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When a start-up tells you it’s “revolutionising payments,” you usually brace for a press release that could sedate an auditor.
But every so often, the jargon hides a fundamental shift.

pay.com.au, a Sydney-based payments platform, has lobbed a small grenade into the foreign-exchange market by letting small and medium-sized businesses earn reward points every time they send money offshore.
For firms used to watching banks clip the ticket on every transfer, this idea is somewhere between novel and overdue.

“Australian SMEs deserve payments that work as hard as they do,” says founder and chief executive Grant Austin. “With International Payments, businesses get smarter and simpler cross-border transactions at competitive rates and with the most flexible rewards on the market.”

Turning FX into frequent-buyer territory

The new International Payments feature folds into pay.com.au’s existing dashboard, handling domestic and global transfers across eight major currencies, the usual suspects from AUD to EUR, in more than 30 countries.
That’s not unusual. The kicker is extraordinary: each transaction earns PayRewards points that can be redeemed through a broad partner network, not just an airline or card scheme.

Flexibility is currency in a market where loyalty schemes are often more restrictive than a frequent-flyer blackout date.
And that sense of value-for-effort may catch the eye of CFOs running tight margins and tighter travel budgets.

Send Payments keeps the plumbing humming.

Behind the curtain sits Send Payments, a Brisbane-based specialist whose API handles the compliance and real-time settlement grunt work.
Its technology quietly ensures pay.com.au’s system stays upright while keeping regulators satisfied.

“Our intuitive and reliable technology reduces the complexity, risk and effort of enabling cross-border transactions,” says Matt Barr, Send’s chief executive. “Partners like pay.com.au can then focus on their core services and grow their offerings.”

Barr’s understatement masks what’s happening: fintechs are now doing the infrastructure jobs banks once considered too vital to outsource.

Why it matters

Foreign exchange fees have long been an invisible tax on Australian enterprises.
A few percentage points here, a poor rate there, are enough to nibble profit margins without raising alarms.
By combining competitive FX pricing with tangible rewards, pay.com.au effectively tells business owners they can have their exchange rate and earn from it too.

The move also reflects a bigger trend: financial software that rewards usage rather than charges for access.
From neobanks paying interest on business deposits to platforms giving cashback on bills, payments as a perk is edging from gimmick to expectation.

Austin insists this isn’t a one-off feature grab but part of a longer push to streamline the cluttered SME finance stack.

“This launch marks an important step in our vision to build a unified payments platform for SMEs across Australia,” he says.
“By bringing together innovative solutions in one place, we’re helping businesses manage all their payments needs without added complexity.”

Fintech’s quiet evolution

Australia’s fintech sector, once obsessed with buy-now-pay-later hype, has matured into something sturdier.
Where founders once talked disruption, they now speak integration, fewer slogans, more APIs.

Pay.com.au’s partnership with Send Payments illustrates that shift: speed without spectacle, innovation without insolvency.

It’s still early days.

The big four banks won’t lose sleep yet, but they might twitch an eyebrow at the idea of SMEs earning rewards on foreign transfers instead of merely paying for them.

If the model sticks, expect copycats and a new loyalty arms race in business banking.

For now, Austin’s team has done something the industry’s glossy decks rarely achieve: turned a routine business chore into a small reason to smile.

In the world of finance, that’s rarer than a fee-free transfer.

Visit pay.com.au for details.