Grow Finance joins Pismo as its first Australian client for card issuance
Australian non-bank business lender Grow Finance has partnered with Pismo to issue its small business-focused Mastercard credit cards within its native market.
Grow chooses Pismo for its first credit card offering
With a market launch scheduled for this September, the offering seeks to provide business owners with better cash flow, management and capital to help them improve their business.
According to the Australian Banking Association, of the 2.6 million businesses currently operating in Australia, 98% of them are SMEs. And while the sector has continued to blossom throughout this year, it has struggled, like much of the world’s SME community, to remain immune to the rising cost of goods and services.
Grow is responding to this with its latest offering, supporting its card issuance and Australia’s $410 billion SME segment with Pismo’s public cloud-native financial services platform.
Using Pismo’s processing platform, which currently manages around 42 million cards, has allowed Grow to develop its first credit card business without the need to build the infrastructure itself.
“While Pismo focuses on the technology, we focus on supporting Aussie SMEs to grow their businesses,” explains David Verschoor, executive director and co-CEO of Grow.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, Pismo is a technology company providing a processing platform for banking, payments and financial markets infrastructure. The platform averages 290 million transactions monthly.
In addition to its first Australian client Grow, Pismo’s card issuing infrastructure currently supports the likes of Banco Itaú, Latin America’s largest bank; BTG Pactual, the largest investment bank in the region; NG Cash, a fintech focused on generation Z; the German fintech N26 and the global bank Citi, among others.
It was recently announced that the payments giant Visa is to acquire Pismo for $1 billion cash, having competed against Mastercard to seal the deal. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year, and Pismo will retain its current management team.
