Windcave

About Windcave

Windcave is the company Australians used to know as Payment Express, and before that as Direct Payment Solutions. The registry trail is clean: incorporated in Auckland on 21 April 1999, renamed from Direct Payment Solutions in September 2015, then from Payment Express to Windcave on 1 July 2019. It is still privately held and tightly held — Andrew Cullen has been a director since the day it was incorporated and the whole shareholding sits with a single company. No listing, no private equity rollup, no bank parent, which in this market makes it unusual.

What Windcave is actually known for is the awkward end of card acceptance: machines with nobody standing behind them. Its own material lists parking, ticketing and public transport, vending, road tolling, kiosks, postal services, petrol and pay-at-pump, and retail self-checkout. It designs and builds its own hardware rather than reselling someone else’s — the SCR200 card reader, SKP200 keypad, BRF210 contactless antenna, and more recently the CHU200 and MTM300 families — and it opened a dedicated research and manufacturing operation in Auckland in 2015, moving to a larger site in September 2024. It also runs the gateway a lot of Australian businesses use without knowing whose it is, sitting behind point-of-sale software, booking systems and ecommerce carts.

In Australia it has been on the ground a long while — Sydney since 2010, Melbourne since 2022. Windcave says it became New Zealand’s first non-bank acquirer when it launched merchant services there in 2016, then launched Australian merchant services in 2018, so here it can be the gateway, or the gateway and the merchant facility together. Its Australian terms cover Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, Amex, Diners, Alipay and WeChat. The build-out since has been steady rather than loud: Discover acceptance for Australian merchants in April 2023, Alipay+ in August 2024, Tap to Pay on iPhone across Australia and New Zealand in December 2024, Zip in April 2025 and Afterpay in October 2025. It does federal government work too, which is about what you would expect from a company whose bread and butter is parking and ticketing.