SMALL FIRMS are being encouraged to take to the web by an Irish start-up offering low-cost credit-card charges for online payments.
Lucey Technology uses the basic principles of cloud computing to make services and applications that were previously the sole domain of larger businesses available to small firms, exemplified by a 1.24 per cent rate for credit-card processing.
“Smaller businesses are typically charged anything from 2 to 5 per cent, whereas big businesses have a much higher bargaining power and get it down to less than 1 per cent,” said managing director Ian Lucey.
Mr Lucey went to merchant banks and negotiated the best rate he could on the basis that he would deliver 1,000 customers. Elavon came back with the offer of 1.24 per cent.
The other charge to Mr Lucey’s clients is the €30 a month they pay to use the company’s software.
Lucey Technology has taken Microsoft SharePoint – portal software typically used by large companies for collaborative working – and re-engineered it as a web-facing platform for small firms.
As well as online payments, SharePoint can be used for digital signatures, file sharing, collaboration, document management and to host web meetings. “Every client gets their own mini site at a fraction of what it would have cost if they tried to do it for themselves,” said Mr Lucey.
The former Sage employee targeted accountants for his first wave of customers. Instead of posting out thousands of tax returns for sign-off, they can load them up on their mini site and get them cleared by the client using a secure digital signature.
To date, 60 per cent of his customers have signed up just to take advantage of the payment service. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s payments or digital signatures; the point is that we are putting an infrastructure in place where small businesses can interact online,” he said.
A fresh interest in credit-card payment has been triggered by the recession, according to Mr Lucey, because firms find it preferable to the infamous “cheque in the post”.
“We’ll have [1,000 customers] by the end of the year,” he said, “around 70 per cent of them from outside Ireland.” Mr Lucey is disappointed with the Irish uptake. “We talk about being a knowledge economy but a lot of Irish businesses don’t use the internet.”
