Windcave

Windcave is the Auckland payments company that most merchants in New Zealand knew for years as Payment Express. It was founded in 1999 and began as a card gateway, then moved into acquiring in 2016, when it launched merchant services at home and called itself the country's first non-bank acquirer. Acquiring followed in Australia in 2018, the UK and US in 2020, Canada in 2021 and Europe in 2023. The group now reports more than 400 staff and offices from Melbourne and Sydney to London, Vilnius, Malta and New York.

Unusually for a gateway, it designs and makes its own hardware: countertop and mobile terminals, PIN pads and weatherproof modules for self-service machines, with an R&D and manufacturing operation in Auckland. The same platform runs online payments, tokenisation, fraud screening and reporting, and Tap to Pay on iPhone arrived in New Zealand and Australia at the end of 2024.

The method list is long. Alongside Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners, Discover, JCB and UnionPay, Windcave supports eftpos in Australia, Interac in Canada, Apple Pay and Google Pay, Alipay and WeChat Pay, wallets from the Alipay+ network such as GCash and KakaoPay, PayPal, Klarna, Zip and Afterpay (Clearpay in the UK). In 2026 it added iDEAL | Wero for Dutch shoppers and ACH bank payments in the US through Plaid. What a merchant can switch on depends on country and channel.

Windcave suits retailers, hospitality groups, ticketing businesses and unattended operators that want terminals, gateway and acquiring from one supplier. Pricing is quoted by its sales team rather than published. Its European business runs through Windcave Limited UAB, a Lithuanian payment institution licensed by the Bank of Lithuania.