Can you explain what Emergent Payments role in the industry is?
Emergent Payments enables digital businesses of all types and sizes to accept secure payments around the world with a focus on solving the complexities of emerging markets. Emergent Payments has created a turn-key payments platform called Pay+ that easily enables merchants to monetize products and services globally. By supporting the most effective payment methods in each of 180 markets and handling all of the issues and complexities involved with cross-border payments, merchants can begin generating global revenue with a single merchant agreement and one point of integration.
What are some of the trends you have seen in global payments and particularly emerging markets?
Global business-to-consumer e-commerce worldwide is forecasted to reach $1.7 trillion in sales this year, driven by emerging market growth. This represents a 17 percent CAGR in 2015 and is primarily attributable to the Asia-Pacific region—notably China, Indonesia and India—where sales are expected to reach $681.2 billion, outpacing North American sales. Last year, it was estimated that Asia-Pacific spending would claim over 46 percent of digital buyers worldwide. Other global markets that are significant contributors to double-digit global growth include Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Russia, among others. The opportunity trend is clear. But what merchants will need to address to truly capitalize on these significant growth trends are local issues, such as which payment methods are preferred (usually not international credit cards) to local tax and compliance stipulations.
How do you see business in emerging markets evolving over the next five years?
Many of today’s perceived emerging markets, such as China, Indonesia and Brazil will have already emerged in the next five years. This will be driven by key demographic and infrastructure improvement trends—including a younger population with a strong affinity for global brands, increasing connected devices such as smart phones, greater and more accessible broadband penetration and stronger economic growth leading to more disposable income.
As concern around the security of payments grows what is Emergent Payments doing to help its users?
Security is paramount for all parties involved—consumers, merchants and platform operators such as Emergent Payments. It’s important to look at all systems, architecture, technologies as well as policies and procedures to ensure the highest degree of security. PCI DSS compliance is just the beginning.
What was one of the biggest difficulties you faced when expanding to a global market?
The most important aspect to understand when expanding to emerging markets is that payment culture and compliance is local. In the US (but to a lesser extent in Europe), credit cards dominate e-commerce transactions. The US—no surprise—is a credit driven culture but consumers in Germany are not. Nor are Indonesian online shoppers. Understanding local payment culture and compliance is the biggest challenge for merchants and the one that we decided we would solve on their behalf.