Payment Optimisation
The RBA just changed the payments conversation.
Lessn was built for what comes next.
The Reserve Bank's decision to slash interchange fees has focused Australian attention on the cost of processing a payment. At Moroku, we've spent two years building Lessn around a different question entirely — what does it actually cost a business to get paid?
When we started building Lessn, the thesis was straightforward: Australian SMEs are paying too much to get paid, and most of that cost is invisible to them. The interchange fee on a card transaction is a line item someone can point to. The cumulative drag of failed payments, manual reconciliation, slow collection, and staff time chasing overdue invoices — that cost is buried across the P&L and rarely attributed to the payments layer at all.
The RBA's decision to cut credit card interchange from 0.8% to 0.3% — and halve debit interchange on top of that — is a significant structural shift. But its most important effect for Lessn isn't what it does to processing costs. It's that it forces a broader reckoning with payment economics at the SME level. CFOs who were previously distracted by rate negotiation with their acquirer will now have to find the next lever. We think that lever is end-to-end AR optimisation. And that's precisely what Lessn is built to deliver.
What the market has been getting wrong
Payment providers have sold SMEs on basis points for decades. The conversation has always been about the processing fee — what percentage the gateway takes, what the interchange component is, whether you're getting a good merchant rate. It's a legitimate cost, but it's the smallest cost in the system.
The real cost of getting paid for an Australian SME spans the entire AR cycle. When you add up failed and declined payments, the overhead of matching transactions to invoices across multiple rails, the working capital cost of slow collection, and the staff time spent chasing and resolving — the numbers dwarf what any rate negotiation can recover.
For a business processing $1 million annually, our modelling puts the post-RBA processing fee at roughly $7,000 per year — a genuine saving on where it was. The hidden AR costs — failed payments, reconciliation, DSO, and manual intervention — stack up to around $57,000. That's an 8:1 ratio. The RBA addressed the smaller number. Lessn is built to address the larger one.
Adjust the slider below to model the numbers for your own business.
Figures are estimates derived from Australian SME research. Processing fees, failed payments, and DSO scale proportionally with revenue. Reconciliation and manual AR have a fixed base cost that grows logarithmically — reflecting that staff time doesn't double when volume doubles, but does increase at higher revenue levels. Actual costs vary by business model, payment mix, and industry.
What Lessn actually does
Lessn is a payments orchestration platform for Australian SMEs. It sits between a business and its payment rails, routing transactions intelligently and giving merchants, founders, and bookkeepers genuine choice across card, direct debit, and bank-to-bank methods including PayTo.
Choice matters here because different people in a business need different things from their payment infrastructure. A founder wants to know the business is getting paid on terms that protect cash flow. A bookkeeper wants clean data that matches automatically to invoices without manual intervention. A merchant wants to offer their customers flexibility without taking on complexity themselves. Lessn addresses all three through a suite of payment tools — split payments, scheduled payments, and customer-facing payment preferences — alongside role-based access control that ensures each person in the business sees and controls what's relevant to their role, and no more.
The routing layer reduces processing cost. But the more significant value is what Lessn does across the broader cycle: intelligent retry logic that recovers failed payments before they become a manual problem; reconciliation that matches settlement data to invoices automatically, regardless of which rail a payment came through; and the payment data layer that gives a business real visibility into its cash position rather than a lag-laden view through the accounting system.
The interchange cuts make one part of this story slightly less dramatic — as card and bank rail costs converge, the routing arbitrage on any individual transaction narrows. But that convergence actually strengthens Lessn's core value proposition. When rails are roughly equivalent in price, the decision of which to use becomes less about cost and more about reliability, speed of settlement, and reconciliation quality. Lessn competes on all three.
The platform embedding opportunity
One of the strategic directions we've been most deliberate about with Lessn is its distribution model. Rather than building a direct-to-SME sales motion from scratch, we've focused on embedding Lessn inside vertical SaaS platforms that already serve SME markets — platforms in professional services, healthcare practice management, and field services, where the software vendor is the trusted relationship and payments is a natural adjacency.
The RBA decision accelerates this strategy. Vertical platform vendors are going to face merchant clients asking harder questions about payment costs and AR efficiency. These platforms won't build payment orchestration themselves — it's not their core capability and the regulatory and infrastructure complexity is significant. An embedded Lessn gives them an answer to that question without building it.
This is the model that makes Lessn interesting at scale: not as a payments gateway competing on rate, but as the intelligent AR layer that makes vertical software platforms indispensable to their customers.
Why now matters
The timing of the RBA's decision is useful for Lessn in a way that goes beyond the direct economics. It's created a moment where payment costs are front of mind for Australian SME operators and the CFOs of the platforms that serve them. That's a commercial opening — not because the savings on interchange are transformative, but because the conversation is now happening.
Lessn's pitch into that conversation is straightforward: processing costs just got simpler. Let's talk about the other $57,000.
We've been building towards this moment. The RBA has helped create it.