How to support the arts while you're buying your morning coffee – or anything

It's such a commonplace occurrence we don't even really think about it: You buy something, anything, tap your credit card or phone to pay for it and go about your day. But how does the money go from your bank account to the merchant's? And who makes money on the mysterious fees that are paid somewhere in that transaction?

That is what friends Alistair Webster, Marc Goldenfein and Lara Thoms got to thinking about during lockdowns, as they were brainstorming ideas as to how they might be able to help the moribund arts sector. As it turns out, point-of-sale payments are an enormous industry, generating billions and billions in profits for payment providers every year. 

"Every time you use a credit or debit card to purchase something in store or online, the business pays a fee to a payment company that basically gets the money from the consumer's account into business'," says Webster. "At the moment, there are only for-profit [payments processing companies]: the big banks the handful of the US tech companies, Silicon Valley tech companies. And we thought, Well, why couldn't we set up a payment company that uses those fees for good?"

Thus, ArtsPay was born, which collects fees from point-of-sale purchases and puts that money into a foundation, which then gives money to small arts organisations or individual artists. "Every time someone buys a coffee or a book or tickets at an ArtsPay business, some of that purchase price will be going into the arts," he says.

ArtsPay teamed up with global payment giant Fiserv, which provided the technology and knowhow to facilitate the payments processing, both online and in venue. ArtsPay's fees are actually lower than those of the big banks, and merchants and customers like knowing their hard-earned is doing something good. So far the list of businesses includes icons like the Tote, Lucy Folk jewellery, Oscar Hunt and the Paperback Bookshop. But this isn't just a service for small, independent businesses. ArtsPay wants to sign up as many big companies as it can, too.

"Big businesses spend millions of dollars a year on payments," says Webster. "So imagine if we could funnel that millions of dollars into the arts – that would be amazing and transformative for artists, transformative for the small arts organisations that we're supporting, and transformative for our cities."

The organisation has just started onboarding businesses and is in the process of setting up the foundation that will distribute the cash. The "big, audacious" goal is to eventually be able to give $10 million to artists every year. Just because it's a big goal doesn't mean it's not achievable, though – "There's no reason why we can't," says Webster. "We have a product that works." 

The organisation is Australia-wide and has business across the country signing up to be a part of the project. For the consumer, the experience is identical to any tap-and-go system, "except that the terminal is branded with ArtsPay, so they get to say get to see that their money is going into the arts rather than to Commonwealth Bank. Our terminals say, 'we support the arts ArtsPay'. That's a great way for businesses to say that they're using our provider. And the customers get to know that these fees are going to do something good. And of course, once we start our grantmaking, we'll be able to share with businesses and then with their customers what impacts their fees are actually having, which will be incredible."