The first part of this interview can be found in our recently launched Online Payments and Ecommerce Market Guide 2017.
In this installment, we continue or discussion with John Snoek, VP Product at Acapture, about the current landscape and pace of innovation in the payments industry. What do merchants need and how can PSPs create added-value services? Ultimately, we aimed to find out what Acapture’s approach towards product innovation is and how it plans to develop future services for merchants.
What is the current pace of innovation in payments?
In the past we saw a relatively slow pace of innovation in the payments industry, but today the situation has notably changed. In fact, innovation is rapidly accelerating. This is, of course, in line with the overall growth rhythm of ecommerce. As online retail becomes more and more global, the adoption of online payments has made investing in innovation increasingly attractive. Having more financial resources at hand enables companies to innovate and grow their business spectrum.
How do you add extra value to merchants businesses?
As the industry is evolving to greater and greater levels, processing transactions is no longer the main service that we provide. Actually, it is the bare minimum, just the base of our products. Nowadays, our efforts focus on creating added value for our merchants by letting them concentrate on growing their business and attracting their customers, while we take away the complexity of payments. We make sure we save them costs in all the possible areas and provide support in growing their profit by optimizing authorization rates for accepting as many genuine transactions as possible while also reducing fraud.
...processing transactions is no longer the main service that we provide. Actually, it is the bare minimum...
Moreover, we make sure merchants can offer their customers a seamless checkout experience that ultimately reduces cart abandonment and supports merchants in increasing their revenue.
We have a very flexible and pro-active team that works together with our clients to understand and solve their pain points. All our clients are confident that they use the most secure and up to date platform for their ecommerce needs, as well as the necessary data and analytics for a constant improvement of their customer experience. At the end of the day, our business is about serving the end consumer in such way that they become loyal, they trust the retailer/merchant, they find what they are looking for, they pay in their preferred payment method and they have complete, secure service throughout the entire transaction.
Where will you be focusing your efforts and resources over the coming months?
Acapture’s focus for the upcoming timeframe is on supporting our merchants improve their business activity by using data to learn and understand more about their consumers’ behavior. With the help of data science we also improve authorization rates, making sure that genuine transactions are not rejected in error. In this sense, we use machine learning models meant to efficiently prevent fraud and reduce false positives. Ultimately, from a purely product point of view, we want to add extra conversion features to our gateway.
Our efforts also target the optimization of our own processes in order to make our products and services even faster and easier to use. In this sense, I am a firm believer that performance does not have an end point, but is rather constant.
What is Acaptures approach to product innovation?
Our approach is to remain vigilant on changes and opportunities in customer demands, market developments and regulation. We primarily focus on unifying our internal processes with the merchant and partner experience in order to provide speed, accuracy and scale. Being aligned on these levels might seem just a basic requirement. It is, however, very often overlooked.
We primarily focus on unifying our internal processes with the merchant and partner experience in order to provide speed, accuracy and scale.
When developing our products, we strive to support merchants to develop their business further, worldwide, by taking away the main challenges they are confronted with. With SlicePay, for instance, we aimed to offer companies like online marketplaces, OTAs, franchises and sharing economy platforms a flexible, cost-effective payment solution that would make PSD2 compliance feel easy; and so, merchants can concentrate on the core work of their business.
In the area of authorization rates optimization, where we keep a close eye on the false positives, we use data science modelling available from our in-house data science team to make sure we lock fraudsters out of our merchants’ platforms while also making sure all genuine transactions are processed. This benefits both the merchants and their customers.
Don’t forget to read the first part of our interview with John Snoek in our Online Payments and Ecommerce Market Guide that you can download here!
About John Snoek:
John Snoek, VP Product at Acapture, has over 20 years’ of go-to-market experience in product development, management and launch. Prior to joining Acapture, John was responsible for global marketing and product management, being also one of the pioneers in the field of alternative payments at GlobalCollect.
About Acapture:
Acapture is the subsidiary company of Payvision, one of the world’s fastest growing global card acquiring networks. Licensed as a payment institution by the Dutch Central Bank, Acapture combines with Payvision to maximize the revenues of merchants and help them grow their business globally.
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