Online Payments Trends in Australia: Insights from Beyond Tomorrow
I recently joined The Eftpos Show panel at Beyond Tomorrow alongside leaders from across the payments ecosystem, including Google, OpenAI and Western Union.
What stood out wasn’t anything theoretical. It was how aligned everyone was on what’s already happening in market. Merchants aren’t struggling to access payments anymore. They’re trying to get more out of what they already have.
Digital wallets are now the default
In Australia, Apple Pay and Google Pay now account for a significant share of online transactions. In many cases, they’re approaching 40–50% of checkout volume and still growing.
Customers don’t want to type card details if they don’t have to. Increasingly, they don’t. For merchants, that raises the bar. This isn’t about adding another payment method. It’s about meeting expectations. If wallets aren’t working well in your checkout, it’s noticeable, and it impacts conversion.
Tokenisation is no longer optional
Tokenisation came up quickly in the discussion, and not as a “nice to have”.
A few years ago, you could treat it as optimisation. Today, it’s part of staying competitive. It improves approval rates, reduces failed recurring payments, and helps manage the card lifecycle.
This change is being driven by the schemes themselves. They are incentivising tokenised transactions and increasing costs on non-tokenised ones. The impact is already being felt commercially.
Performance is where the real gains are
The biggest shift isn’t new payment methods, but how payments are being measured.
Twelve months ago, most conversations were about capability. Now they’re about performance, why approvals are being lost, where checkout is slowing down and where revenue is leaking.
At scale, small improvements stop being small. A marginal uplift in approval rates, a reduction in latency, or better routing decisions can translate directly into revenue. Payments is no longer background infrastructure. It’s something teams actively optimise.
Local infrastructure still matters
There’s a strong industry focus on global schemes, but the reality is that global roadmaps often move too slowly to deliver functionality tailored to the Australian market. That delay can translate into real costs across time, money, and ultimately customer experience.
Used well, eftpos and the NPP give merchants more control over routing, access to lower cost pathways, and better alignment with how the local market works. We’ve seen businesses shift debit traffic through least cost routing and materially reduce their cost of acceptance without changing their checkout experience.
What’s next
One of the more forward-looking topics was agentic commerce. Systems initiating transactions on behalf of users.
It’s still early and there aren’t many scaled examples in Australia yet. But the direction is clear. Less manual interaction. More embedded payments. More decision-making happening at the system level.
It’s not something most teams need to act on today. But forward-thinking merchants are already setting themselves up — investing in more flexible infrastructure, tokenisation, and systems that can support more automated, intelligent payment flows.
What this means in practice
The way payments is evaluated has changed.
It’s no longer just about whether you can accept payments. It’s about what you’re actually getting from your setup. Approval rates, cost, performance, and customer experience all matter.
Most of the opportunity isn’t in adding more. It’s in getting more out of what’s already there.
Final thought
Events like The Eftpos Show are useful because they reflect what’s already happening, not what might happen next.
Payments is becoming more visible, more measurable, and more directly tied to growth.
If you’re starting to look at your payments setup through that lens, I’m always happy to compare notes.
