Live Payments

About Live Payments

The origin story is the interesting bit. Macquarie Bank set Live Payments up in 2006 as a taxi-specific payments provider, then privatised it in March 2008. The new owners immediately bought Taxi E Pay to form Live TaxiEpay, putting EFTPOS terminals in Australian cabs. Live eftpos launched in 2011 and the business pushed past taxis into general small-business merchants. Live Capital came in 2015 for merchant funding, then a run of smaller brands. In 2022 it dropped the Live Group name, went back to Live Payments, and made the move that matters: it became an acquirer in its own right rather than reselling someone else’s acquiring. That is what puts it on Visa’s published register today.

The taxi niche never went away and it is still what Live Payments is genuinely known for. It calls itself a taxi payment specialist and sells LiveTap for Taxi, which it describes as the first tap-to-phone payment app in Australia built specifically for taxi drivers — no terminal, just the driver’s phone — plus a driver card on Visa that lets drivers draw their takings daily. Outside taxis it is a fairly conventional small-business acquirer: countertop, portable and smart terminals including the PAX A920 Pro, DX8000 and Verifone P400, online and virtual terminals, bill payments, and it says around 750 point-of-sale integrations.

Distribution is where it punches above its size. It has been a Qantas Business Rewards partner since 2017, so merchants earn Qantas Points on transactions, and it sits behind AMP Bank GO’s merchant offer — AMP’s own page spells out that the EFTPOS contract is with Live Payments, not AMP Bank, and that Live Payments handles the application, support and disputes. In November 2025 US fintech Pipe launched in Australia with Live Payments as its partner, embedding pre-approved capital offers inside the Live Payments customer portal. It says it serves more than 10,000 customers nationally. It is privately held, Australian owned, files nothing public, and gets almost no trade press — the Pipe partnership is the only third-party announcement of substance in years.