BPS Technology Limited (ASX:BPS) CEO Trevor Dietz Discusses its Digital Enhancements, Strategy Platforms and Growth Plans BPS Technology Limited
(ASX:BPS) stands for Business Payment Systems. The DNA of our business is all about bringing a customer to a merchant. We focus on the SME market, which is the largest market existing in the world.
Now things are changing in the payments industry, cash is disappearing from most people’s wallets, ATMs aren’t as popular as they once were, cards are also on the sunset. But the one thing that will never change is the fact that a consumer needs to pay a merchant. And we’re in that payments space, bringing a consumer to a merchant, making a transaction happen, collecting a fee. That’s what we do, that’s the platform from which we operate.
We had quite a good half-year. Our revenues were $25.5 million, which was up on the same period of the previous year. EBITDA was $4.7 million, which was 4 per cent up and the NPAT came in at $3.5 million, which was 7.3 per cent up. And our earnings per share was 6 cents, which was 7.2 per cent up on the same period last year.
Our dividend was two cents per share, it was unfranked, because we’re a newly listed company and we will pay tax this coming year. And on that basis, unfranked but coming forward, it will be franked.
Bartercard is already the largest trade exchange in the world. We have more than 24,000 merchants and more than 50,000 cardholders. As a platform, we do 1.8 million transactions worth more than $600 million per year. We operate in eight countries and we’ve just sold licences in India and China, the two most populous nations in the world.
As a business, we’ve changed quite a deal with Bartercard this year, in terms of how we sell the product. We’ve gone away from having a very large upfront fee to join, which was anywhere between $1,500 and $2,500. And those old merchants used to pay $39 a month. Now it’s free to join. So now it’s free to join and you only pay $99 a month, as a merchant. And if you join Bartercard, you get Bucqui for free and if you join Bucqui, you get Bartercard for free. It’s $99 a month and you get both.
Bucqi is a mobile app; it sits on consumer’s mobile device. It’s phone agnostic, it’ll sit on a Windows phone, Android phone or an Apple phone. It will work on a new device or an old device, it’s very simple and what it does it manages payments and loyalty. And the loyalty points are delivered in a thing we call a ‘Buc’, which is equal to a dollar. And whom we serve out there with the consumers, the one thing they said about loyalty is they like the programs, but they wanted to be rewarded. And they were happy to change where they bought and sold, provided they were rewarded in something, which is portable. And therefore, they want to be able to use their points to go from place to place, and be able to either earn or redeem. Bucqi does all of that.
TESS is our technology platform; it stands for Trade Exchange Software Services. And the industry is actually quite fractured across the barter industries, there are more than 2,500 exchanges around the world according to the global governing body, IRTA. But they all run different technologies. And IRTA wanted the platforms across the world to be on a common payments technology and software, to facilitate the movement of monies and transactions across all these different exchanges.
They chose our platform as a recommended provider, under a white label system and that’s what we’re doing. We’re actually providing this out to trade exchanges around the world. We’ve actually also provided it to the IRTA’s interchange platform, where all the various trade exchanges deal with one another. And in the three months to the end of December, the transactions using this new platform were up almost 40 per cent. It’s the biggest leap that IRTA’s had in 17 years.
So our expansion plans go beyond that just of Australia, but also across northern Europe, through Asia and the Americas. And we’re looking to acquire the businesses that will fit within the ecosystem that becomes BPS. And again, it’s that SME market and businesses that have a collection of SMEs, where we can bring value to and bring new offerings to, in terms of service and delivery. That’s what we want to be able to achieve.
I think the major component about where we want to be as a business, is harnessing the tremendous amount of data that we’ve got. We’ve got 25 years worth of history of all the SMEs that have been involved with us, and now we’re rolling forward with consumers in the bucqi. And what we’re really looking to do is to harness that data in a commercialised way, so we get predictive buying. We’re seeing you as a consumer, you as a merchant, information that is relevant and timely to you and your needs at that point in time.
And we’ve got the technology pieces, we’ve got the actual people and we’ve just recruited our new CTO, Andrew McIntyre. It was a global search we made for him and you know he’s a director of one of Queensland’s largest Credit Unions. He’s a local lad, but he’s got tremendous credibility in this industry. So we’re looking to really harness that and actually do exponential growth, as far as the business is concerned.
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