NewTech Friday: Paypa Plane – a streamlined payments platform that works for everyone involved

What led to the creation of Paypa Plane?

We started Paypa Plane in 2018. At that time, we were very interested in ongoing, subscription or scheduled payments (any payment really that had been set for a future date of processing). We were most interested in these types of payments as we could see they were increasing - not just in Australia but in many regions around the world- and we could also see that there were some persistent problems associated with them. 

These types of payments are driven by an ongoing relationship between the payee (usually a business) and the payer (usually a consumer), yet, the systems that were managing them never catered for that relationship. We saw businesses falling victim to an increasing rate of loss of cash-flow due to bounced payments and upset or lost customers. Typically, we saw increasing manual admin and increased customer service demands - fielding emails and phone calls related to payment management- to actually manage these payments taking a toll on the business too.  

On the other end you have payers - real people who need transparency around their own payments and be able to self-manage them. There is a lot consumer unease about ongoing or scheduled payments. People do not want to be surprised by money disappearing from their accounts or being locked into one card or bank account or having payment days fall on days that the rent is due or their pay hasn’t landed yet. People need to be able to change payment days, change dates, change payment methods on demand and not via phone or email and have a fully transparent and aggregated view of what is happening across all their accounts. 

The problems that businesses and payers are experiencing are all connected and current software solutions make it worse because they only fully serve the business. As a backdrop to all this, in many regions around the world - particularly in Australia right now - there is also a significant systems shift needed to incorporate real-time, data-enriched payments systems. 

This led us to our third stakeholder with increasing problems in this space - banks! Banks are faced with business clients who need better services and are increasingly turning to third parties. Combined with the tougher competitive landscape created by challenger banks and payment service providers, banks serving businesses of all sizes need now more than ever to stay relevant and super close to their customer. Though many banks are grappling with legacy systems, they are aware of the value that good data and better services can bring to the LTV of their business clients.

All of these factors coalesced and led us to rethink the way that payment software works so that we could truly address the needs of each party. We set out to build a platform or networked system that actually increased benefits to each party because it solved the problems of the other participants - compounding those benefits overtime with wider distribution and usage.

Could you present Paypa Plane's offer?

Paypa Plane is a payment system overlay - a platform designed to serve the entire ecosystem and solve all these complex problems for each stakeholder. Embedded in the banking experience and plugging in over the top of the payment rails, the system revolves around proprietary connection between a business and their customers called a Smart Payment Agreement. This link is powerful because it actually lives and evolves with the customer and the business through the lifecycle of their relationship and allows all parties to access features and functions beyond anything else in the market.

A Smart Payment Agreement is created when a business sends a digital payment request to their customer. The customer self-onboards, consents to the terms, and establishes their Smart Payment Agreement. From there, both parties can see all activity on that agreement (changes, history, schedules etc). Payers can self-manage aspects of the payment agreement and businesses can relax knowing that the system will protect their customer relationship and their cashflow without manual intervention. The Smart Payment Agreement is important because it allows for changes and self-management capabilities for both parties that would not exist without that connection. 

Among other things, these capabilities mean a dramatic reduction in failed payments and a responsive and customizable failed payment recovery flow that goes beyond the traditional ‘retry’ approach. This results in over 99% of cash flow captured for the business without manual intervention and, critically, happier customers. 

When this system is offered to businesses as part of their payment product suite (or merchant acquiring suite), we sit over the top of core payment systems. Gateways and account to account payment rails plug into the system as payment modules. The settlement flow remains unchanged. This is critical to ensure low barriers for banks to adopt the platform and to respect acquiring relationships already in place. Once in place, all payments resulting from Smart Payment Agreements have explicit consent-to-payment embedded in the payer onboarding. This means that the bank has assurance that businesses are operating in a compliant and protected environment. So, for the bank, Paypa Plane becomes a hub - uniting all the payment types into one experience for their business clients, driving further traffic into the transactional flows, increasing lifetime value of business clients and creating a valuable and significant competitive advantage.

What's coming next for Paypa Plane?

We have some significant commercial partnerships with banks here in Australia and we will continue to roll out the platform with these partners. We will also be supporting the launch of PayTo (NPPA’s new innovation for real-time account-to-account direct debits) via our platform. After some initial market trails in the US we will also start to expand further into that market this year.