What is one of the most competitive sectors within the wider scope of the financial landscape you may ask? Peter Theunis, SVP of BPC, believes that you should be taking a look into the future when it comes to Acquiring-as-a-Service.
The Pay360 conference event provided the backdrop for Payment Expert’s interview with Theunis, as he broke down why acquiring is becoming such a focal point for merchants and payment service providers as consumers demand more options in as little time.
Theunis also spoke on the rise of emerging markets, like the Middle East, and why personalisation of digital wallets continues to evolve to meet these various consumer preference points.
Payment Expert: Firstly Peter, BPC has been very active in the Middle Eastern market. What are some of the key digital payment use cases helping the region’s case in becoming a leading financial market?
Peter Theunis: There is a lot of digital wallet implementation, because wallets are often the best way to onboard people. There are two segments in the Middle East, which are countries like Saudi Arabia that are very mature, and more emerging markets like Egypt, etc.
But you see that wallets, for most companies, are the instrument to onboard. Also what you see in the Middle East in general, is that much more mobile operators are involved in the whole ecosystem while in Europe, the mobile operators weren’t there 10 years ago that separated themselves from the whole payments ecosystem.
PE: Digital Wallets are highly popular in the Middle East, but are gaining traction in other markets very quickly. How important is it that these wallet providers begin to focus on customer personalisation for the next generation of customers?
PT: If you see in certain countries where you have two, three mobile operators, for example, and three mobile operators and all three are launching a wallet, it becomes a crowded space.
So personal personalisation, hyperpersonalisation, is required to make every customer feel unique these days. Every customer needs to feel that these days.
If it’s one-size-fits-all, you get people who are not really interested, so it’s very important to select your target audience and then to personalise that further for anything that people want to do. Within that perspective also I think loyalty becomes a very important factor because loyalty is linked to brands, loyalty is linked to stickiness.
I think all of that together will make sure that customers will have the success of a wallet, because it comes down to the stickiness of the wallet.
PE: There has also been an emergence of numberless debit/credit cards. How beneficial has this been in being able to mitigate fraud?
PT: All the measures around tokenisation have to do with security, and it is true that fraudsters are always one step ahead of the rest, so it means it’s a constant race against these fraudsters.
Tokenised cards are a tool, a mechanism, to avoid frauds and due to the fact that more and more cards are digital it is much easier to scan in an automated way instead of manual parts. You’re not swiping your card, because now with a digitalisation, you have much more control over the parameters.
PE: Within BPC’s recent Next-Generation report , there was a focus on acquiring-as-a-service. How crucial will this shift in acquiring be in the coming years?
PT: What’s important to know is that in Europe, acquiring is very mature. But if you now take a look into the Middle East, the schemes put in a lot of effort to issue a lot of cards, but acceptance points are not always there, but a lot of cash is still in these countries.
So the next generation battle is won in the acceptance space. As these players today don’t want to set up infrastructure for the next two or three years, acquiring-as-a-service becomes important to offer them a full full service.
Acquiring 10 years ago, five years ago even, was mainly about doing the transaction and making sure that the merchant has his money the day after or a few days after. Now, today is a full merchant ecosystem where the merchant is not only doing transactions, it’s reviewing its transactions, doing cash predictions, lending, if necessary, and it’s a full SME or micro-SME management environment.
Looking at Europe again, if you as a merchant need to take a credit line in a bank, it costs quite a lot of money. If the merchant can do its cash flow prediction better, or even having cash flow immediately, that’s one of the new trends that payout as soon as possible.
PE: Lastly, how has Radar Payments’ rebrand to BPC Processing helped offer your solution to partners in a more seamless way?
PT: The commercial name of Radar Payments, we changed over the last year to BPC Processing to make it more clear. So first, we had to dis-separate the brand because we saw that there was confusion in the market, so we now call it BPC Processing.
Let’s take it a few months back when the bigger UK banks’ mobile banking systems went down. Often it is because they’re still deployed in traditional legacy environments, mainframes, and so on.
When you go into the cloud, resilience and high availability is much easier to achieve. It’s much easier to achieve also in time because you don’t need to deploy another hardware rack or hardware box. It’s really a configuration style.
So moving to that kind of technology will make everything much more scalable because these days scalability is not really linear, but it is totally event driven.
