Australia is banning card surcharges. For software platforms, this is the moment to rethink payments.

If part of your merchant pitch still relies on “passing card costs on to the customer”, that line now has a clear expiry date.  

On 1 October 2026, surcharging – adding an extra fee to a card payment so the customer covers the processing cost – ends in Australia, which means any software platform that used surcharge pass-through as part of its offer will need a new way to explain the value of payments.

The change follows the Reserve Bank of Australia’s review of merchant card costs and surcharging, published at the end of March. From October, surcharging on debit, prepaid and credit cards will end across the designated eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks, while the wider reforms also bring lower interchange caps and new transparency requirements for card schemes and large acquirers.

For PayFacs, ISVs and ISOs, this is a reset in how merchants think about payments, as well as a good moment to replace a fading pricing hook with something stronger: payments that sit inside the software, run under the same brand and stay under control.  

What changes on 1 October in Australia

Since March, I have been having the same conversation with platforms whose merchant offer was built, at least in part, on surcharge pass-through.

What happens, they ask, when the sales line that helped win merchants for years suddenly stops working overnight?

The short answer is that merchants start seeing card costs directly, rather than pushing them onto their customers as a separate surcharge. The longer answer is that once those costs show up more clearly on a payments bill, merchants are far more likely to ask questions about how their payments are set up and who is really in control.

Surcharging meant accepting cards at close to zero net cost because the customer paid the fee at the terminal. That mechanic is the basis of the zero‑cost terminal model seen across Australian industries, from retail to automotive: the platform provides the device for nothing, sets the surcharge to cover the processing fee, and the merchant rarely sees a payments bill of their own. For a sales team, “your card costs go to zero” was always hard to beat.

From 1 October, those offers have to be reworked. Thousands of merchants who have barely had to think about a payments bill will start seeing one. And when they do, the first company they are likely to question is the software platform whose name is on the terminal, because that is the payments brand they know.

Why embedded payments matter more now

The RBA says the reforms will cut business payment costs by about A$910 million a year, but merchants will only see that saving if their provider passes those savings on. The reforms also require card schemes and large acquirers to publish their fees, which should make it easier for merchants to compare providers. Both of these things change the market.

If a merchant used to pass card costs on to customers, they may not have cared much about comparing payment providers. But now that those costs are more visible, they have a reason to look around. That makes merchants on your platform easier for competitors to target, and merchants on other platforms easier for you to win.

But merchants do not compare payments on their own. A venue owner does not think about rostering software on one day and card processing on another. They think about whether the night ran smoothly, whether tables turned on time, whether a split bill took seconds, and whether a broken terminal was fixed quickly. To them, the software and the payments are part of the same product.  

From October onward, merchants will increasingly measure success by the combined value that an embedded software and payments experience delivers to their vertical and business. Merchants will judge platforms more by how well that the software as a whole helps them run their business. What exactly matters to each merchant will vary by industry: the membership that renews without lapsing, the invoice that is paid before the tradesperson leaves the driveway, or the clinic that reconciles a full day of appointments without switching systems.

This is also the best defense against competing on price alone. When fees are published, price becomes the easiest thing to compare. But if payments are built into the way a business runs, they become harder to compare and harder to replace. Your acquiring partner should enable you to present a defining value to your customer in a way that supports payments remaining part of your product as a feature. Merchants who make a switch to other platforms will miss out on the distinct features they rely on every day, and that loss would affect their business more than any savings elsewhere.  

How Nuvei helps Australian platforms own the payments experience

Nuvei works with Australian software platforms as an embedded payments partner. Payments run inside your platform and under your brand, while you keep ownership of onboarding, operations, and the merchant relationship. Underneath, Nuvei holds the acquiring relationship, processes the transactions, and carries PCI and scheme compliance. Your merchants and their customers see your software, not ours. More broadly, Nuvei’s payments platform is built to support online and in-person payment experiences across channels.  

That model rests on four practical building blocks.

1. Bring Your Own Device: hardware on your terms

Bring Your Own Device gives partners more hardware control. If you already have devices in the field, or a terminal strategy you want to keep, you can source and purchase your own hardware, mainly PAX devices, while Nuvei provides the payment software, certification, and transaction enablement. That gives you faster deployment, more hardware flexibility, less dependence on acquirer-run logistics, and more control over merchant rollouts.

2. Integration suite: keeping the lifecycle in your software

The integration suite keeps more of the merchant lifecycle inside your software. Through four APIs and a webhook, partners can handle terminal activation, terminal swaps, terminal configuration, refunds, and status updates without pushing merchants into a separate payments workflow. That means a merchant with a failed terminal contacts you, not an outside provider, and your systems can reflect changes in real time instead of waiting on manual follow-up. Partners that want broader implementation flexibility can also review Nuvei’s integration options.  

3. Online gateway: built-in security for online payments

The online gateway covers online and card-not-present volume without forcing partners to build the full security layer themselves. The gateway acts as a built-in payments engine, with PCI DSS-aligned handling and sensitive payment data stored with Nuvei. Your merchants get secure payment capability inside your platform, while the transaction security burden sits with us.

4. ANZ Nuvei Partner Portal: an operations back office from day one

The ANZ Nuvei Partner Portal gives partners an operational back office from day one. For software companies that do not yet have a full payments admin layer, the portal provides one place to onboard and activate merchants, track onboarding status, monitor accounts and in-person and online transactions, view support cases status and run reporting. That reduces the need to build everything upfront while still giving partners visibility and control over their merchant base. Teams evaluating the partner model can also look at Nuvei’s partner programme.  

Taken together, these capabilities answer the more important post-surcharge question:

Can I run payments as part of my product, on my timeline, with my merchant relationship intact?  

With Nuvei, you can bring payments inside your platform without giving up control of the merchant experience.

The questions to ask before October

Every provider will say they are ready for 1 October. The more useful question is what that readiness actually lets you do on 2 October that you could not do on 30 September.

• Can you manage your merchants yourself, or does that still go through someone else’s team?
• Can you activate, swap, configure, and support terminals from inside your own product?
• When interchange falls, can you clearly show merchants what changed and where the savings went?
• Can you keep the payments experience inside your software, under your brand, without building the full acquiring stack yourself?

Those are the questions that get closer to what this reform really changes. A surcharge-led pitch depended on a regulatory setting that is now being removed, but a payments experience you genuinely control is a stronger proposition and one that does not disappear when the rules change.

And the rules will keep changing. The RBA has already said it plans a further public consultation covering parts of the retail payments system not settled in this review, including mobile wallets, three-party card networks, buy now, pay later services, and e-commerce platforms.

The platforms most likely to do well through that change are the ones whose merchant offer rests on what they own: product control, servicing control, operational visibility, and a cleaner merchant experience. If part of your sales story expires on 1 October, now is the time to replace it with one that does not.

Talk to Nuvei’s ANZ partnerships team about bringing payments inside your platform before October.