Australian Payments Plus (AP+) has selected Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) to develop eftpos Click to Pay with integrated least-cost routing (LCR), a project that is billed as a world first for online debit card payments.
Click to Pay allows consumers to make fast online purchases without manually entering card details, replacing payment card details with a digital token.
By integrating Click to Pay with eftpos, merchants will have the option to move away from costly card scheme networks by automatically routing the payment to the lowest-cost network.
In an April 2024 report, the Reserve bank of Australia found that the cost of accepting debit card transactions is nearly 20% lower for merchants that have LCR turned on compared with those with LCR turned off.
While LCR is widely enabled for in-store payments (70%) and increasingly for mobile wallets (30%), online guest checkout payments have historically lacked this functionality.
Adrian Lovney, chief payments and schemes officer at AP+, says:“Click to Pay with eftpos combines the seamless, secure online checkout experience customers expect with the added benefit of least-cost routing - helping put downward pressure on the cost of accepting payments,”
AP+ has been working with Google to roll out eftpos functionality and least-cost routing (LCR) on transactions made via Google Wallet, with ANZ and Suncorp as the first two issuers live.
Lovney says the programme will be rolled out more widely in 2026.