Over the last few days, after reading the recent Wrkr announcement regarding Link Group's updated MSA with Wrkr, the latest SoW 3 developments and the dot point mentioning Wrkr priorities for FY 23/24 to build out Wrkr Pay - Payments 2.0, prompted me to looked into the Australian payment rails and the companies that operate them. I did this primarily for myself to understand if there could be any major opportunities where the Wrkr Platform could benefit by building a Digital Wallet into the Wrkr Pay Platform 2.0 for all employees/workers and superfund members.
What I found is that if Wrkr achieves critical mass, meaning, that when Wrkr passes the 5 million or so workers/employees, that has been spoken of recently in Wrkr announcements, Wrkr may be in a position to offer a solution to the greater retail payments space. Wrkr could potentially cause an uptake of workers into an Australian Made Digital Wallet service keeping the major players in the forefront of the Australian Payments Industry and maintaining an edge over big tech giants who control the app stores and also control the functionality of a "non app store owner" Digital Wallet offering.
The Digital Wallet now appears to me and IMO, such an important and lucrative service to have under the hood of your transaction platform these days, not only enabling the ever widening range of possibilities with retail payments and loyalty platforms, but foremost connecting the Digital Wallet via the latest software technology to the other mundane transactions associated with platforms like Wrkr that facilitate Payroll transactions and Super Contributions.
One major benefit built into a Digital Wallet could be allowing a workers pay to be made available instantly after a nominated time frame of work, for example, getting paid for hours worked in a day, not weekly, fortnightly or even monthly time periods, whilst also calculating and facilitating the necessary tax and super contributions.
I believe that a Digital Wallet of that description should/could only be offered by a company like Wrkr, that is already integrated and trusted moving the private data associated with Payroll transactions and Superannuation contribution transactions. We already know Wrkr has achieved the trusted standard in Australia and possesses many other relevant credentials needed in the Regtech industry to facilitate that service.
I've found the major players/operators in Australia are banks and the transactions facilitator mother company, which is owned by a, member - owned model.
Australian Payments Plus now owns BPAY Group, eftpos and NPP Australia.
eftpos owns Beemit! I would argue that, Beemit may be struggling to gain acceptance even though Beemit boasts over 1 million users, they still have a way to go as far as being the go to in the Digital Wallet market in Australia. I'll post more about this in another post.
If Wrkr built out a Wrkr Pay Wallet, that could be legitimately offered to "workers" for a greater purpose than just the benefits of retail transactions, loyalty points safekeeping and spending how would an established payment rails provider, like eftpos then view little old Wrkr?
It would appear to me, Wrkr may be moving into a win, win situation through the Link Group partnership, not only gaining in the Clearing House payments arena, but potentially in the retail payments arena.
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