Woolworths Group selects Gr4vy to power Wpay’s payments platform

Discover why Australia and New Zealand’s largest retailer, Woolworths 
Group, chose Gr4vy’s payment orchestration platform (POP) technology 
to power its Wpay payment platform.

Established in 1924, Woolworths Group is New Zealand and Australia’s largest retail group, offering a range of products to its 24 million customers, across a growing network of businesses. The group represents one of the largest processors of card payments in Australia, settling an annual value of more than $87 billion in payments across more than 1.5 billion transactions in 2023 alone. 

Wpay, a new standalone payment business launched by Woolworths Group in June 2022, extends the benefits of the investments the group has made in its payments platform to other merchants who may not have the scale to build it themselves.

Wpay is a proven retail payments platform, designed for retailers. Originally developed for the Woolworths Group, Wpay is now available for its customers across Australia and New Zealand. Wpay is a comprehensive merchant platform that can be tailored and will continually evolve to meet clients’ changing needs, helping deliver powerful customer experiences.

“Wpay is committed to investing in leading-edge payment capabilities and technologies to help service our retail businesses and provide the best possible customer experience as part of our Wpay payments platform. I’m excited about this partnership, and what it will bring to our merchants’ customer payments experiences and look forward to collaborating in the future.”

— Paul Monnington, Managing Director of Wpay

The Challenge

As consumer behavior and risk profiles continue to shift, Wpay needed a nimble and agile platform to deploy and manage payment complexities, and offer advanced payment optionality to Woolworths brands and other Wpay merchants in Australia through one integration. It was also important for Wpay to have its payments data in market and not introduce unnecessary latency onto its payments platform with its partner selection.

Following a successful proof-of-concept, Woolworths selected Gr4vy and its payment orchestration platform technology to power its Wpay payments platform, and accelerate the offering’s product development and innovation agenda. 

Key stats at a glance

With retail continuing to grow across Australia and New Zealand, here are some insights into the region:

• Woolworths Group serves 24 million customers across a growing network of businesses
  
• Wpay processed more than $87 billion in card payments across 
more than 1.5 billion transactions 
in 2023 alone
  
• Woolworths Group has 372,000 shareholders, many of whom are everyday ‘mum-and-dad’ investors
  
• In 2023, total retail turnover for Australia was approximately $425 billion Australian dollars – an increase of over $14 billion from 2022
  
• The New Zealand retail market size was valued at $79.2 billion NZ dollars in 2021 and is expected to achieve a CAGR of more than 4% during 2021-2026
  
• An average of 24.5 million customers shop across Woolworths Group every week, with Australian sales increasing by 17.4% in 2023
  
• Woolworths group generated 
$64 billion in sales for 2023, cementing it’s place as one of Australia and New Zealand’s 
largest retailers

The Solution

Gr4vy and Wpay collaborated to carefully identify and deliver specific product and payment orchestration infrastructure capabilities to implement that would enhance Wpay’s existing comprehensive payment platform and product offerings. 

As a result, through Wpay’s payment platform, powered by Gr4vy’s IaaS payment orchestration platform, merchants onboarded through Wpay can now offer even more exceptional payment optionality, streamline and manage transactions on both the front- and back-end of the checkout,and drive better customer payment experiences.

Gr4vy product features

• Cloud-native infrastructure – Move payments to our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform and eliminate risk of a single point of failure, with bespoke resilience and regional cloud instances.
  
• Maximize conversion – Our no-code workflow engine optimizes approval rates and lets you customize payment flows, with automated failover rules for personalized checkout experiences.
  
• Single integration – Access unlimited payment providers, 100+ payment methods, and global anti-fraud providers through one low-code integration, with options for embedded checkout, hosted secure fields, API, or e-commerce platform plugins.
  
• PSP agnostic – Avoid vendor lock-in by working with multiple payment providers through our agnostic vault, with centralized PCI DSS Level 1 certification for secure data collection, storage, and transaction tokenization across multiple PSPs.
  
• Reduce risk – Manage fraud, trigger risk services, and decline high-risk transactions to avoid unnecessary costs, with options to use anti-fraud providers, control 3DS, and set custom rules throughout the transaction lifecycle.

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