How To Turn Emerging Payment Options Into Your Next Growth Channel #566

Most brands still see payments as a cost centre: something to minimise rather than optimise. Caroline Tran from Hello Clever is flipping that mindset. Her approach transforms the payment rail itself into a driver of growth by connecting real-time payments with real-time rewards. “Cashback feels like a gain, whereas discounts feel like a loss.” That simple shift is redefining how merchants view both margin and loyalty.

In Today’s Playbook:

• How Hello Clever is using real-time payments to power instant cashback and loyalty
• Why cashback feels like a gain while discounts erode brand value
• Why Sonia Friedrich says friction is the ultimate conversion killer
• The key to turning payment rails into marketing assets that grow both margin and trust

Connect with Caroline Tran
Explore Hello Clever
Listen to Caroline’s main episode
Episode #392 with Sonia

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Would you be comfortable flipping a coin to see if your customers will come back a second time? I didn't think so. I wouldn't be. But here's the kicker. One in two shoppers won't come back if they've had a dodgy delivery experience. That's right. Half of your customers gone thanks to a late package or a squash box. That's where Shippet comes in. The Aussie-made delivery solution could be your secret weapon. In the last year alone, Shippet helped retailers save over$220 million in great cost. With automated fulfillment, expanded carrier options, and multi-store management, Shippet's turning one-off shoppers into lifelong feeds. Join leading retailers like Meyer, Kmart, Fotmonn, Harvey Norman, Freedom Furniture, and over 4,000 others who've stopped flipping a coin and are turning delivery into a competitive advantage. Visit Shippit.com to find out more. When you think about it, there are a lot of things that the current generation are going to look back on our generation and go, why the hell did you do that? From smoking cigarettes to watching commercial TV as a family and even paying by credit card, even though credit card is the most common form of payment now, I can't imagine that it's going to be that way into the future. It has been shown that younger generations are moving away from credit card as their main payment method. And it makes total sense because there are so many new payment methods emerging that aren't just about paying for a product, but are actually part of a bigger growth picture, part of a community, and rewarding customers in different ways that credit cards could never do. And I think we're pretty lucky here because in Australia, we are actually on the leading edge, I think, of payment options, especially when it comes to replacing credit cards. So think about when it came to Tap to Pay, we were one of the most advanced economies when it came to using that either through cards or through our phones. We've also had the huge, huge success story of Afterpay here, which led the buy and for pay movement. And more recently, we interviewed Carolyn Trant from Hello Clever. And I love that her proposition is tapping into two trends here. It's about enabling peer-to-peer payments, which is reducing the cost of those transactions and facilitating those bank-to-bank payments from a B2C perspective, but also incorporating shop back and rewards for customers who pay in that way. Of course, why wouldn't a younger generation choose this method when they're getting rewarded through shop back and not getting slugged huge interest fees that they can't pay off? So today I want to unpack how new real-time payment mechanisms and smart cashback strategies are giving businesses that get on the leading edge here a financial edge that can fuel growth, not just take payments. It's about being pragmatic and allowing smooth checkout, but actually turning payment into a profit and growth opportunity. So let's take a clip from my chat with Carolyn Trant from Hello Clever, where she breaks down how their C2B consumer to business payment system works as an innovative growth engine. All right. Well, I want to talk about that growth engine being cashback and loyalty. When you talk cashback, so let's take that example that you had before. I go through, I buy a PC, I'm getting$300 back on my PC. Who's funding that cashback?

SPEAKER_00: 3:35

So the merchant with fund that's cashback. So in Hello Clever Merchant Dashboard, there is a tool. It is called Cashback Campaign. What it will do is that we will let the merchants who flexibly set up a cashback campaign depends on their budget. Right. So if you think about all the cashback platforms like ShopApp or Cash Rewood, you have to go through another affiliate platform and it fits cashback, right? We are dynamic. You can set up, let's say during peak time, you give, you know, 3%, and during like quiet time, you give 5%. So it's super dynamic and it fits into your budget as well. So let's say I have$5,000 budget because it's coming out of your marketing budget. Let's run it, you know, during the quiet time, right? And give them the most cash back or whatever you wanted to design it. So there's a product under our merchant dashboard, it's Cashback Campaign. Now we launch another product, it's called My Stone Campaign under Hello Clover. So what it means is that you're gonna reward your regular. So it's like a what we visualize it as a digital coffee card. So you come back and purchase a PC, you know, I don't know, like once a year or whatever, you get rewards further. So I come back and purchase and I get, you know, rewards even more. And it's all embedded into payments, right?

SPEAKER_01: 4:54

And do you find that your merchants are advertising that cashback option further up in the journey? Or is it usually waiting until they get through to check out to surface that?

SPEAKER_00: 5:06

Yeah, so they would normally, if they run a campaign like that, they will advertise it in their EDMs or on their website, right? Yeah. During, I guess, in a financial year, you know, we do cashback during this time and this time, right? Get quick. And to be honest, some of the campaigns run out in like literally 15 minutes. It's crazy. So 15 minutes, it's run out$5,000. And so it means that customers actually going to wait for that moment to purchase and it's increased the revenue for the merchants at that point.

SPEAKER_01: 5:35

And they're justifying this cashback, are they? By reduced fees?

SPEAKER_00: 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

Yeah. Okay. So that's the calculation you've got to do to understand that if I can shift customers to spend more, buy more, and use real-time payments via Hello Clever, I can actually justify giving away this much cash back because I'm not losing in other fees.

SPEAKER_00: 5:55

Yeah. So basically because you have been saving that much of payment fees, you're using our payment fees savings to become a cashback, right? And then it helps you to increase your revenue. It literally a no-renner.

SPEAKER_01: 6:06

That makes sense. Tell me some of the most what are some of the most creative examples that you've seen of integrating all this together.

SPEAKER_00: 6:13

So we work with merchants in especially uh travel sector. And for travel sector, to be honest, it's quite high risk because what if COVID happens again, right? So people cannot travel. So there are a few, you know, campaigns that we are launching with one of the, I guess, uh largest booking system in Asia Pacific. It's called Travel Loca. I'm not sure if you know them. So we've been running a few campaigns with them, and you know, we see how Heyman has saved them a lot of fees, right? Because they are a global business. So they they sell tickets in like 50 countries, and you can imagine how you can do all of the payment integration in each of every single country. If you go through Hello Clover, we can just do that to you, right? Literally to you. Gotcha. So it's saved a lot of technical efforts as well as, you know, we can centralize everything in one place. So you are as a payment manager or like a financial manager, you can just go into our payment dashboards and have a look at which country you've gone live and who has been paying and buying which tickets, right? So it has been a really interesting use case for us. So we do find a lot of traction in high-ticket items, for example, computer stores, furnishers, and then travel sector, right?

SPEAKER_01: 7:27

Okay. It's such a killer breakdown from Carolyn and potentially. Do we have another Nick Molner on our hands here? I love how she explains that the payment rail itself can actually drive growth, not just power it and enable it, but fuel it. And that was similar to the Afterpay model, where they created this community of retailers on Afterpay where customers demanded that other retailers have Afterpay, otherwise, they'll shop with this community. So that was their growth driver, whereas Carolyn's going for that shop back, cashback option. By building on the NPP and the pay ID rails, Hello Clever is cutting out the middleman, which means that they have more cash to spend and to give back. And merchants are saving that 3% to 4% in processing fees to be able to reinvest straight back to customers through instant cashback. Pretty clever, right? And I think there's a huge opportunity right now with cash rewards no longer with us that customers have learned that habit and are now feeling like they might be missing out. There's a huge opportunity if you can tie that to payment as well. But the money side is only half the story. If we want people to actually use new payment methods, we've got to make it easy and trustworthy from the first click. I always come back to this from Sonia Friedrich back in episode 392, where she tells us all the time friction kills conversion. So, yes, you can have the best incentives, the best cashback ever. If the payment isn't smooth, it's going to kill conversion. And we know that approximately one in five credit card payments fail. So we can't have a system where one in five fails. The more friction you give, the less conversion you'll have. The more mental effort you ask for, the more customers will tap out. So if you are introducing a new payment option, even one with a great hook like instant cashback, the process has to feel effortless. Think guess checkout simple. Think instant checkout simple. No extra forms, no overthinking. So here's the play. Number one, turn savings into customer wins. There is an emergence of new payment platforms that are cheaper than traditional methods. As Carolyn said, three to four percent fees, you're losing the credit card. Reinvest them back into cashback or loyalty that will hit instantly. It will encourage customers to come back, spend more, more word of mouth. It becomes a bit of a flywheel then for your payment. The quicker the reward, the higher the adoption because we all love extra things at checkout. Make it instant. Number two, make the experience invisible. Even though we're asking customers to trial a new payment method, peer-to-peer and pay ID isn't new. So it's not a totally new learning experience. Your new payment flow can't take a big learning opportunity, especially in the checkout. The payment flow needs to feel like the path of least resistance. Think ShopPay. That feels really easy now. Might not have been at the start, but right now that feels really easy. That's what you're competing against. Payment has to be that smooth. Don't make customers think. And number three, pick payments that build trust. Choose rails that actually help you retain customers. Fewer features mean fewer drop-offs, more repeat purchases, and stronger data signals to build loyalty around. After all, Visa and MasterCard have built their brands through trust. That's what you're up against if you're asking customers to switch. Trust needs to be at the core of this. So make sure that you're showing that all your payment methods are trustworthy through an easy process and smooth transactions. The payments world is moving fast, and I love that we're here in Australia and we're leading the way. The smart operators in retail are realizing that it's not just about saving on fees, trying to get down to close to 0%. It's about building a growth loop that funds itself. Real-time payments, cashback, loyalty, trust. When you connect all of those dots, you're not just processing transactions, you're building a business that converts faster, retains longer, and scales smarter. It's very clever. If you want to discuss real-time payments or other ways that you can really take advantage of new transaction methods in your checkout, I encourage you to come on over to the Add to Cart community where you can discuss and ask questions on all of this stuff. We have a community of over 500 e-commerce professionals in there ready to answer your questions, share their tips, share their experiences, and connect you to people who might have been in your scenario before. So come on over. It's free to join adtocart.com.au. Join the community, and we'd love to see you in there to share your knowledge and help each other out. And of course, if you're listening to this on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple, we'd love you to hit that subscribe button and we're going to continue bringing you more playbooks to help growing your e commerce business. See you next time.