B2B Platforms Need Flexible Payment Infrastructure to Scale

The platform economy accounts for over two-thirds of eCommerce transactions, but according to Romain Mazeries, CEO at FinTech firm Mangopay, solutions that tackle the complex payment needs of platforms and marketplaces remain scarce today, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) space. 

For example, the flexibility to build and operate their payment stack, which is critical for platform-based businesses’ growth, is not widely offered, creating a gap in the marketplace platform space that Mangopay has been trying to fill since its launch in 2013.

To expand its payment offering, the Luxembourg-based firm, which serves leading EU marketplaces and platforms like Leboncoin, La Redoute and Wallapop, recently announced the acquisition of Dublin-based payment orchestration platform WhenThen — a move which Mazeries said gives their platform clients greater flexibility in handling payments.  

“With WhenThen, we can advance our mission of offering platforms access to a comprehensive and modular payment infrastructure and enhanced pay-in capabilities,” he told PYMNTS in an interview, while “accelerating the deployment of our multi-payment service provider [PSP] strategy through external orchestration.”

With WhenThen’s payment stack, Mazeries said, the firm can also expand its value-added services, giving clients multiple options for payment methods like buy now, pay later (BNPL) or deciding which invoicing or booking systems to use. 

“We don’t want to offer only one BNPL solution, we want to have a catalog of about 10 partners so that clients can pick and choose the one that fits their business model,” he explained, adding that the goal is to help clients offer a frictionless experience to their end users.

Overall, he said “the magic” behind the two recent acquisitions — prior to WhenThen, Mangopay acquired Polish fraud prevention firm Nethone — and building a three-way stack (Nethone, WhenThen and MangoPay) is in the works, giving clients access to an end-to-end solution that tackles all aspects of their payment needs.

“It’s our ability to offer a best-in-class risk platform that provides solutions and offers dedicated functionality not just for marketplaces, but also FinTechs,” he said.

Cracking the US Market

According to Mazeries, the fragmented nature of Europe’s payment landscape means there is a need for tailor-made solutions, whether in mature markets like France, the U.K. and Germany or other markets emerging in the marketplace space such as Poland, the Czech Republic or Romania. 

And as Mangopay strives to meet those needs, also on top of its list moving forward is accelerating the firm’s expansion to the U.S. market, where he said “there is a lot of space” due to the lack of strong competitors apart from U.S. payment giant Stripe and Dutch firm Adyen. 

But the recent Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) crisis has made the market a hard one to crack, especially when creating a strong banking network, he acknowledged. However, Mazeries pointed to the significant progress the firm has made with hiring and acquiring licenses as an indication that its white-label solution will stand out to potential customers there. 

So, even though the journey to formally establishing operations will likely be long and not before 2024, he remains confident that the company has what it takes to effectively compete in the U.S. market.

“We are now valued at $1 billion with the WhenThen acquisition [so] we’ve got the means to accelerate, to deliver, and to enhance our game and win against our main competitors,” he said.

Watch Mazeries’ previous PYMNTS interview: Can Payments-as-a-Service Crack EU’s Cross-Border Payments Complexity?

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