Monoova is positioning itself as an alternative to POLi Payments, with the Australia Post-operated service due to close in September.
Monoova founder and CEO Christian Westerlind Wigstrom
Monoova
The Australian B2B payments provider made its pitch to corporate users of POLi on LinkedIn.
“With POLi Payments set to wind up their Australian operations by September 30, if you’re looking for an alternative provider for account-to-account payments, talk to Monoova,” the company said.
The payment solutions company said it could offer faster transactions, cost efficiencies and improved security features over POLi.
“Monoova’s all-in-one API can enable one-off payments, account top-ups, regular transactions and direct debits,” it said.
“We will work closely with you to identify the best solution tailored to your specific needs and provide integration support for transitioning from POLI PayID APIs to Monoova API.”
The Sydney-based payments company has processed around $87 billion since launching in 2017.
Monoova founder and CEO Christian Westerlind Wigstrom told iTnews that POLi Payments “was solving a very specific problem” that required users to “leave the merchants app or website to go to your bank to then pay into the merchant’s bank account.”
“POLi solved that very elegantly by making it possible for you to not leave the merchant website and instead essentially allow the merchant website, through POLi, to go to your bank account for you and make a transaction.”
However, while POLi is used as a way for customers to make near real-time bank transfers to pay for goods and services, some banks such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia had stopped allowing customers to use it, citing concerns around the security aspects of the payments.
To use POLi, customers had to turn over their account login details to the provider, which then completed payments on their behalf.
Monoova solves consumer security concerns via the digital direct debit service platform, PayTo.
“Because of PayTo, you no longer have to hand out any personal login details,” Westerlind Wigstrom said.
“In fact, it’s almost the other way around, it’s additionally secure because the way you authorise the transaction is through your banking app, just as a push notification.
He added that while Monoova “is a strong successor to POLi” it is quite different: “I don’t think we’ll ever see anyone doing anything like POLi again because of safety concerns”.
“I believe Monoova is a strong successor to POLi. We’re not a replacement for POLi in the sense [that] we do the same thing. We’re just a different company.”
POLi found other uses in recent years by allowing customers to deposit money with cryptocurrency exchanges that they could then use to buy coins.
Westerlind Wigstrom said Monoova is also already servicing parts of the crypto industry.
Monoova is part of the Reserve Bank (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) pilot project, which is exploring the use cases of CBDCs, and released a sample of submissions by industry participants.
“What excites us about the CBDC, and the reason we are one of the very, very few participants, is the fact that we think the future of money is very likely to be supported by blockchain,” Westerlind Wigstrom said.
“I think it is the first of a lot of very interesting steps towards having a new type of underlying technology infrastructure for our everyday currency”.