Till Payments makes 120 employees redundant, shakes up the table in continued fintech shakeup

by James · January 9, 2023

In addition to the restructuring, Matt Davey, Theo Koundouris and Jerry Yohananov have been appointed to the Till Payments board, along with co-founders Mr Haddad and Christopher Hicks.

The three new directors nod towards Till Payments’ hopes of listing on the Nasdaq, which the company confirms is still on the cards.

Till Payments is currently elbow-deep in a $200 million capital raise, which management expects to be at a lower value than its last capital raise in late 2021, which valued the business at $500 million.

Las Vegas-based Mr Davey runs Tekkorp Digital Acquisition, a Nasdaq-listed blank check company worth about $US250 million ($362 million).

Mr Koundouris is managing director of Supabarn, a family-owned supermarket chain that is also a Till Payments customer.

Mr Yohananov is the CFO of OnDeck Capital Australia, a technology-based lender to small businesses offering loans of up to $250,000.

The three new independent directors have replaced chairman Greg Miles, a former Westfield boss, millionaire chief executive John Banfield and Edwina Gilbert, who chairs Phil Gilbert Motor Group and is also on the Carsales.com board.

Till Payments, which offers an omnichannel payments platform centered around merchants, has grown rapidly as businesses rush to digitize their operations and merchants try to simplify their growing number of payment offerings.

The explosive growth of Afterpay, the buy-now-pay-later company that was acquired by Square in 2021 in a $39 billion deal, set off a wave of payments startups that enjoyed several years of growth and venture capital.

But rising interest rates and higher inflation have dampened the margins of the payment companies; both those who build the underlying technology as well as those who offer technology-based loans.

Till Payments, which raised $125 million in 2021 from investors such as Afterpay-backed Touch Ventures, joining high-profile Australian merchants on the register, is expanding its operations to New Zealand in 2022.

The company said it processed over 200 million transactions annually and had posted threefold growth in merchant base and annual transaction volumes from 2021.

“As part of this strategic shift focused on immediate goals of sustainable growth, achieving profitability and maintaining industry-leading customer service, we have had to restructure our business,” Haddad said.

“In line with our three-year plan, and in response to pandemic activity, we have over-invested in expansion and driven phenomenal growth, for which I take full responsibility.”