Grégoire Delpit, ProcessOut: 'Cross-borders ecommerce is about building and managing a system with several providers. It can be complex, but it’s our job to make it smooth and simple'
What is ProcessOut all about and how has the company’s journey been so far?
ProcessOut is about helping merchants build, scale, monitor, and optimise their payment infrastructure by leveraging all the best payment providers on the market. Payments are super complex! There are many pain points: transactions that fail and you’re not sure why, payment methods that change from a country to another, reconciliation, cash collection, and different currencies. To help merchants tackle these challenges, we have developed monitoring and smart routing solutions for payments:
My cofounders and I started ProcessOut 4 years ago. We were lucky enough to be joined by great people and met amazing payment experts who helped us build and scale our products. Their knowledge and feedback helped us understand what payment managers need and we built it. From a business point of view, we currently mainly work in the US, in Europe and in LATAM. US is our largest country in terms of transactions, but we’re still a small player there. France, our motherland country, is the market where we have the largest market share, as we analysed around 10% of online transactions there. It’s a very exciting journey. In 2019, we started supporting merchants in LATAM, and we now cover the full area.
Can you elaborate on your business model and the type of merchants you serve?
We mainly work with fast growing scaleup and large merchants. More than 200 top merchants chose us to build and scale their payment infrastructure or to optimise their payment performance: ecommerce companies like Veepee or Rakuten; SaaS companies like Dashlane, NordVPN, or Aircall; mobility/delivery companies like Glovo, Oui.sncf, or Dott; and gaming companies like Ankama or FDJ.
Our product is made to be super easy to test and assess. It can help you have a first overview of the performance of your current payment infrastructure and assess if it makes sense to go further. You can even test the product for free!
On the long term, for the monitoring system there is a fixed fee per month. To use our smart routing system, you need to integrate our API, and we charge a small, fixed fee per transaction. The ROI of the product is positive from day one, as we optimise fees in real time and thus cover the small, fixed fee.
One of the key challenges faced by merchants is managing multiple PSPs, which means unifying, analysing, and harmonising payment data from all the providers, as well as having one single reconciliation file. Could you elaborate a bit on how to overcome this challenge? What about other challenges specific to cross-border ecommerce?
Payment data has value for different departments inside a company (Finance, IT, Marketing, Logistic, Customer Support). When you use several PSPs, reconciliation is a critical process. Whether you are building a global hub internally or working with a third party, be sure to validate this process from a technical and financial point of view. If it is not handled properly, it will be a huge hindrance in your development. Our monitoring system is used as a global hub by large merchants. We have a very flexible/ developer-friendly solution to collect and centralise payment data, and on top of that, we have created a lot of features both for developers and non-developers to help interpret the data.
There are challenges in every aspect of the cross-border payment process. When it comes to the checkout, it’s mainly about offering the relevant payment and delivery options to the customer in order to maximise conversion.
When it comes to the payment processing, it’s about managing the transaction in order to maximise the authorisation rate and optimise fees in each country. Another pain point is managing different currencies, taxes, and payout. Cross-border ecommerce is about building and managing a system with several providers. It can be complex, but it’s our job, at ProcessOut, to make it smooth and simple.
Where is the cross-border payments space headed to in your opinion – can you share with us a 5-year prediction for this market?
Payment is an amazing market, with very different trends depending on geography and industry. To summarise: in Western countries, payment has become a commodity, with a strong accent on price. The trend in Western countries is a challenge for all the players in this industry, and that’s why you see a lot of innovation around payment focused on bringing additional value to merchants. It is mainly about improving conversion, increasing performance and security, and transforming payments from a cost centre into a profit centre.
The editorial was originally published in the Cross-Border Payments and Commerce Report 2019 – 2020, which depicts the major trends driving growth in cross-border payments, cross-border commerce, and marketplaces.
About Grégoire Delpit
Grégoire Delpit is ProcessOut’s co-founder. Before starting ProcessOut, he worked in Private Equity Funds in North Africa and France, where he namely invested in Infrastructure, Industry & Technology companies.
About ProcessOut
ProcessOut helps online merchants (SaaS, ecommerce companies, apps) monitor & optimise their payment performance. Top online merchants use ProcessOut’s payment monitoring solution to assess, benchmark and improve their authorisation rates & to optimise payment fees and use ProcessOut’s smart routing solution on top of their preferred payment providers to get the best from each of them and dynamically optimise fees & decrease failed transactions.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now