But the till has moved on.

While no one was looking, the till has become a completely integrated payments system run by a company that is tipped to be Australia’s next Fintech Unicorn. 

Till Payments, an Australian company that is touting itself as a disruptor in the acceptance and electronic processing of payments sector, is fresh from raising $110 million in private capital.

It will use the funds to, among other things, expand its footprint in Australian car dealerships in addition to developing further its software services and systems and revving up its current drive into overseas markets.

Shadi Haddad

Till Payments has found its way into around 200 local dealerships; mostly at this stage with dealer groups seeking a more efficient way of collecting and allocating money across multiple departments and multiple brands.

The system allows customers to pay on any device including new payment experiences such as SMS or email-based payments. Till payments provides a secure platform for customers to pay using their preferred method – debit card, credit card and buy-now-pay-later such as Afterpay or ZipPay. 

The system then allocates the funds into where they belong in the dealer’s management system where it can be seen in real time on a dashboard for the dealership as well as for the total group.

Till Payments says it eliminates double handling and manual reconciliation and reduces credit card merchant fees for its dealers. Some dealers are reporting around 30 per cent savings in collections costs and bookkeeping labour costs and the platform is being seen as a major step in the elimination of cash payments in car retailing.

Dealers also report reduced service and sales queues.

The platform is integrated across most major DMS systems in the market including Pentana, Revolution Tune, Titan DMS and (soon) other DMS providers.

Shadi Haddad, the CEO of Till Payments told GoAutoNews Premium the company was experiencing “quite a heavy influx of new inquiries around dealer management system integrated payments”. 

“It’s about creating more efficiency, better customer experiences, and reducing costs for all these dealers,” he said. 

Edwina Gilbert

Citing a dealer business with 12 franchises on a single lot he said: “Within those franchises are independent dealer operations across the group. So accounts receivable, accounts payable are all different. So when you have two to three people and accounts receivable across 12 franchises, it’s a lot of people managing manual based payments, acceptance and receivables. 

“Being able to take some of that cost away and reducing those operational overheads is a core outcome of our system,” Mr Haddad said.

Edwina Gilbert, an advisory board member to Till Payments and executive chair of the Phil Gilbert Motor Group, told GoAutoNews Premium that the platform had transformed collections and accounts administration at the company’s dealerships.

She said it also helped with the response to the pandemic by providing a contactless payments solution in service and parts operations and acceptance of secure digital payment of deposits when their showrooms were closed.

“In a more traditional environment, we would just have the physical bank terminal in our dealership. But I can’t initiate an electronic payment to a customer through my traditional bank terminal. All I could do was give you my BSB and account number and ask you to please put the repair order number or the contract number on your payment advice so that our accounts department reconciles it,” she said.

“So our admin department has direct deposits coming from service departments, from parts, from sales and the reconciliation becomes a nightmare.

“But with the Till system I know that if I initiate the payment from my service department at X branch in Y brand, then from a reconciliation perspective that payment will be directly accounted to that repair order or contract in the DMS. 

“Even though we have these multiple sources of payments and invoices being paid, we can see from a dashboard where the various payments are coming from. So it’s much better from an accounts and administrative perspective, as well as really user-friendly for the customers.”

Ms Gilbert said that particularly over the past 18 months with COVID most of the group’s consumers have become much more comfortable with paying in an online electronic format. 

“I dare say most people are much happier these days in putting into a secure payment gateway than they would be giving their credit card details over the phone,” she said.

She also said the platform has brought about a “massive uplift” in payments security.

“When I was introduced to Till Payments 18 months ago, we were still taking credit card payments over the phone which would have involved the customer providing a sales consultant their credit card details and punching that into a terminal at our end. 

“Well that might have worked some time ago, but in a world of fraud and a much higher lens from the card providers on who’s responsible for that fraud, this enables a really secure payment environment where you don’t have your staff jotting down somebody’s credit card on a piece of paper because now they will initiate the link within the merchant Till Payment system. 

“The payments are done through the Till Payments dashboard. It’s all secure. It goes directly to the customer. They pay remotely using their credit card and we don’t actually see the details of that credit card.” 

Ms Gilbert said that during recent COVID lockdowns they were able to create deposit links, either by SMS or email in a secure environment where customers were able to pay their deposits online through the Till secure payment link.

She said the platform was reducing service department queues where customers used to wait at the counter and go through the physical process of inserting their card or tapping their card to settle up before collecting their cars at the end of the day. 

“If you had your car serviced today, we would send you a secure link in an SMS or email that says: ‘Phil Gilbert sends you this service invoice for $178’. You would click on the link and, the same as if you’re doing your online shopping, you’d have the option there to enter your credit card details, expiry and CCV, confirm the amount that’s due and payable and then submit that in a secure environment.

“This Till Payments system enables us to complete your service and send you a payment link in advance of you coming in to collect your car in the afternoon. You would securely pay to this payment system and if necessary it enables that to happen in a purely contactless environment. 

“So not only does it answer the question for the dealerships over the last period of time to move contactless, it is a massive uplift in the security elements of what we’ve been able to provide as a dealership.”

The platform also caters for buy-now, pay-later service department sales.

By John Mellor