To enable the European SME market, U.K.-based payment service and gateway provider Creditcall and FinTech-company-turned-pan-European-acquirer Credorax have partnered to launch an integrated omnichannel payment platform — an end-to-end service that enables online, mobile, in-store and unattended payments acceptance.
In recent years, the European SME community has seen rapid adoption of a variety of payment methods, most notably in mobile point-of-sale (POS) and semi-integrated payments. And more than ever, SMEs are a critical market for the European economy.
Fred Tyler, vice president of partnerships at Credorax, said that SMEs constitute some 99 percent of all businesses in Europe. Further, SMEs provide Europe with two out of every three private-sector jobs. Despite its importance, Tyler said that the European SME market is historically underserved by financial institutions when it comes to keeping pace with the latest technologies.
Tyler ran into the issues underserved SMEs face back when he ran his own small, omnichannel business in London.
“The payments aspect was completely fragmented,” he said. “We had standalone payments solutions in-store, a standalone solution for the eCommerce website and a standalone accounting application — and none of those systems spoke to each other.”
This fragmentation turned reconciliation, asset management and understanding margin control into one big back-office headache. Since that time, the number of channels, payment methods and selling models available to sellers has only increased — not to mention the additional steps merchants are required to take for EMV certification and compliance.
Credorax and Creditcall’s omnichannel payment platform works to address all of these issues for European SMEs, providing an integrated payment gateway, credit card processing and reporting for seamless and automated back-end reconciliation.
“We offer unified reporting at the back end,” said Sian Bosley, VP of business development at Creditcall, “to meet the challenges in terms of reconciliation and accounting issues for all of those merchants.”
Bosley noted that the platform also helps supply a choice of multiple manufacturers so that SMEs can support different devices in different environments — choosing the most suitable device for the environment in which they’re taking payment.
“We also allow the merchant to support tokenization across the channels,” Bosley said, noting that merchants could, for instance, take a payment in a POS environment and refund it over the phone or in an eCommerce environment.
Credorax and Creditcall’s omnichannel payment platform also reduces time to market for payment providers and merchants, cutting down on delays caused by EMV certification processes, payment gateway integrations and acquiring setups.
Creditcall enables this through its portfolio of SDKs, ChipDNA, which can support online payments and multiple payment devices on multiple channels across Europe within days. Likewise, Credorax’s digital onboarding and quick MID setups play a key role in speeding up the process, the companies said.
Along with offering their solution directly to SMEs, Credorax and Creditcall bring their integrated omnichannel offering to merchants through partnerships with ISVs, ISOs and PFs that are strong at providing integrated card-not-present and card-present solutions.
“We provide a rapid onboarding tool to the ISO or ISV partner, so they can be up, online and running within three to five days,” Tyler said, noting that for the payments facilitator model sometimes used for the micro-merchant category, the companies can provide merchant onboarding in near real time.
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