Building unlimited potential
A new year, new brand, new partner, big opportunity
We’re excited to announce something special we’ve been building.
PromisePay is now Assembly.
With a new name, new look and renewed passion, we also begin this next chapter of our journey with a new partner. Assembly has been chosen by one of the world’s largest classifieds sites — Gumtree — to power payments for its new on-demand service Gumtree Connect.
The two announcements are somewhat linked in that they mark the next evolution and maturity of our business.
A tale of trust
When I reflect on our origins, in 2013, when Darren, Simon and I opened the doors to PromisePay, we didn’t start with payments, we started with creating the best experience.
As three consultants trying to get paid for our work, the experience was unfriendly, to put it kindly. The fact was, online and mobile commerce may have sparked a total business revolution, but it had created painful, uncertain experiences amongst the millions of people who were now dealing with others they had never met, and were never likely to meet. Bare in mind, the Sharing Economy was in its infancy.
Every day we came up against the same challenges. How could we trust this person to pay? Would our money ever arrive on time? Why should we have to endure lengthy bank approvals and transaction fees?
Frustrated, we began to ask ourselves, why should anything get in the way of our hard earned money? So we set out to build PromisePay and systematically remove the barriers standing between so many businesses and their money.
Re-assembling for our future
Changing your identity isn’t done lightly. But PromisePay, a name that was born when we began as an online payments and escrow startup, no longer reflects who we are as a team, or as a platform. What started as a way to bring a trusted experience to online payments, has now grown into something bigger and more powerful than we ever imagined.
While we have grown up, our mission remains the same — to dismantle the old and broken payments systems and build a world where any organisation can use payments however they like, to not just move money, but to build better experiences and better businesses.
Rebuilding payments
Using a tired old meme, we are entering a payments 3.0 environment, where rather than being the burden on business, payments are an enabler of great experiences and new business models.
There are good reasons why payments became difficult. Complex compliance regimes, legacy banking platforms, inflexible gateways and a severe lack of advanced, scalable technology. Since payments tech began, everyone has worried about getting payments in — no one had thought about sending money out.
The newer 2.0 payment platforms took a pretty good step forward, adding a simple front end, particularly for online commerce sites. But in reality, they just made a broken experience somewhat less broken — a little faster, or some elegant code to take a payment online. But they were still very inward-focused.
More than just payments
What if you want to do more than just take a credit card payment online? Or if you didn’t want the compliance obligations of the funds running through your account? Or if you wanted disputes and fraud taken care of? Or you wanted to split a payment between multiple parties? Or you wanted to hold funds until both the buyer and seller confirmed the exchange had satisfactorily taken place? Or you wanted funds held in a digital wallet and then reconciled against every purchase?
In fact, what if you could separate each of the options and actions and make them simple to piece together so you could assemble payments flows in any way you wanted? Wouldn’t that help you create exceptional customer experiences and add new value to your business?
So we did exactly that. And we learned that millions of businesses worldwide need more than a credit card swipe, yet no solution caters for it. So, sadly, consumers end up with less than ideal experiences, and business suffer.
We believe the potential of bringing payments online is so much more than moving money from one place to the next.
Payments at the centre of experience
Assembly takes a different approach. We believe the potential of bringing payments online is so much more than moving money from one place to the next. We put customer experience at the centre of our thinking and reimagined the way payments were managed, to empower organisations to deliver extraordinary experiences to their customers, and in turn bolster their business. Or in simpler terms, we took the entire burden of payments away and let companies imagine their perfect customer experiences.
Today, we deliver on that promise for more than 100 platforms across North America, AsiaPacific, and now Africa.
We’re inspired by these customers and their teams who are using payments to build outstanding experiences and innovative products. For example, Airtasker, with its trusted on-demand services marketplace; hipages, with seamless online and mobile payments for tradies, and Flippa, with the world’s largest global marketplace of web businesses. And now Gumtree.
‘Assembly’ celebrates our customers, our technology, our people, and the huge opportunity that lies ahead.
Cash is disappearing. Commerce is moving on to marketplaces and platforms. Banks are under pressure. Legacy payment platforms are defunct and need replacing. Customers in all industries are demanding and expecting a better experience from the businesses they deal with and buy from.
This is a new beginning and in some ways we start again. We have even more ambitious plans for our product and our business. We are rapidly expanding our team this year, so if you feel inspired by the challenge of changing how business is done, please get in touch, we need you!
