Cirralto Ltd (ASX: CRO) shares are slowly coming down after a morning of flying high on news the company has upgraded its payment services. At its intraday high, the Cirralto share price reached 9.1 cents – a gain of 7.6%. – but, it has since fallen.
At the time of writing, the Cirralto share price is back where it started this morning, trading at 8.4 cents.
Let's take a closer look at today's news from the technology-focused investment company.
Spenda's latest upgrade
Cirralto has upgraded SpendaCollect, SpendaPay, and the Spenda app, with more planned for the remainder of this quarter.
Spenda is designed to facilitate business-to-business (B2B) transactions but is beginning to branch out into business-to-customer transactions.
The Spenda suite now offers what is essentially a buy now, pay later (BNPL) service. It's also newly equipped with Visa Business Payment Solutions Provider (BPSP) and Mastercard Payment Aggregator (BPA), as part of Cirralto's agreements with Fiserv, Inc.
Cirralto says this will speed up its onboarding of customers and allow it to create a merchant rate to increase its profits.
Other new services include electric funds transfers, BPAY, credit card services, and finance or pay by the month (essentially a BNPL service).
The company says it provides payment services at a lower cost than traditional merchants. It says this is likely to be attractive to businesses. Spenda is also said to help bypass the disruption businesses often face when changing software as it works with other systems rather than replacing them.
It also allows for the automation of business ledgers in B2B transactions and increases security by identifying both parties of a transaction.
Cirralto will focus on customers in a few key markets, to begin with.
These include connecting fashion, homewares and specialist retailers to manufacturers; connecting parents to schools and schools to suppliers; connecting food producers to suppliers and food retailers to producers, and connecting vehicle owners to service providers.
Spenda's existing customers will be migrated to the new services over the course of May.
Commentary from management
Cirralto managing director Adrian Floate commented on the upgrades, saying:
The last 12 months has been a transformational period for the company, moving from pure development to launching and commercialising new products…
We have focused our development teams on crafting software that drives improvements for our customers and our customers' customer's. We have entered into new strategic relationships that expand our service capability and, in the past few months, we have developed a payment solution that bundles the most common ways businesses pay each other into a single solution.
Cirralto share price snapshot
The Cirralto share price has had a fantastic 2021 on the ASX so far, despite the fact that today's early gains have failed to stick.
Currently, the Cirralto share price is up 110% year to date. It's also up a humongous 2,733% over the last 12 months.
The company has a market capitalisation of around $171 million, with approximately 2 billion shares outstanding.
