Reimagining real-time payments & reconciliations with Cuscal

Payment-automation specialist Monoova is helping businesses benefit from the instant, always-on and data-rich capabilities of the New Payments Platform (NPP), driving the digital transformation of large, ongoing transaction flows to make managing business payments easy.

As one of a very small group of payment service providers to be enabled on the NPP, Monoova recognised the potential of this transformative piece of payments infrastructure early, innovating on top of Cuscal’s NPP solution and leveraging the platform’s capabilities to help businesses manage their payment workflows more effectively. Fully automating how business receive, make and reconcile payments in real-time.

Automating the way money moves

Rolling out real-time payment capabilities in September 2019, Monoova has leveraged Cuscal’s NPP APIs and services to integrate real-time payments with their proprietary Automated Payment Service (APS).

A single integration with the APS platform provides scaling businesses with greater visibility and control over their incoming and outgoing payments, with the ability to exchange payment information and instructions in real-time. The optimisation of payment workflows has been a specific focus for Monoova to make managing business payments easy through enabling automated, real-time reconciliation of real-time receivables by issuing unique account identifiers and PayIDs to clients who, in turn, can associate these identifiers with individual customers.

This holds the key to improving both the experience of Monoova’s clients’ customers and the client treasury teams, making payments happen successfully and invisibly, with automated reconciliation to track incoming and outgoing payments to better manage the flow of available funds.

Since connecting to the NPP through Cuscal, Monoova’s growth has been double initial estimates and that trend shows no sign of slowing down with clients valuing the real-time processes that Monoova has enabled for both receivables and payables, automating manual processes that can be an obstacle to growth.

Monoova Client Story - HNRY

Launched in 2018, Hnry is an all in-one accounting service that takes care of all the financial admin for contractors, freelancers, sole traders and the self employed - allowing them to focus on getting the job done, rather than worrying about tax and compliance. Hnry provides a pay-as-you-go service, handling Invoicing, Expenses, Payments, Taxes and lodgements. As Australasia's fastest-growing accountant and tax agency, Hnry helps tens of thousands of individuals to focus on doing what they do best, without having to worry about the burden of financial admin.

Central to the Hnry service is the ability to provide bank accounts for their customers to receive their self-employed income into. Through using Monoova’s technology, Hnry are able to quickly provision unique bank accounts for their customers, enabling them to accept inbound payments and distribute outbound payments to the ATO, savings, superannuation as well as to their personal bank accounts.

Given the nature of the customers Hnry is dealing with - the ability to receive secure, Osko-enabled payments is incredibly important to support the lifestyle of Australian sole traders. Moreover, the ability to use BPAY via Monoova to make automated allocations to long term savings accounts and superannuation helps their customers meet their long-term financial goals.

Monoova has helped Hnry scale in the Australian market and their technology will continue to help Hnry ease the tax and financial burden for the hundreds of thousands of self-employed Australians.

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Monoova client story  - NIUM

Nium is a leading embedded fintech company that recently became the first global B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia. They provide banks, payment providers and businesses of any size, with access to global payment services via one API. Their platform helps businesses pay and get paid across the globe, with services for payouts, pay-ins, card issuance and banking-as-aservice. Once connected to the Nium platform, businesses can pay out in more than 100 currencies to over 190 countries.

A core offering is Nium’s card issuance-as-aservice. This solution allows businesses to launch their own card programs in more than 40 countries. A benefit of this solution is that clients can instantly transfer funds onto their cards and top-up their value as they go.

Given the nature of the solution, Nium couldn’t offer this level of service in Australia without the ability to receive and reconcile credits via the NPP for clients. They wanted cardholders to experience real-time card top-ups. Thus, turned to Monoova. By tapping into Monoova’s pioneering payments solutions, Nium has been able to launch its card issuance-as-a-service solution in Australia and help local fintechs issue company branded cards of their own.

Nium’s partnership with Monoova allows cardholders to top up their virtual wallets instantly, as each cardholder is provided with a unique virtual account number that can be used to receive and reconcile direct credits from other bank accounts in real-time.

Since integrating with Monoova, Nium has seen significant traction in the growth of its cards business in Australia. This, in turn, has empowered many local companies to go-to-market and scale faster than ever before, like Melbourne-based travel fintech Pelikin.

“It made no sense that you would send a real-time message asking someone to wait two days for funds arrive. Consumers expect and deserve better than that. Businesses, therefore, need to do better than that. At Monoova, we always believed that money should move at fast as information. Our partnership with Cuscal has made that a reality for some of the most innovative companies in Australia.”

Christian Westerlind Wigstrom, CEO, Monoova

Reimagining real-time to enable end-to-end payments automation

As the most frequently requested capability for the NPP, third-party payment initiation will help to drive the next phase of growth for the platform and payments-automation businesses like Monoova. Known as PayTo, this new service will create opportunities to reimagine the way a business requests and initiates payments, making it possible to automate more payment processes and move them seamlessly into the background. PayTo will support a diverse range of payment use cases, and importantly it will provide businesses and consumers a genuine real-time account-to-account payment alternative to direct debit arrangements, overcoming some of the friction experienced today with existing methods of delegated payment authority.

More than 1 in 5 companies accepting direct debit payments indicate that 25% of these payments are dishonoured¹.

1 in 5 consumers find it frustrating getting charged an amount more than they expect when paying by direct debit, with Millennials significantly more likely than other generations to be frustrated².

As part of the first cohort of institutions to offer PayTo when it becomes available from mid-2022, Monoova’s clients will be amongst the first in Australia to be able to initiate payments from a funding account with the payer customer’s authorisation.

Building on Cuscal’s PayTo Initiation APIs and services, that manage the orchestration of PayTo agreement requests and payment initiation messages between ecosystem Participants and the NPPA’s Mandate Management Service (MMS), integration of PayTo services within Monoova’s APS will provide their clients with access to an extensive suite of client-facing APIs to offer a true end-to-end payment automation solution.

Once PayTo is available Monoova's solution will incorporate mandate creation, payment initiation, clearing, settlement and reconciliation of receivables. All in real-time and all through one simple API integration. The speed and certainty of the PayTo services Monoova will offer in partnership with Cuscal ensures that businesses will never be left waiting. Improving customer experience outcomes and helping to build stronger customer relationship while reducing instances of failed payments.

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Once PayTo is available, Monoova will focus on four overarching use cases:

Replacement of current direct debit setups;

Real-time funding of large disbursements (e.g. payroll and dividends);

Automation of flows in the context of custodial and trust arrangements (e.g. wealth management);

and Adding payment options for e-commerce.

“Monoova’s success shows the commercial advantage that can be realised by moving early and building innovative solutions on top of Cuscal’s flexible and scalable NPP solution. It’s exciting that we are now leveraging our extensive real-time payments experience to facilitate the smooth flow of complex payment initiation instructions, enabling early adopters of PayTo like Monoova to capitalise on this new capability.“

Nathan Churchward, Head of Product, Emerging Services, Cuscal

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References

1. RFi Commercial Banking Council, October 2020.

2. RFi Digital Banking Survey, March 2021.

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_{Monoova Payments Pty Ltd (ABN 38 126 015 227) trading as Monoova (“Monoova”) is the authorised representative of Monoova Global Payments Pty Ltd (ABN 77 106 249 852; AFSL No. 421414 ), the issuer of the Combined Financial Services Guide & Product Disclosure Statement Non-Cash Payment Products and Services dated 20 September 2023. (FSG/PDS). This information is given in summary form and does not purport to be complete. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Monoova does not assume responsibility for, the content, accuracy or completeness of the information presented. Before acting on any information you should consider the appropriateness of the information having regard to these matters and seek independent legal, financial and tax advice. To the extent that the information contained above is sourced from third parties or provides link to third party websites, Monoova takes no responsibility for the accuracy, currency, reliability and correctness of any information included in the material provided by third parties nor for the accuracy, currency, reliability and correctness of links or references to information sources (including internet sites) operated by third parties.}

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