What is the story behind IXOPAY, what are your target markets, and what payment issues are you trying to solve in these markets?
IXOPAY is part of the IXOLIT group, a high-end IT service provider focused on managed infrastructure, custom development, ecommerce platforms, and payments, for nearly 20 years, giving us an in-depth understanding of the challenges our clients face. IXOPAY is specifically addressing the needs of large online merchants, as well as Payment Service Providers and Independent Sales Organizations.
Enterprise merchants typically operate globally, driving their need to integrate with multiple payment providers in order to cover the countries, currencies, and payment methods preferred by their international customers.
Our IXOPAY gateway enables such merchants to integrate a multitude of payment services in a quick, safe, and cost-effective way, as well as consolidating reporting, risk management, and settlement/reconciliation processes into a single platform. Saving merchants’ time and money while offering seamless transactions to their customers is a true win-win scenario.
The core business of PSPs and ISOs, on the other hand, is building and managing relationships with acquirers and merchants. This is where our PCI-certified white-label gateway comes into play. A modern, highly scalable multi-tenant architecture, functional depth, powerful configuration tools, and our growing catalogue of acquirer integrations come together to form the ideal technical foundation for successful PSPs.
Having worked on many international projects, what do you see as being the most important high-growth markets (regionally and in terms of verticals covered)?
In terms of territories, I believe the biggest growth potential is to be found in the APAC region, followed by LATAM and EMEA. Merchants have a lot of catching up to do in order to successfully expand in these regions, especially regarding local payment preferences.
As for verticals, the demand for various payment methods and optimised checkout flows are growing for retailers of tangible goods, while providers of digital goods and services invest in multi-acquirer setups in order to achieve a higher degree of independence from any single payment provider.
Regarding local payment methods and preferences, what are the main challenges for companies entering a new market?
Many growing merchants are facing constraints resulting from their initial approach to payments, which often is direct integration with specific PSPs. Over the years, they have accrued a large amount of technical debt, making the integration of additional PSPs – those best suited for the new markets these merchants are seeking to enter – difficult, costly, and risky.
I would advise anyone starting out in ecommerce to think long term: does your payment service strategy give you real flexibility, or are you tightly coupling your business infrastructure to a provider who might not follow you into new markets? Most legacy PSPs will give you the “integrate with us and you’re set forever, wherever” pitch. But they face their own set of constraints – technical, commercial, regulatory, etc – and have their own strategy. Expanding to a new market or offering a new payment method may make sense to you, but not necessarily to your PSP. Their risk and fraud management tools might work fine for your current markets, but can they handle the specific challenges of new markets?
To avoid getting bogged down by PSP lock-in and unnecessary growing pains, you should invest early on in a modern, scalable, and easily extendable platform, one which enables you to add new payment providers without compromising on speed, customer experience, or security. This is the need we are addressing with IXOPAY.
What do you believe is driving ecommerce growth and what is the role of marketplaces in emerging economies?
Rapid technology developments, such as the deployment of internet connectivity to populations in emerging countries and the establishment of fast supply/delivery chains, are probably the most significant factors. Looking at Africa, for example, it is readily apparent that mobile phones are enabling countries to leapfrog their way to modern service standards, helping local businesses reach more customers and growing their economies in the process. As payments are an integral part of commerce, payment methods are naturally co-evolving as these markets grow, taking the specific regional, technical, and socio-economic contexts into account.
Beyond domestic business, digitisation of emerging countries is also boosting cross-border commerce. Marketplaces are well-positioned to support and capitalise on this development, provided they offer the seamless, localised payment experience to their users that all consumers expect.
This interview was first published in our Payments and Commerce Market Guide 2018-2019. The Guide presents the key trends and developments in global and regional payment methods by highlighting the innovation, challenges, and developments in the use of the most important payment methods across geographies and verticals.
About Adam Vissing
As VP Sales & Business Development for IXOPAY, Adam brings two decades’ experience in the high-tech industry and an educational background in Computer Science & Management to the table. His current focus is on helping clients streamline and scale their payment processes globally. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is a best-of-breed, highly scalable and PCI-certified payment platform for White Label Clients and Enterprise Merchants. The modern, easily extendable architecture provides intelligent routing and cascading functions as well as state-of-the-art risk management, automated reconciliation and settlements as well as plugin-based integration of Acquirers and Payment Service Providers.
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