Meet Grow: The Israeli Fintech Challenging the Traditional Payments Stack
Grow Payments cleared the regulatory hurdle that lets a nonbank operate inside the Israeli domestic payments system on the same infrastructure the banks use. What it built, what to watch, and why the timing of August 19, 2024 made the company possible.
Published in Fintech & Public Markets — olam.business
Most Israeli payment companies in the past two decades did one of two things. They sold software to merchants who still cleared through bank-owned acquirers. Or they sold cross-border products that worked because the Israeli domestic stack didn't.
Grow Payments is the first to do something genuinely different. It cleared the regulatory hurdle that lets a nonbank operate inside the domestic system on the same infrastructure the banks use — and it built a product that turns that access into something a small business can actually buy.
This is the piece on what Grow is, what it built, and why the timing of August 19, 2024 made the company possible.
The unlock
On August 19, 2024, the Bank of Israel granted three nonbank entities direct operating access to the country's core payment infrastructure. Grow Payments Ltd. was one of them. (For the full context of why this matters — ZAHAV, Shva, MASAV, the bank-owned acquiring oligopoly — see our payments pillar.)
The short version: until August 2024, only banks could clear directly through the national rails. Now three nonbanks can. Grow is the only one of the three targeted at general small-business payments. That's not a marketing claim. That's a market structure.
The product
Grow's commercial product is a payment-acceptance layer that sits inside the invoicing software an Israeli small business already uses.
A merchant on Greeninvoice, Sumit, or EZcount issues an invoice. The invoice includes a Grow payment link. The customer pays — by credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Bit. The receipt issues automatically. The money settles to the merchant's bank account.
The user experience is comparable to Cardcom or Tranzila. The difference sits underneath: Grow clears directly on Bank of Israel infrastructure, so the intermediary stack is shorter than what any bank-owned acquirer offers. That translates into lower per-transaction cost and faster settlement.
The product Grow is most clearly betting on, though, is bank-transfer-based checkout. A payment link that defaults to direct account-to-account transfer — with cards as a fallback — is a different product from what the legacy acquirers offer. Lower per-transaction revenue for the operator. Lower fees for the merchant. Higher potential volume. Different unit economics altogether.
The business model
Three things make Grow's economics different from a bank-owned acquirer.
First, the rail is shorter. A standard Israeli merchant on a bank-owned acquirer pays for at least four intermediaries: the issuing bank, the card network (Visa or Mastercard), the acquiring bank, and Shva for clearing. Grow collapses that. It does not eliminate the card networks for card transactions, but it eliminates the acquiring-bank layer because it is the acquirer. For bank-transfer transactions, it eliminates the card networks entirely.
Second, the integration sits inside accounting software, not inside a leased POS terminal. There is no monthly equipment fee. There is no installation. Onboarding is digital. For a service business or a B2B operator, the relevant comparison isn't terminal-based — it's whether the payment flow lives inside the invoicing system the operator already uses.
Third, the customer acquisition path runs through partnerships, not branch banking. The legacy acquirers grew through bank-branch distribution: every business banking relationship was an opportunity to sell terminal services. Grow grows through invoicing-platform integrations. The merchant who uses Greeninvoice already has the Grow option exposed inside that workflow.
Merchant adoption: what to watch
The thesis is clean. The execution test is whether Israeli SMBs actually switch.
Israeli small businesses are conservative on payment infrastructure for understandable reasons. Switching costs are real — reconciliation, integration with accounting systems, retraining staff. The cost of a payment error is high. And the bank relationship that sits behind the legacy acquirer is the same bank relationship that supplies the operating credit line. Disrupting one risks disrupting the other.
Three signals to track over the next 18 months:
Volume share on integrated invoicing platforms. If Grow becomes a meaningful percentage of payment links issued through Greeninvoice, Sumit, and EZcount within a year, the distribution thesis is working. If it stays in single digits, the legacy acquirers' inertia advantage holds.
Bank-transfer checkout adoption. Cards are not going away in Israeli e-commerce. The structural question is whether merchants adopt bank-transfer as the primary rail for high-value B2B and service transactions — the segments where card fees never made sense. If they do, Grow has a category. If they don't, Grow is competing on price inside an existing category.
Bank response speed. Bit Business, PayBox Business, and acquirer-led merchant products are all credible competitors if the banks decide to invest. The next 12 months will reveal whether they treat Grow as an existential threat (and ship product accordingly) or as a fringe entrant they can ignore.
Where Grow does not compete
Reading Grow's competitive position is easier by looking at who it isn't trying to replace.
Not Bit. Bit is a consumer P2P utility that found a backdoor into commerce. Bit Business now exists as a formal merchant product but remains constrained by the bank-owned distribution model that built it.
Not Payoneer or Rapyd. Both serve cross-border. Grow is a domestic Israeli rail.
Not the legacy acquirers outright. Isracard, Max, Cal retain physical retail, deep merchant relationships, and the terminals that sit on Israeli countertops. Grow's wedge is digital-first SMBs — service businesses, professional services, online-first commerce — where the merchant-acquirer relationship was never the lock-in.
What Grow competes with is the default. The default of an Israeli SMB calling their bank and accepting whatever the bank offers. Every transaction that moves from that default onto a Grow rail is, structurally, won.
The risks worth naming
Three.
First, scale. Direct infrastructure access does not, by itself, build a sales motion. Grow needs to acquire merchants, deepen invoicing-platform integrations, and convert operators whose default is to keep what they have. The growth curve over the next 18 months will tell the story.
Second, bank response. The three largest Israeli banks did not lose direct infrastructure exclusivity by accident, and they will not surrender SMB share quietly. Expect product launches from Hapoalim, Leumi, and Discount — faster, cheaper, and better integrated than they were two years ago.
Third, the regulatory ceiling. The August 2024 designation made Grow one of three. If the Bank of Israel opens the same access to ten or twenty nonbank entities over the next two years — which is the policy trajectory — Grow's first-mover advantage compresses fast. The window to convert regulatory access into a product and brand lead is finite.
Why timing matters more than product
The most important thing to understand about Grow is that the product, on its own, is not what makes the company interesting. Competent Israeli payment-link products already exist. At the merchant level, the user experience between them is converging.
What Grow has that the others do not — today — is the regulatory position. The August 2024 designation makes Grow a first-mover nonbank with direct infrastructure access. Whether that translates into a durable advantage depends on what Grow does with the window before it closes.
The structural significance is broader than any single company. For two decades the Israeli SMB payments stack was a closed system: bank-owned infrastructure, bank-written rules, bank-set pricing, merchant as price-taker. August 2024 broke that. Grow is the first proof-point that a nonbank fintech can operate inside the system on the same terms as the banks. Whether the long-term winner is Grow, or one of the next dozen entities to get the same access, or a non-Israeli platform that enters through the now-open door — the twenty-year model is over.
For Israeli small businesses, that is the part that matters. The merchant of 2026 has options the merchant of 2022 did not. The acquirer is no longer the gatekeeper. The bank is no longer the only counterparty. The rails are finally accessible from outside the banking system.
Grow walked through the door first. The question that decides the next decade is who follows them — and how fast.
— The Olam Editorial Team
