Liven goes head to head with Square after its $152m acquisition spree

Australian fintech and loyalty marketing start-up Liven has introduced a payment terminal after its latest acquisition, in a bid to take on Jack Dorsey’s Square.

Liven co-founders Shahrooz Chowdhury and Grace Wong, with co-CEO William Wong. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Fintech and loyalty marketing platform Liven is going after Jack Dorsey’s Square with the launch of its own free payment terminal following a $152m acquisition spree over the past few months.

The Bill Tai-backed start-up on Thursday announced the launch of a terminal which has been embedded with the company’s loyalty marketing and “brand dollar” tools. It can automatically track customer credit card numbers and spending and give rewards to users.

Liven co-founder Grace Wong told The Australian she believed it was time an Australian homegrown alternative to Square – a popular US fintech supplying payment terminals nationwide – with lower fees landed in the market.

Liven's new Abacus Android point-of-sale terminal to rival Square.

Liven’s payments platform includes table ordering, loyalty marketing, payment processing and the ability for customers to pre-pay for items in advance, all of which would charge a single flat fee to not confuse customers, Ms Wong said.

Most businesses struggled to gather data about their in-store customers and the new system would be able to do it automatically for them, issuing a QR code on a customer receipt which allowed them to be instantly on-boarded.

“Businesses will do whatever it takes to get that data but up until this point not a single technology existed,” Ms Wong said.

“When it comes to physical commerce, business owners are blind. They don’t know who visited their restaurant, let alone have any ability to make them a repeat customer.”

The new terminal will use the technology of Abacus, a fellow Melbourne-based start-up which formed part of Liven’s $152m acquisition spree in July this year.

Other co-founder Shahrooz Chowdhury, the former chief digital officer at Guzman y Gomez, said most hospitality venues were stuck using payment and ordering products from multiple companies and were often at the mercy of those providers and any issues they faced.

They also had to track multiple fees which would not be the case with the new terminal which had a flat round for all services.

Mr Chowdhury would not disclose that rate but said it was lower than Square which charges businesses 1.9 per cent for a tap-and-pay payment.

Liven's new Abacus Android point-of-sale at Foodle.

“That’s really a key challenge. By stitching together all the different companies and typically having a dozen or so contracts at a dozen different price points, there’s real confusion about gross profit at the end of the day,” Mr Chowdhury said.

At the time of launch, the terminals were already in operation at supermarket business Foodle. Liven had about 6000 customers globally, the company said.

The start-ups’ approach to brand loyalty is a little different to most restaurants, allowing vendors to set up and sell an item it calls brand dollars to customers. Those dollars can be used to pay in store and often come with a kickback in the form of cash back.

That approach, Ms Wong said, is a bit like each store having its own digital currency.

The Liven terminal launch arrives just over one month after a Square outage left thousands of stores customers across the country angry.

The businesses found themselve unable to process payments for almost 24 hours when one of the company’s data centres went down.