Tyro wins case against Kounta over poaching merchants

The news: Merchant payments provider Tyro has won its legal challenge against agent and point of sale (POS) software company Kounta, after alleging the Canadian-owned company had been trying to steal its customers. The NSW Supreme Court found that Kounta — which provides POS software and payments services as an agent under Tyro's financial services licence — breached its contractual non-solicitation obligations to Tyro.

The numbers: Tyro has a customer base of roughly 53,000 merchants, while Kounta's Lightspeed platform is used by around 12,000 businesses in Australia and New Zealand, according to the Australian Financial Review. Tyro is seeking damages for compensation and lost profits, which the court has deferred until 24 November for further directions.

The context: Tyro's value has struggled to recover after an outage — and subsequent class action — in 2021 that left thousands of businesses unable to process card payments. The company has survived two takeover bids since then but Tyro's market cap has slumped to $535.3 million with a share price of $1.025 today, down from more than $4 per share at points in 2020 and 2021.

What they said: "The Court has today made orders that restrain Kounta (without Tyro’s consent) from soliciting, inducing or otherwise attempting to persuade any Tyro merchant to become a merchant of any entity providing Acquiring Services (being the functions and facilities provided by Tyro to facilitate the processing of financial transactions)," Tyro said in a statement.