National Australia Bank pens merchant acquiring deal with Pollinate
National Australia Bank has signed a deal with Pollinate Networks to improve its merchant acquiring for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
London-based Pollinate has raised £70m in funding
NAB has also invested in Pollinate, bringing the London-based fintech’s total raised to £70 million.
Pollinate is deploying its cloud-based platform, which it says will help NAB’s SME customers “better manage and grow their businesses.”
The fintech says its platform brings digital services to SMEs through a single platform.
“Real-time data that delivers greater insights into what customers want, when and how they want it, can be transformative to a small business,” says NAB group executive for business and private banking, Andrew Irvine.
“Leveraging Pollinate’s platform, NAB will be able to give businesses the information they need to make decisions about their daily sales at their fingertips.”
NAB is the second bank to use Pollinate’s technology. The firm has launched two solutions with NatWest: Tyl and Payit.
Tyl, unveiled in September 2019, offers card machine and online payment solutions such as link payments and payment pages.
Pollinate launched Payit with NatWest in June 2020. It says it has reduced the cost of online payments by 25%, based on an average transaction of £80.
“Banks around the world have had a difficult decade, but they remain the only ones in the payment chain who can connect directly with both merchants and consumers,” says Al Lukies, Pollinate founder and CEO.
“NAB is ideally placed to create a virtuous circle between the bank, its business customers and the communities they serve.”
Earlier this year NAB signed a multi-year cloud deal with Microsoft. Around 1,000 of the bank’s applications will move to Microsoft Azure as part of the deal.
Related: NAB and CommBank race to launch no-interest credit cards
