Eftex

About Eftex

Eftex sits on Visa’s acquirer register next to CommBank, NAB and Westpac, and it will never try to sell you a terminal. It is a wholesale operator. Its own service pages name the customers as enterprise merchants, merchant service providers, payment facilitators, payment gateways and master merchants, and for settlement, eftpos and Mastercard acquirers, direct connectors and payment gateways. In plain terms: if you are a small business taking cards, there is a fair chance Eftex is somewhere behind what you are using and you have never heard the name. That is the business model, not an accident.

The lineage matters. Eftex is part of the privately held Banktech Group, started by David Glen in 1991, and the Eftex entity was once registered as Banktech Asia Pty Ltd. Banktech launched Australia’s first independent non-bank ATM network in 1998; Eftex spun up in 2000 with its first live ATM transaction and a Westpac acquiring relationship. It collected direct acquiring relationships with ANZ, NAB, CommBank, Westpac and Suncorp between 2006 and 2020, and Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay scheme links in 2011. Then the piece that really sets it apart: an Exchange Settlement Account with the Reserve Bank and AusPayNet membership in 2018. An ESA means it settles in its own right rather than renting someone else’s balance sheet, and it onsells that as sponsoring-acquirer services to smaller acquirers.

On scale you are taking its word for most of it. The company says it handles more than $30 billion in transactions and over 150 million client transactions a year across more than 25,000 ATM and point-of-sale terminals in the Asia Pacific, with over 21,000 point-of-sale terminals in Australia. Those are its own undated figures and there are no published financials — it is private and files nothing. Beyond its own site and a couple of directory listings, Eftex has almost no press footprint at all. For an infrastructure provider selling to other payment companies, that is about what you would expect.