Actionable advice to scale your business in an uncertain economic climate

Ecommpay’s business development manager, Daniella Sjarki gives an overview of the latest payment preferences and technologies to help your business gain a competitive advantage in an era of uncertainty.

Running a business these days isn’t easy. Aside from keeping afloat during these turbulent times of post-COVID, war, sanctions, and inflation, business owners need to make decisions fast. Ensuring a company is on top of all the latest trends is a must for staying competitive, yet it’s no easy task in a landscape where new technologies rarely stay topical for long.

With easy-to-integrate solutions already existing in the online payment sphere, expanding across Europe and the UK is now a realistic proposition, even for businesses keen to reduce their transaction costs. 

This post will outline some of the latest payment trends and technologies to help you understand the advantages of adopting them into your workflow, including the ability to scale fast and simultaneously take root in new markets.

Almost every European country has its own local payment method. If you want to reach customers in both the UK and EU, you’ll need to ensure your checkout has a diverse selection of options available — yet in the past, adding all of those methods could often take several months to implement. Open banking can now help immensely in this situation. The technology allows businesses to use a single solution integrating multiple payment methods, and it can often be set up in a matter of days, making it easier to scale fast into new markets.

Open banking (also known as pay-by-local-bank) is a technology that facilitates a radically streamlined payment process, with more security for both businesses and their customers, as well as a much-improved overall payment experience.

In a nutshell, open banking solutions enable your customers to pay straight from their bank account. For example, Ecommpay offers open banking solutions covering over 80% of the UK and European banks in a single integration. Moreover, transactions are fast — usually happening in less than 15 seconds. 

Here are a few further advantages of adopting open banking into your workflow: 

• High conversion rates due to less manual inputting of data.
• Higher successful transaction rates compared to credit and debit cards.
• Lower fees compared to typical card transactions.
• Zero chargebacks.

From protecting your customers, to allowing fast, streamlined payments, open banking offers a range of benefits packaged in a single, cost-effective solution that works across Europe and the UK.

As much as every business should focus on conversion and revenue generation, many companies need to make single and mass payouts to legal and private entities. The ability to efficiently send payments across borders can be helpful for paying a wide range of stakeholders, including vendors and partners, or when sending mass payouts to employees.

The biggest issue encountered by merchants when making payouts is high transaction costs. Commission for currency conversion needs to be paid each time a cross-border payout is initiated, which can quickly add up. In addition, there is always plenty of room for mistakes when setting up a payout, especially if hundreds of cross-border transactions need to happen simultaneously. The result could lead to funds being sent to the wrong person or delayed payments. If you can’t make timely payments due to fixed banking hours or hold-ups due to processing complexities, you risk losing business and the trust of your stakeholders and customers.

We advise looking for payout solutions covering all of your payout requirements. The best FinTech payment providers will allow payouts to happen via a single integrated dashboard or through an API, allowing businesses to manage numerous payment orders and recipients, as well as receive operational reports from within the same interface.

The result should be a streamlined process that makes it simple to payout funds to numerous recipients in different regions, sending money to their preferred payment methods (local and international bank cards, e-wallets and bank accounts). Payouts should also be able to be sent not only in EUR, GDP or USD, but in recipients’ native currencies to reduce transaction costs.

If you’re keen to expand into a specific region, you need to be catering to your potential customers in that region.

Ensure you’re partnering with a PSP that offers a variety of payment methods so you can embrace alternative payment methods (APMs) tailored to local preferences, boosting customer satisfaction and expanding your market reach.

For example, we offer APMs that are popular across Europe, Asia, LATAM and North America.

It’s also important to make sure you’re accepting payments in different currencies if you have plans for expansion, providing your customers with familiarity and convenience. At Ecommpay we support more than 130 payment currencies on our hosted payment page.

Our dynamic automatic currency conversion tool can also help increase conversion rates and improve transparency for your customers. This allows your customers to pick the currency they want to complete their transaction in, wherever in the world they’re based.

The e-commerce landscape is changing rapidly, and despite the uncertainties thrown up by inflation, sanctions and global supply chain issues, annual growth worldwide remains strong. In order to scale your business fast and expand into new regions, it will become ever more crucial to build a diverse portfolio of payment options, and identify the right technologies and payment service provider to implement them.