at Wpay’s plans for PayTo, and the role PayTo might play as a replacement for Australia's POLi payment solution. In this session, Zepto's solutions experts had a tinker under the hood, taking a look at some technical aspects of PayTo, and walking through a hypothetical transaction flow or two.
To kick things off, Senior Solutions Engineer — Jaimie Wistaff — took us through a pair of end-to-end PayTo payment flows: A single e-commerce purchase use case; then a recurring subscription payment flow.
In each case, we see both a hypothetical user experience, as well as the sequence of events taking place under the hood.
Importantly, Jaimie highlights the two separate actions in a PayTo flow: The PayTo agreement, then the PayTo payment which can be initiated once the customer has approved the agreement in their mobile/online banking environment.
"Really, from the moment the customer puts in their information and clicks 'check-out', things start moving. And the moment they authorise that PayTo agreement everything happens in real time," says Jaimie.
During the webinar, we cover a lot of territory. Jaimie and Zepto's Head of Solutions & Customer Success, Justin Steer — and our Product Manager for PayTo, Tom Campbell — answer the following questions:
- What's the difference between a PayTo 'agreement' and a PayTo 'mandate'?
- What does a business need to do to facilitate a PayTo transaction?
- Is mobile banking the only way for a customer to authorise a payment agreement?
- What role does data play in a PayTo payment flow, and how can this benefit both the end customer and the merchant?
- Do banks offer merchants web hooks for payment confirmation via PayTo? Or is that the issue solved by Zepto?
- What does 'real-time' actually mean? And how do the banks handle these real-time payments?
- With regard to the integration process, what does it take to get your business live with PayTo?
- What are the most common 'unhappy paths' we're experiencing at the moment with PayTo?
- For merchants who have implemented it, what is customer adoption and perception looking like for PayTo?
- Are there any NPP standards around migrating existing direct debit agreements to PayTo agreements?
- Even though it is a technical session, it’s accessible to anyone with an interest in better business and consumer payments experiences.
You can watch the full replay below.
The webinar concludes with a great question from session host Chris Ponton-Dwyer, Zepto's Senior Enterprise Sales Executive. He asks, "What's one piece of advice you would like everyone to leave with today when thinking about a PayTo implementation?"
Here's how our team answered
"Start now. It's still early days, so you have time to work with your customers, understand their user experience, and make tweaks before PayTo volumes really pick up. That would be my biggest recommendation. Start now while the volume is still picking up so that you can really customise the PayTo flow. And by the time volumes are up there, you'll already be a PayTo pro."
Jaimie Wistaff, Senior Solutions Engineer
"Focus on customer centricity 100%. Deeply understanding your own customers' needs and your own business use case is vital."
Tom Campbell, Product Manager for PayTo
"We've been working very closely with a number of organisations who are thinking about PayTo in the context of new use cases. It's exciting to see PayTo being viewed as more than just a replacement for traditional direct debit, and evolving across e-commerce into different areas. So my piece of advice would be to think about how PayTo can solve some of those challenging business problems that perhaps other payment methods don't necessarily fit into, or handle efficiently."
Justin Steer, Head of Solutions & Customer Success
PayTo is a registered trademark of NPP Australia Limited. All information shared in this webinar recording is general in nature, please consider our Product Disclosure Statement and your own needs before acting on any information presented in it.