Fintech DataMesh signs up private retail giant Peregrine

Peregrine, one of South Australia's largest private companies, will deploy DataMesh's full suite of financial payments products including hardware, software and data processing across its flagship On The Run (OTR) fuel, retail and convenience businesses, which incorporates outlets for brands such as Krispy Kreme SA, Subway, Oporto and Brumby's.

Peregrine, which is owned by the Shahin family and has annual revenue of about $2 billion, will also use the DataMesh system across its national network of Smokemart & GiftBox stores, the largest privately-owned retail tobacco chain in Australia.

The long-term agreement is the first for DataMesh, a privately owned Sydney-based company understood to be close to securing further deals for its technology.

DataMesh has developed a new payments framework that is said to cut costs to retailers, improve efficiencies and eliminate the problems of technical outages due to bank payment switch or telecommunications failures.

The technology adapts to a merchant's existing relationships with merchant acquirers, allows them to drive their own choice of hardware while not competing with the banks for merchant acquisition and transaction banking customers.

The DataMesh technology automatically selects least-cost or merchant-choice routing to minimise transaction costs for both retailers and their customers.

The technology also provides forward point-of-sale (POS) integration for loyalty cards in one system, as well as in depth analytics of customer transactions to determine customer buying trends and needs.

DataMesh Group CEO Mark Nagy describes the Peregrine agreement as a major step forward for the company's payments and analytics technology.

"Partnering with such a significant retailer is real validation that we, even as an early stage company, have been able to solve pressing business issues faced by large merchants, such as lack of POS integration, hardware of choice, and real time connectivity to multiple acquirers something that banks and other payments providers haven't been able to do," Nagy says.

"Peregrine selected the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 POS platform, which gives the company an opportunity to develop a very rich point-of-sale experience to meet the growing needs of the group.

"DataMesh was the only Australian company able to deliver a reliable connection to the system, and our new Cloud POS APIs have proven their value as they enable us to deliver Peregrine a true 360 degree view of their customers across all channels."

Nagy says the traditional methods of connecting an eftpos terminal to this system were not working for Peregrine.

"The DataMesh team has worked tirelessly to develop solutions that not only fix current payment system issues for merchants but can vastly improve their business efficiency through new and improved integrated technology.

"This is important in the current environment where the world is increasingly trending to a cashless society. We are building a strong customer pipeline for our commerce and data analytic products and we expect to announce further contracts to the market in due course."

Peregrine's executive chairman Yasser Shahin says the DataMesh payments and data analytics solution responds to 'some of the limitations and frustrations we have had in our payments systems up until now'.

"In particular, we see DataMesh's technology able to improve our payments reliability by shielding us from the impact of any bank or telecommunications outages. It is better, lower cost technology than is on offer elsewhere and we see it greatly improving our business operations, customer interactions and efficiency."

Business News Australia