Illustration credit; Tsahi Levent-Levi on Flickr

The CEO of Australian online payment gateway provider eWay has taken it upon himself to try and coax more Australian businesses to embrace ecommerce by dramatically overhauling the speed at which businesses can gain a merchant account and get paid after transacting.

“We are going to change the speed of how long it takes to get a merchant account. Right now, if you try to get a merchant account, it takes four weeks, six weeks, six months,” eWay CEO and founder Matt Bullock says. “We are pushing it down to four days, and then we will change that down to four hours next year, then eventually get that down to nought hours. That is by getting rid of a whole bunch of banking processes which are busted, and us fixing them and doing them properly.”

The increased speed comes at a price: 2.2 percent and AU$0.30 per transaction, and an AU$25 per month fee. However, that also includes 24/7 support, which banks don’t offer.

Bullock says the higher cost won’t deter merchants, as they are more concerned with the issue of the time taken to get online, get trading, and get paid.

“You talk to the [payment] gateway [company], they say, ‘go away and talk to a bank’,” Bullock says. “You talk to the bank, and that is a long and painful process; sometimes you finish through it and sometimes you don’t. We’re saying, ‘talk to us, you don’t need to talk to your bank. We will do it all and we’ll do it quicker than the banks have ever done it before.’”

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