Nuvei Takes Three-Tiered Approach to Australia Launch

As China comes back online and adjoining markets like Hong Kong and nearby Singapore also reawaken from a COVID-induced slumber, that part of the world is hungry for digital innovation in payments and fraud prevention, creating an opening for platform players and their solutions.

One company seizing this opportunity is Montreal-based payments platform Nuvei, which announced its entry into Australia in March. The latest stop in its push into the wider Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, Australia is unique in many ways — a fact that isn’t lost on Nuvei strategists.

“We have essentially a three-tiered strategy that we believe will help us grow in that particular market,” Nuvei Global Expansion Officer of Digital Payments Praful Morar told PYMNTS.

Morar broke it down, saying the first phase is localizing global merchants already using the platform for cross-border trade into Australia. They’re getting a better footing, which has numerous advantages, not only for merchants, but for Australian consumers who currently purchase roughly 60% of their goods from outside the country, according to Nuvei research.

The second phase is helping Australian merchants expand to new geographies where Nuvei has a presence and can help Australian merchants and brands get quickly established. The third phase undergirds the entire effort, “supporting merchants that are more domestically based and wanting fast, efficient, frictionless payment solutions.

“So inbound, outbound and domestic,” Morar said.

Read also: Nuvei Launches Local Payment Acceptance for Cross Border eCommerce in 10 LATAM Countries

A New Foothold Leveraging a Faster Rail

While Nuvei’s Hong Kong presence acts as a gateway to the massive Chinese market of roughly 1.4 billion consumers, and its foothold in Singapore opens opportunities to access the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines — Australia is a prospect of a different nature, mostly involving itself and neighboring New Zealand.

Together, the two countries comprise tens of millions of consumers with high digital penetration and a modernized national payments infrastructure providing both the consumer demand and the local rails and schemes to meet it, which Nuvei intends to leverage.

“If you look at Australia today, it’s a singular market,” Morar said. Taken together with Hong Kong and Singapore moves, he added, “These are strategic points that touch very big regions. If you look at Southeast Asia in its own right, we’re touching a huge population. Same in Hong Kong and Australia. Australia and New Zealand touch around 30 million people,” which is a combined population with high internet and mobile penetration.

A core part of the strategy is using its capabilities to leverage Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP), the country’s answer to PIX in Brazil or FedNow in the United States, a near-real-time account-to-account transfer system that went live in 2018 and connects to some 60 banks.

Noting that Nuvei is focusing first on card rails including Visa, Mastercard, American Express and that primary grouping, Morar said NPP is now processing over $1 trillion across 1 billion transactions annually, making it a prime conduit for advancing digital commerce and services.

“NPP is fast, efficient, it’s bank-to-bank transfers, it’s C2B payments, and it’s something that the Australian consumer has really taken to,” Morar said. “We see that as a specific growing market. What we look at is enabling our merchants, both the ones that we’re bringing inbound or outbound, and giving them the options of frictionless fast payments that they need to ensure that the consumer is paying for goods and services in a method they understand, know and love.”

See also: Real-Time Payments Use to Drive Pay-by-Bank Options at Checkout

APMs at Home in the Birthplace of BNPL

With Australia being the cradle of the buy now, pay later (BNPL) boom that’s swept the globe in recent years, Morar said alternative payment methods (APMs) loom large in its plans there.

“Alternative payment methods are something that Nuvei spends a lot of time building out,” he said. “We currently have 603 alternative payment methods globally. So, again, the Australian merchant that will integrate into us not only has the Australian solutions, but if they, for example, wanted to trade [in a] country like Brazil, to sell goods and services [there], then a product like PIX, which is similar to NPP, is something they can [access].”

This extends to digital wallets, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, and others, which are already in heavy use in Australia with its well-established open-loop transit systems and deep retail base.

Attending this and all payments rollouts is the specter of fraud, and the Nuvei platform’s strong fraud detection and prevention capabilities are expected to see considerable uptake there.

Nuvei’s proprietary fraud management tool has a two-decade track record and is operational in more than 47 countries with 200 integrations worldwide, he said.

“What that brings is a wealth of knowledge, experience and understanding [of regional differences], but most importantly, domestically,” Morar said. “We can help [Australian] merchants grow out of their region or their domestic play, but safely, soundly and seamlessly. That’s a superb illustration of what we bring to our merchants. We help you grow, but keep you secure.”