Novatti Group Limited (ASX:NOV) Managing Director Peter Cook discusses the company’s strategy of partnering with Tier 1 companies, including Ripple, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.
Melissa Darmawan: Hello. Melissa Darmawan for the Finance News Network. Joining me from Novatti Group is CEO, Peter Cook. Peter, welcome back.
Peter Cook: Good morning Mel and Fin News Network.
Melissa Darmawan: A few weeks ago, Novatti announced a partnership with Google Pay and Samsung Pay, building on an existing list of tier one global partnerships. This week, the company announced a partnership with Ripple. Tell us a bit more about that.
Peter Cook: Ripple really is a very innovative global network. Its cryptocurrency or digital asset is called XRP, and it is the third largest of the cryptocurrencies with actually a market cap I think at the moment of about US 27 billion. But our work with Ripple is around cross-border payments and integrating into their network, which has about 300 banks and financial services companies that use the Ripple network for very fast, accurate transactions, cross-border payments.
From Novatti’s point-of-view, we can be a major partner of Ripple’s in Australia for both sending funds from Australia to, well, initially Southeast Asia, but then globally and on the near term roadmap, for bringing funds into Australia and settling out through the new payments platform for instant payments. Essentially, for our cross-border payments division, we have now partnered with one of the major networks in the world.
Melissa Darmawan: And exactly what is Novatti seeking to achieve with this partnership with Ripple as opposed to the other partnerships you announced a few weeks ago?
Peter Cook: This partnership is very much about building one of the pillars, which is our cross-border payments. If you look at, say, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or even our Visa issuing partnership from late last year, that’s really all about building out card issuing. At the moment, we’re building a payment service provider business or payment banking business, which is issuing of cards. It is accepting payments for merchants and businesses. It’s doing subscription billing and it’s doing cross-border payments. We have a hypothesis that as COVID has driven this acceleration of cashless and digital payments, that there are many services that consumers and businesses need, and we’re able to help in multiple ways.
In terms of these partnerships, what it’s really showing is that as a public listed company with licenses, technology and clients, we can pair up with many of these global brands and accelerate the deployment of these services.
Melissa Darmawan: Aside from fast tracking the group’s international expansion, what should we expect from Novatti in 2021?
Peter Cook: Well, for the last three years, we’ve been growing at about 50% per year at the revenue line. The quarter just finished, the September quarter. We were what we call normalized debit profitable, about $100,000, which was our first time. And we’re fully funded in the sense that we raised $10 million in early July for growth capital and we’re driving very hard with some of that funding to hire staff and grow our businesses.
In terms of 2021, coming off the back of COVID, the acceleration towards digital payments, growing our management team and staff and working with some of these new partnerships, we’re really trying to continue or accelerate that 50% per annum growth.
Melissa Darmawan: Peter, last question. Is there anything else you’d like our viewers to know? Peter Cook, thanks for the update.
Peter Cook: Thanks, Mel. Thanks, Fin News Network.
Ends