Cross-border payments play an important role in business expansion

What are the challenges associated with cross-border payments globally? Are these different in high growth regions like Asia and Africa?

The key challenges associated with cross-border payments globally are providing the right local payment methods and dealing with the logistics behind them. In many high growth markets, alternative payments – which refer to payments made using something other than a credit card like cash, coupons, bank transfers, prepaid cards etc. – still represent as many as two-thirds of all payments.

It is clear that merchants are missing business opportunities if they are not offering a range of relevant alternative payment methods. Letting consumers pay the way they want it is very important, and as a result, you can be tapping only a small percentage of business opportunities if you limit payment methods only to international credit cards, for example.

What role will interoperability, APIs and open platforms play in breaking down these barriers?

Currently, the ability to offer a frictionless payments experience to customers in high growth markets remains operationally challenging and cost intensive to many businesses. Interoperability, APIs and open platforms are critical to help break down the barriers that exist for the fintech companies, financial institutions and businesses that are trying to reach a wider audience and increasingly operate internationally.

We’re already seeing European regulators attempting to tackle these issues with the scheduled implementation of the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) in 2018. While we are still to see the effects of this European regulation play out in real life, the question we must ask ourselves is: what is needed for high growth markets to follow suit?
It seems that, in order for high growth markets to open up to new market entrants, payments players must look at individual markets and their local capabilities and infrastructures and then consider how to make these more open.

There is huge potential for technology to overcome these challenges and I believe we will see significant improvements made over the coming year.

How do you think PayU will help solve the cross-border commerce challenges currently faced by merchants looking to grow and scale in high growth markets?

From a PSP’s perspective, PayU is also a local payment services provider, despite being a global player in cross-border payments. We are directly connected to any relevant payment method, to banks and markets like India, Brazil and offer payment methods that range from cards to wallets and many other payment methods. We follow this pattern across all our markets to make sure we have a very strong local footprint without the need of aggregators.

In many cases, we meet the market with a superior conversion rate because we offer a set of local payment methods, we understand its intricacies and the risks associated with payment processing, we optimize for it, and therefore a merchant has the maximum value out of those integrations.

You have recently signed up a deal with Zooz. What motivated your partnership with Zooz?

Zooz is a technology company that provides a payments platform designed to help merchants maximize their payments performance. The platform enables enterprise merchants to connect with multiple payment and technology providers and route transactions through the entire payment process.

As Zooz’s first global partner, we will capitalise on Zooz’s state-of-the-art technology to extend the reach of our financial services in growth markets and to help us solve some of the difficulties facing merchants.

In terms of payments security, Zooz and PayU are both PCI certified and PayU has licences in the markets we operate in. Therefore, we do everything we can to make it secure both for merchants that use our products and consumers that pay those merchants.

We are not just PayU, we are also Naspers fintech, and we are focused on growing our position and businesses across the globe. We will also continue making investments to make sure that our merchants customers have the best experience possible.

About Matthias Setzer

Matthias Setzer is Chief Commercial Officer at PayU global, a leading payments service provider in 16 high growth markets around the world. PayU is part of Naspers Group that is one of the largest technology investors in the world. Previously, he worked for PayPal Europe, Lycos Europe, and Bertelsmann. Matthias has more than 15 years of experience in ecommerce, sales and payments. He graduated in Economics and has a MBA in Finance and Marketing.

About PayU Global

PayU Global is a leading online payment service provider dedicated to creating a fast and secure payment process for merchants and buyers. Our presence in 16 high growth markets and local focus enable us to be the experts and provide the best solutions for each market. PayU makes up the e-payments division of Naspers Ltd.