Worldpay revenue rises, heads down under with Australia licence
Shane Happach, WorldPay
Global payments provider Worldpay reported a 10% rise in revenue to £2.1 billion for the six months to the end of June, and is expanding in Australia after winning its licence to process payments.
Despite recently suffering two weeks of turmoil, which saw millions of payments affected through one of its gateways, the company’s revenue went up thanks to attracting new customers and because the half-year results don’t factor in the outage.
Net revenues were up 16% to £539.7 million; and there was a pre-tax profit of £168.6 million for the six-month period.
Worldpay says it is “well positioned to deliver a good performance in the second half of the year”.
The firm is also getting ready to become completely separate from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). It has started moving customers onto its technology platform and expects the process to complete in the summer of 2017.
Private equity firms Bain Capital and Advent International bought Worldpay from RBS in 2010 for about £2 billion.
Expansion plans
Meanwhile, in Australia, it says its expansion plans are on track after getting its licence to process payments. Without the domestic licence, it would have to make more expensive cross-border transactions.
Shane Happach, managing director, global ecommerce at Worldpay, says it has “quickly found merchants trading in Australia are hungry for a payment solution that can help them drive up conversion rates and drive down the costs of running an online business across multiple markets”.
It says a number of global companies, including ASOS, Expedia, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Digital World International and Freelancer already use Worldpay.
According to Worldpay, ecommerce in Australia accounted for $42 billion of the country’s GDP in 2015, and the country’s consumers lead the world in terms of eWallet adoption, which is favoured by 21% of shoppers buying goods online.
