WLPayments' insights: Optimising cross-border payments

What is your vision on the current cross-border payments and ecommerce developments? 

We see that creating a level playing field for merchants will make more of them want to do business outside their local market. We want foreign merchants to have access to local payment methods, localised payment pages, and local acquirers. This way, they will be able to compete against locally established brands. For us, breaking the silos of ecommerce and payments is one of the reasons why we developed a new payments orchestration platform.

What has changed with your newly released platform? 

WLPayments’ new platform is based on the learnings in developing payment gateway solutions over the past few years. We have been focusing on building technology that is easy to adapt and integrate, especially to accommodate the ongoing trend of open banking and provide more technological convenience to an increasing number of industry players.

We now build new solutions, independent from the platform, which cater to specific tasks or needs in general, by testing and adding them to our platform without interruption. A great example is the development of our Flex 3DS & Routing solution – as substantial proof of our performance, this has led to a 9% increase in the success rate. 

Why would companies opt for your gateway solution? 

Payment service providers (PSPs) can offer their customers our platform and solutions, fully customised to their company’s brand, look, and feel. We make sure that our partners spend less on keeping up with payments technology and regulations while ensuring that their customers have a frictionless payment experience. 

We have further made the process of onboarding straightforward and quicker. Sometimes banks and PSPs are afraid of moving their merchants when switching to a new platform. However, we affirmatively guarantee zero downtime for the merchants during the switch, with an entirely hassle-free process, both technically and systematically. 

How is your core product/service different from other platforms on the market? 

Our partners and their merchants tell us that our dashboards provide them actionable insights, which they did not see before. Based on Machine Learning and Business Intelligence, the data illustrates customers’ behaviour and their payments journey to merchants in optimising their ecommerce strategy.

Furthermore, we share our payments expertise in understanding and analysing our clients’ requirements, and we provide them with recommendations in working with their merchants effectively. Full-blown payment orchestration is not always necessary, but it can yield good results in the long term if one chooses the right partner in implementing it. At WLPayments, our aim is to make the journey as smooth as possible while delivering the best results for our clients. We stay true to our motto: we grow when our customers grow! 

Could you elaborate on the conversion-boosting features that you use? 

We ensure that customers have a personalised checkout experience based on criteria like location, risk level, and merchant loyalty. 

We provide merchants the ability to tailor their customers’ checkout experiences based on location, currency, risk score, website, and a variety of other factors. They can choose between different payment methods, page designs, risk checks, and checkout flows. These options have resulted in a considerable decrease in cart abandonment. 

Our Flex 3DS solution reduces merchants’ 3DS costs, increases their success rate, and simultaneously ensures PSD2 compliance. Moreover, this solution provides a frictionless checkout experience to the customers, illustrating that compliance does not have to come at the cost of seamless payments. This solution has helped the merchants increase their conversion rate by 9%. 

We are introducing the concept of acquirer agnostic open banking, which will be very innovative compared to anything else in Europe. And of course, transaction routing is an integral part of optimising payments, as are cascading, retries, and second chance functionalities. The goal is to route transactions to the acquirer that has the highest acceptance rate. For example, local cards should be processed by local acquirers, while specific BINranges might work better with a particular acquirer. Having such a rule-based routing engine allows merchants to tweak transaction flows and continually improve the success rate. Our merchants saw an increase between 5% and 15% in their success rate after switching to our platform.

We also made simple improvements like providing merchants with the opportunity to accept wire transfers in a new country. Now they can sell before they even receive confirmation from the acquirer for the local payment methods. 

How do you see the future of WLPayments? 

Payment companies, banks, and ISOs now realise that they need the best platform to stay relevant to their clients. Maintaining in-house technologies is a huge challenge, and businesses no longer want to run that risk. That is why WLPayments can further add immense value to these companies and ensure that their customers get the highest quality solution at a very competitive price.

This interview was first published in our Cross-Border Payments and Ecommerce Report 2021–2022, which taps into the fast-growing cross-border market and provides a comprehensive overview of trends and developments that are pivotal in this space, being the ultimate source of information for ecommerce businesses interested in expanding globally. 

About Sunil Jhamb

Sunil Jhamb is the CEO and Founder of WLPayments, a trusted white-label global payments platform with secured plug-and-play payment solutions for ISOs, PSPs, banks, and online merchants. Sunil has over 20 years of experience in consulting and strategy, and as a winner of MPE Influencer of the Year 2019, Sunil is an authority on international payments. Before this, Sunil founded Newgen Payments and worked at GlobalCollect as the director of global planning and strategy – developing corporate strategies and driving revenue opportunities globally.

About WLPayments

WLPayments offers a white-label payment gateway platform with secured low-code and no-code stack for ISOs, PSPs, banks, and online merchants. The advanced payments orchestration is offered through a single API connection with several key features, including Flex 3DS & Cascading, Intelligent Transaction Routing, Automated Reconciliation, Split Payments, and many more.