CROSSBORDER: SUBSECTION Free to pass: Understanding local quirks is the key to seamless cross-border transactions
HALT! WHO GOES THERE? Giving seamless international payments the green light will necessitate understanding – and providing for – local requirements, say Checkout.com’s Tracy Meng and Claire Gates from PPRO You could describe payment services provider Checkout.com and infrastructure company PPRO as among the heroes of the e-commerce explosion triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. They rose to the occasion as customers worldwide – even the previously digitallyshy – became used to running their lives online, each company achieving unicorn status in January 2021. Checkout.com, which works with businesses worldwide to optimise their payments, tripled its valuation to €12.3billion after raising $450million in a Series C funding round, which made it Europe, the Middle East and North Africa’s most valuable venture-backed business and the fourth-largest fintech globally. Meanwhile, PPRO attracted more than $180million of investment to take it value above the magic $1billion and enabling it to fund further growth, after its strong, double digit, year-on-year
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transaction volumes in 2020. At the same time, it expanded its global team by 60 per cent in 2020 and developed new strategic partnerships with local payment methods in high-growth markets, including Indonesia and Singapore. PPRO offers a payments infrastructure for businesses (PSPs and their merchants), which allows them to offer more choice at the checkout and boost cross-border sales. In 2020, this helped it process $11billion of payments. Both companies see this as just the beginning. Tracy Meng, global head of partnerships and partner engineering at London-headquartered Checkout.com, described the opportunity it is intent on seizing: “We don’t feel like we’ve reached some milestone where we can rest on our laurels; it’s chapter zero in our story.” Similarly, PPRO’s chief commercial officer, Claire Gates, added: “It’s been exciting but there’s a lot for us to work on, going forward. Key, having raised the money, is
reinvesting in developing a stronger, scalable expansion to our product suite.” And no wonder they feel fight-ready, given the stark figures showing worldwide payments growth left to run, released by PPRO in the 2021 edition of its Payments Almanac, in November. It predicts that the e-commerce sector will grow to $6trillion by 2025, with, crucially, ‘consumers expect[ing] to make purchases with their preferred payment method’,. The latter, says Meng, is key to achieving the elusive goal of seamless cross-border transactions in an increasingly borderless marketplace. “A lot of payment industry people call the likes of Giropays and P24s ‘alternative payment methods’,” says Meng. ”That’s a misnomer. In some regions, where 70 per cent of the population want to pay using them, they’re primary payment methods. “So, it’s important for merchants to create the right experience, understand their customers, do the research, so that customers can see, when they’re checking www.fintechf.com
