A newcomer in the payments processing market, DataMesh Group, has had its first big contract win, signing a deal to provide payment services to retail and property group Peregrine.

DataMesh was launched in 2018 and is headed by its founder Mark Nagy, a veteran of the payments industry whose CV includes roles at Commonwealth Bank and Keycorp.

Nagy said DataMesh is in the switching and processing end of the market. It also supplies point of sale hardware. It has no plans to be a merchant acquirer.

Nagy said: “There has been a strong focus in the industry on mobile and internet payments. The bricks and mortar end of the business has some problems which have been left unaddressed. Our goal is to fix the technology end for merchants.”

Adelaide-based Peregrine owns a portfolio of retail businesses, including tobacco retailer Smokemart & Giftbox, the South Australian outlets of donut maker Krispy Kreme and petrol station chain On the Run. It also owns fuel distributor Reliable Petroleum and a commercial property portfolio.

DataMesh will be Peregrine’s sole payments provider.

Nagy said some of the “pain points” for merchants include outages, limited and outdated payment terminal options, high lease and transaction fees, lack of integration of payment types and poor data analytics.

He said a common problem was that if merchants want to do something different, such as put a payment terminal on a petrol bowser, their banks may not be able to support them

DataMesh claims that its platform enables connectivity to multiple card scheme and acquirers. One benefit of this is “real time cut-over to back-up acquirers in the event of an outage.”

Nagy said the DataMesh software operates on the merchant’s choice of EMV-compliant payment hardware with any payment instrument accepted.

He said the technology automatically selects least cost or merchant choice routing to minimise transaction costs.