Leading real-time payments platform, Volt has appointed Adam Vidal as senior vice president of Australia and New Zealand, responsible for driving and expanding Volt’s commercial operations in the market.

Vidal brings a wealth of experience to Volt, having held senior commercial roles at major banking and payments institutions across a career spanning over 20 years. Joining from Basiq where he built and led sales and customer success teams, and contributed to the successful acquisition of the business by Australian banking provider Cuscal.

Prior to Basiq, Vidal spent over three years at PayPal, where he led the onboarding of strategic new verticals including QSR, insurance and franchisee marketplaces. He also spent over seven years at Visa as senior director of Visa’s global payment gateway CyberSource, where he grew the business across fintech, merchants and financial institutions.

Commenting on his new role, Vidal said: “Australia is an exciting market for payments innovation; currently dominated by the card schemes, but with rising operational and interchange costs, merchant margins are being squeezed.

“Now is the time for an alternative real-time payment option that disrupts the card dominance, and with PayTo we have that opportunity. I’m excited to bring Volt’s globally recognised real-time payments infrastructure to the Australian market.”

Last year, the Reserve Bank of Australia announced its support to decommission the Australian BECS payment system, in favour of more modern, digital, and real-time payment systems. Namely, the New Payments Platform (NPP). Volt’s gateway is integrated with PayTo, an Australian digital payment platform from the NPP that enables consumers to authorise and control payments directly from their bank account.

Volt co-founder and chief growth officer, Jordan Lawrence said, “I’m thrilled to be welcoming Adam as our latest addition to lead our Australia and New Zealand growth. He has an enviable CV of experience and with a career spanning over 20 years at some of the biggest players in the banking and payment space, his market knowledge and business acumen will be instrumental for our growth in Australia and beyond.

“The market is a critical one for us strategically in terms of our global expansion. As we’ve seen by launching with Megatix and most recently one-click payments, it’s a market where the demand for account-to-account payments is already very high and with PayTo recently launching plus the government’s efforts to innovate the payments space, we need to make sure we’re capitalising. We see Australia and New Zealand as the base to grow Volt into APAC, so success in this region is a strategic priority to us and Adam is an important part of that.”