Oliver Brough, Cambridge Global Payments: "Expanding globally to boost cross-border ecommerce"

Where does Cambridge see itself in the ecommerce payments market?

Cambridge sits behind the scenes to help our customers expand their geographic reach, reduce costs and scale their businesses. Through strategic alliances, we are bringing on innovative solutions every week to serve the evolving needs of global ecommerce. We see our business as an enabler to PSPs, aggregators, major global merchants, marketplaces and communities, and we are as happy to sit behind these firms or work directly with the end customer. We operate our business though our global network of in-country bank accounts, allowing us to substantially reduce costs through our modern, integrated technology solutions. Importantly, we provide these alliances with complete transparency of FX mark-ups and revenues. This helps build trust in our relationships and gives them and their customers confidence for they are getting added value.

How is cross-border ecommerce challenging traditional global payout processes?

Cross-border ecommerce adds complexity to both business processes and risk. Businesses have to deal with the cost and complexity of handling multiple currencies and the risk it brings. For instance, multiple payment systems and data requirements to get payments delivered vary from country to country. It is complicated! If it goes wrong, it takes up valuable operational time and impacts your merchant experience and retention. Alongside this, ecommerce is rapidly evolving from the traditional merchant model to community and marketplace models and platforms with buyers and sellers based around the globe. All of this costs money to operate a business at a sustainable cost whilst delivering a great service.

When you say global payout, does this cover the emerging markets and less developed economies in South America, Africa, Middle East and Asia?

Sure, absolutely. We are helping deliver payments around the world to any country location that is not subject to sanctions. What we are seeing is that the major banks are restricting their trading to the top 25 or so currencies, but this leaves another 125 currencies around the world where there is a need for legitimate trade and therefore payments need to be made. Getting these payments delivered can be difficult. In some countries, you need to arrange for a physical exchange to occur in-branch to have any confidence in getting the payment delivered. Cambridge has a specialised Emerging Markets Team which has spent the past 28 years together doing this at top tier commercial banks. They bring extensive knowhow and in-country relationships with local banks around the world to ensure that these payments are delivered. In fact, many of our alliances are banks themselves who have stopped offering Emerging Markets payments and need support to do this for them. You can find out more about our emerging market capabilities here.

What challenges do you see within the banks themselves for global payments?

Many tier 2 and 3 financial institutions struggle to get access to global payment services in a fast, low cost and integrated environment. For example, there are very few banks that can offer the range of currencies and bank payment methods, combined with easy to use, integrated technology offered by Cambridge. We run white label global payment services for these banks, providing all of the technology and execution they require but aligned to their brand and with revenue share agreements. Effectively, they outsource this part of their business to Cambridge, avoiding the cost and risk, yet sharing in the revenue generated whilst providing an excellent service to customers.

Is it banks you’re targeting with your Fiserv alliance?

Yes, our teaming with Fiserv is a great example. Cambridge has integrated international payments into WireXchange. With WireXchange, Fiserv serves banks and credit unions by enabling them to offer international payment services to their customers. For example, a bank will service customers who need to make supplier payments around the world and want to offer this as part of their online platform, but don’t want the capital costs to set this up, nor the operational cost and risk of running this service. Through Fiserv, we manage the whole end-to-end process of setting up payments and beneficiaries through our integrated technology. Our platform checks payment details for accuracy to ensure it can be processed and delivered in a timely fashion, all in a self-service environment for the bank’s customer. You can find out more here.

So, are these same payments services you offer to banks available for ecommerce?

Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, with the ever-evolving world of ecommerce, merchants, marketplaces and their payment service providers have a greater need to receive, hold and send money around the world. We have access to local bank accounts around the world enabling us to deliver through low cost domestic clearing without correspondent bank charges taking fees out of each payment. We already serve over 12,500 active clients globally and we are growing fast.

What’s next?

There is no lack of demand for what we are doing right now. With our excellent payment services, technology and knowhow, we are focused on meeting the needs of the ever-growing and evolving ecommerce market.

Oliver Brough

Oliver is General Manager at European eCommerce at Cambridge Global Payments. Oliver has 20 years of experience in technology solutions covering currency management, payment processing, payment messaging and online security.

Cambridge Global Payments

As one of the largest non bank payment institutions in the world, Cambridge Global Payments has built trust, expertise and great technology through a broad range of global banking and payment partners. Our platforms integrate seamlessly with some of the largest and most innovative payment processors, aggregators, merchants and communities to help meet the evolving needs of global ecommerce.