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Author: Cuscal Limited

Armaguard Group acquires Cuscal rediATM Scheme

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

Person pushing ATM button

Sydney, 26 February 2019: Armaguard Group announced today the signing of an agreement to purchase Cuscal’s physical ATM assets and to take over the management and operation of the rediATM Scheme.

The rediATM network provides direct charge fee-free transactions for the cardholders of rediATM Scheme members, with an extensive network of ATMs across hundreds of unique locations, including regional centres Australia-wide.

The purchase aligns the core competencies and future plans of both the Armaguard Group and Cuscal.

The Armaguard Group has decades of expertise in ATMs, and currently provides services to the majority of existing ATMs in Australia. This purchase allows Armaguard to provide additional end-to-end currency and technology management solutions, and facilitates the continued provision of cash across the community. Cuscal is a payments business and its future strategy is centred on mobile, real-time and data initiatives. This sale allows Cuscal to focus on its future plans while ensuring its clients and customers continue to receive convenient, secure, 24/7 access to their money.

Gary Allen, CEO, Armaguard Group, is delighted about the purchase:

Our core business is currency management, which includes supporting financial institutions with the circulation of cash into the community. We aim to ensure that everyone has access to their cash when they need it, and part of this is the provision of ATMs, an essential service to communities across Australia.

We look forward to investing in this well-established network to support ongoing services to the community.

Commenting on the sale, Craig Kennedy, MD, Cuscal said:

We are proud of our history in ATMs. We worked with one of our clients to offer the first ever modern ATM back in 1977, and the rediATM Scheme has given millions of people secure, easy, direct-charge free access to their cash for nearly 10 years.

However the ATM industry has evolved, and our business has changed. We strongly believe that this sale is the best way for our clients and their customers to continue to get secure, convenient access to their cash. We will continue to drive, switch and settle for ATMs, while spending more time on our core strategic areas of mobile, real-time and data – enabling our clients’ customers to make payments wherever they are, with whatever device they choose.

Gary Allen sums up:

While the deal is subject to regulatory and other approvals, we expect it to be completed in the coming months. This acquisition is the natural extension of our current technology driven business, and we look forward to a seamless transition for rediATM Scheme members and their customers.

—ends—

Media contact details: Eva Donaldson, 0429 449 963, eva_donaldson@linfox.com

Media contact details: Jake Waddell, 0417 312 902, jwaddell@cuscal.com.au

P&N Bank Digital Card Issuance

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

P&N Bank, the largest locally owned and operated bank in Western Australia, and Cuscal worked in partnership on an Australian-first innovation with the instant Digital Card Issuance API, delivering a seamless digital customer experience for new and existing customers.

Watch the video for more on how P&N Bank, Data Action and Cuscal collaborated to deliver this customer-focus solution.

Cuscal’s payment success journey up to 2018

Posted on by Cuscal Limited


Cuscal and its predecessors have been operating in Australia since the 1960s. Credit Union Services Corporation (Australia) Limited was established in 1997 before being shortened to Cuscal Limited in 2006.

Watch this animation to find out about Cuscal’s payment success journey starting from back in the 1970s up to 2018. Cuscal is now considered to be the largest independent provider of payment solutions in Australia, with the widest range of products and services.

You can also read about Cuscal’s history of innovation in payments.

The Voice of Payments

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

Virtual assistants are changing the way people shop, bank and interact with businesses. From chatbots to voice assistants, businesses and their customers are seeing the benefits of automating and simplifying transactions and interactions.

Learn more about voice assistants and other innovations driving change in payments around the world in the Global Payments Innovation Playbook which we produced in collaboration with PYMNTS.

The NPP is starting to realise its potential

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

We have been thrilled by the reaction to the recent article which broke the news about the New Payments Platform (NPP) collaboration between Cuscal and Assembly Payments. We’ve both been fielding lots of enquiries from companies keen to emulate Carsales and so we thought we’d write this article to tell you a bit more about how the collaboration works and the best way to bring the benefits of real-time payments to your customers.

We think the NPP is a fantastic opportunity for any e-commerce company that is sending large amounts of money around or just needs to move money fast. Whether this is large volumes of transactions (or just large transactions) the benefits are clear – immediate, verified payments with detailed descriptions will enhance customer experience and minimise enquiries.

What is the NPP and how do you connect?
The NPP is the new, decentralised payments infrastructure which allows participating financial institutions (including Cuscal and the RBA) to move money between each other in seconds, 24/7. To become part of the infrastructure (a ‘Participant’) is a lengthy, complex process and you are required to be an Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (as it’s a regulated environment and requires access to RBA settlement facilities). However, most companies don’t need to do this. They can get the same benefits, more cheaply and easily by connecting to one of the Participants.

What levels of connection and capability are there?
The second official level of connection to the NPP is called an ‘Identified Institution’. The collaboration between Cuscal and Assembly Payments is big news because Assembly is the first company that is NOT a financial institution to be officially recognised as an Identified Institution. This means Assembly can register and create PayIDs for others and offer NPP services to its own customers, like Carsales.

Complicated? It doesn’t have to be.
While the background, and some of the terms, are a bit complicated, actually using the NPP is getting easier. Most companies will connect through APIs. The New Payments Platform has recently published its API framework which enables third parties to get a greater understanding of the platform and what it can do, using a sample API Sandbox.

Each NPP Participant will support their own APIs based on the NPP API Framework. Cuscal has already released REST APIs, which is how Assembly accesses NPP and Osko services to move money in real-time between Cuscal and other financial institutions.

Using the NPP is even quicker and easier for those companies that don’t need to become an NPP Identified Institution but want the benefits that come with NPP and Osko payments. For example, Carsales is enabled for NPP services through the Assembly platform.

Which path is right for you?
It depends on what you want to do.

  • Talk to Cuscal if you want to become an Identified Institution, like Assembly, and offer PayIDs and NPP services to your own customers. This path will suit businesses such as financial institutions and payment service providers.
  • Talk to Assembly if you would like a full suite of multi-channel payment solutions including real time NPP payments, PayIDs, underwriting, fraud and KYC services. This path will suit many online businesses, especially corporate enterprises, marketplaces and ecommerce platforms.

If you’re confused as to which path is right for you, just get in touch with either one of us and we’ll steer you in the right direction!

By Nathan Churchward, Cuscal and Simon Lee, Assembly Payments

Vigil fraud monitoring service

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

With the growth of debit and credit card transactions and the introduction of real-time payments, Australian financial institutions and their customers are becoming increasingly attractive targets for fraudsters.

Having a fraud strategy and solution in place that can help your organization to stay ahead of emerging fraud trends and protect your customers, brand and balance sheet is critical.

Our intelligent fraud monitoring and detection service, Vigil, combines our extensive fraud monitoring experience with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to help predict and prevent fraud losses before they occur.

With 24/7 monitoring by experienced fraud operations and a flexible and agile platform, Vigil can decline potentially fraudulent transactions in real-time with greater power and accuracy for support payments.

Our online case management tool provides your organization with direct access to view transactions and alerts, giving you more visibility to emerging fraud trends than ever before.

Vigil for the New Payments Platform

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

With the launch of the New Payments Platform, there is a perception that the speed of real-time payments will increase the risk of fraud and leave customers vulnerable to attacks. In reality, real-time payments aren’t inherently riskier than other payment methods, but organisations should be vigilant to the evolving threat of fraud and increase their focus on planning and prevention.

Partnering with Cuscal can help your organisation to manage the risk of real-time payments fraud.

Our Vigil for NPP service combines our extensive fraud monitoring experience with the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technology from our partner Feedzai, to deliver instant decisions about the authenticity of real-time payment requests without sacrificing the real-time authorisation response times that are essential for the New Payments Platform.

The Vigil for NPP service supplements the blacklist functionality of Cuscal’s core NPP solution, providing your business with an enhanced fraud protection service that integrates seamlessly with Cuscal’s NPP Solution.

Vigil fraud management platform

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

At the core of the Vigil service is our fraud management platform. This platform is powered by Feedzai – a provider of leading-edge fraud detection used by major banks, payment businesses and retailers globally.

The platform leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, combined with big data, to accelerate the detection of emerging fraud trends which can help to protect businesses from fraud loses.

Agile models ensure the platform proactively keeps pace with fraud as it evolves, scoring transactions at scale without compromising on the response time required to spot and stop high-risk transactions.

Cuscal will have access to the latest data science modules to continually evaluate the effectiveness of the platform’s fraud models – building, testing and deploying new models to strengthen fraud rules and reduce the number of false positive alerts.

Harnessing the power of big data, our platform can turn big data inputs into the insights required to reduce risk and combat fraud.

Instantly ingesting available event signals from multiple sources – including transactional data, online sessions, customer data, device data and third-party data – the platform generates a 360 degree view of the customer’s normal patterns of behaviour which helps to identify fraudulent transactions.

Transactional and event data, paired with sophisticated machine learning algorithms, allow us to create a profile of individual customer behaviour to reach new levels of sensitivity and detect fraud with greater power and accuracy.

Profiling behaviour on an individual level helps the platform to maintain very low false positive ratios, allowing your customers to transact in a frictionless manner.

Our platform has the ability to process large amounts of data, enabling fraud analysts and operations teams to respond quickly and feed information into the platform to retrain modelling to respond to changes in fraud trends or new events.

By adapting to this human intelligence through automated feedback loops our platform can apply this knowledge to future transactions without the need for manual coding, so we can remain adaptive rather than reactive to stay ahead of coordinated attacks and emerging fraud trends.

Vigil fraud team

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

Our fraud team monitors transactions around the clock to protect against fraud at its most common time – after business hours.

The Vigil fraud team assess all transactions that are blocked, or alerted for investigation by our fraud management platform, to determine whether the block should be removed or if additional action should be taken.

We contact customers on your behalf with the upmost professionalism and sensitivity to confirm the legitimacy of questionable transactions and take action, if required.

The assessment outcomes from our team are automatically fed back into the platform so that it learns from, and adapts to, new fraud patterns and suspicious events without the need for manual coding, so we can remain adaptive rather than reactive to stay ahead of coordinated attacks and emerging fraud trends.

Vigil Case Manager

Posted on by Cuscal Limited

With direct access to reporting, transaction decisions and streamlined workflows between Cuscal and your organisation, Vigil empowers you with a complete end-to-end view of fraud.

Vigil Case Manager provides your business with an easy to access interface, allowing you to monitor and review items related to your customers.

With real-time access to statistics, analysis and fraud reports, Vigil Case Manager arms your business with the information you required to track your fraud results.