In your opinion, what are the main challenges currently facing the payment industry?
This industry has become considerably more international and complex. I will give you a simple example to illustrate my point. Let's imagine a Chinese tourist buying a luxury bag from a major Parisian retailer and paying it with her e-wallet. The transaction is a perfectly simple one for the customer. All she has to do is display the QR code on her smartphone and have it scanned by the cashier. Behind the scene, however, the transaction is a little more difficult to manage. The money will be transferred from a Chinese account to the store's account in Paris, and charges will be levied by the mobile payment company.
Today, more than 30% of mobile transactions are cross-border transactions. Contrary to what one might think, bank cards no longer have a monopoly. Around three quarters of online transactions are now carried out using alternative payment methods such as AliPay, WeChat Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay, to name just the best known. In total, there are more than 300 different payment methods worldwide. Therefore, both trends - cross-border payments and the increasing number of payment methods - will intensify in the coming years.
This development affects all stakeholders in the value chain: Payment Service Providers (PSPs), merchants, marketplaces, purchasers, airlines and the tourism industry. They are and will increasingly be required to manage money flows from all over the world almost instantaneously using a variety of payment methods, each with its own business rules. In short, a real headache!
What solution do you offer to meet this growing complexity?
We are one of the few payment platforms to offer a full-service solution on demand. We offer access to 185 - soon to be 250 - payment methods around the world, whether in India, the United States, South Africa or Europe. Through a single API, we offer advanced services ranging from simple processing, fund collection and the reconciliation of financial transactions through currency conversion, detailed transaction reporting, distribution of payments from an unlimited number of vendors and commission calculation. We also check the identities of all parties involved and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. In short, we ensure that international payments are child's play for all our customers and partners.
Thanks to this positioning, one of the most disruptive in the payment market, we have been able to enter into major contracts with the largest international PSPs and BtoB marketplaces. The transactions we manage grew by almost 70% per year over the last three years.
EBRC has been your partner for more than 8 years. What attracted you to EBRC and why do you continue to trust it?
Beyond the exceptional quality of EBRC's infrastructure, it is the expertise of the people with whom we immediately found common ground. They were direct, concrete and proactive. They reassured us and were able to provide us with support in difficult choices or negotiations. The fact that they work with many financial institutions and are PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) certified was also a decisive argument for us.
Over time, our partnership solidified and even expanded as a result of our desire, in 2018, to implement an ambitious CSR policy within our company. We were pleasantly surprised to find that EBRC was 100% compliant with our environmental specifications. EBRC powers its five Data Centres using entirely green energy, from wind or hydraulic power plants, and has invested heavily in energy optimisation solutions (Kyoto wheels, heat pumps, free cooling, cold corridors, etc.) which reduce energy consumption and enable the company to save more than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Finally, what also reinforces our decision to continue working with them is their impressive production and storage capacity. Our transaction volumes have grown exponentially in recent years and all our data is hosted with them. Today, we have 1.5 billion Euros in transactions per year and we expect to reach 2 billion Euros by the end of this year. We have become a major customer for EBRC and we hope to become even more so in the future. For us, that would be the best proof of our success!
For more information: limonetik.com.