2024 might feel far away, but as Market Platform Dynamics (MPD) CEO Karen Webster has illustrated, thinking one, two or even three years ahead in payments is no longer enough. Planning smart in this industry means never resting on your laurels, it means looking ahead to anticipate your customers’ future needs.
One company that understands the full weight of this idea is eCommerce platform provider Digital River. Today, the Minnesota-based company processes more than $27 billion in online transactions across nearly every country in the world.
As Souheil Badran, senior vice president and general manager of Digital River, explained in an interview with PYMNTS.com: “Merchants with our solution can unify their payment channels with one device and accept credit card, and mobile payments in 140 countries with one integration.” But, this doesn’t mean its plans for 2014 are anything less than robust.
Badran indicated that Digital River plans to emphasize services customers deem most valuable in 2014, focusing its attention on mobile, software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). More surprisingly, Badran hinted the company will be pursuing some of the payments industry’s more disruptive forces. Badran noted that Digital River will be exploring bitcoin integration in 2014 (Jump to 3:07).
Such moves shouldn’t be a surprise to those who have been following Digital River. Badran spoke to PYMNTS.com about his company’s 2013 accomplishments such as its new cross-border commerce capabilities (Jump to 0:47), and Beanstream, its white-label mobile card acceptance device for financial institutions (Jump to 2:06).
For more on how Digital River plans to better serve merchants at every stage of their life cycle in 2014, listen to our full podcast with Badran below.
*If you have trouble with the audio player above, click here.
For more insights from Digital River, sign up for its upcoming webinar on mobile in emerging BRIC markets here.
Souheil Badran, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital River World Payments
Souheil Badran is the senior vice president and general manager of Digital River World Payments, leading all aspects of the company’s global payments strategy, including strategic development, sales and marketing, product management, operations, mergers and acquisitions. Today, Digital River processes more than $27 billion in online transactions and offers global payments in more than 190 countries and over 170 currencies.
Souheil joined Digital River with extensive experience in high technology organizations -leading sales and marketing, product management, strategic development, mergers and acquisitions and high-growth initiatives. Prior to Digital River, Souheil was senior vice president and general manager of First Data Corporation’s e-commerce solutions group, a team that focused on e-commerce and card-not-present commerce. His specialty in international e-commerce also includes previous executive leadership positions at Rebtel, VeriSign, Digital Insight (acquired by Intuit) and Metavante Corporation (acquired by FIS).
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