On the consumer end of an eCommerce transaction – these days clicking the buy buttons is usually the end of the road, one way or the other. Usually, the transaction goes through – the widget goes into the mail and everyone goes to bed happy. Sometimes the card gets declined; the consumer gets frustrated and moves on; and the merchant misses the sale.
Now if there was legitimately something amiss with the card – it happened to be stolen for example – then that rejection is a good thing, because by rejecting the transaction the merchant avoids the dreaded chargeback.
But when the card is actually totally legitimate and bounces back for a random and unhelpful reason – it’s bad news. The merchants has lost the customer that day – and very possibly forever – and thus missed out on dollars they might have otherwise liked to lock in. Worse yet – there are a variety of reason a card can fail – and not all of them are obvious to the merchant
“When a payment is rejected, merchants often don’t know why it failed,” noted Abi Solomon, Zooz’s Director of Marketing.
Zooz,is an Israeli firm that helps merchants connect with multiple payment providers by allowing ecommerce companies connect with a wide variety payment providers, ewallets, banks, fraud management, and other related services.
It’s signature product Smart Routing that works by moving payments merchants through the “optimal method”, working with 50 partnered providers. Zooz claims that by working with such a wide range of potential providers – they are better able to tailor to the individual merchant and thus the rate of declines, minimize the impact of fraud, and maximize revenues.
“We know to route to the right payment processor, increasing the chances of the card being accepted,” noted aid Ronen Morecki, co-founder and CTO of Zooz.
It’s main competitor in the space is Adyen – which has its own form of transaction routing – though Adyen is itself an acquirer, Zooz is not – it is just a routing platform.
And it is a platform with a clear eye toward expansion – a path made markedly easier by the $24 million in funding in a round led by Target Global Ventures, Before the latest pick-up, Zooz had raised over $16 million, including a $2 million round in 2013 and a $12 million round in July of last year.
The firm has confirmed it plans to use the new funding to enhance and expand its global growth efforts.
“We are opening sales and tech support offices in Berlin and San Francisco. We are also you going to invest more in business intelligence that relate to payments and better optimization of data. We are also looking to go from 80 to 120 employees in a year’s time. Sales and tech support in both cities,” Morecki, said.
Morecki also noted their much of their future efforts abroad will center in Germany.
“We believe that the German market is highly advanced in eCommerce and many other retailers in Europe are interested in the German market. So it makes sense for us to follow their lead.”
And while big growth entails big risk often – Zooz finds itself in conditions increasingly favorable and the variaty of payment methods keeps exploding – and the need for simplicity and streamlining becomes increasingly accute.
Zooz, an Israeli company that helps merchants connect with multiple payment providers, has raised $24 million in a round led by Target Global.
Founded in 2010, Zooz lets ecommerce companies connect with myriad payment providers, ewallets, banks, fraud management, and other related services. Zooz’s smarts can then analyse the consolidated payment data to give useful insights to merchants.
The company had already raised more than $16 million, including a $2 million round back in 2013 and a $12 million round a year later, so today’s news takes the company’s total funding past the $40 million mark. We’re told that Zooz will use the fresh cash influx to accelerate its growth in new markets, double-down on its existing markets, and build new products.
Here’s a new one for the Investment Tracker, and one we have not seen in recent and not so recent memory. No B2B deals. FinTech all the way in an admittedly weak week.
For the final week in April, total investment activity came in at less than $100 million, easing up on some of the more outsized deals we had seen earlier in the month and moving toward a more normalized and certainly lackluster double digit period.
The best way to look at the week? Two deals of size, relatively speaking, and the biggest one was Remitly, where as the name implies the remittance ware may be heating up a bit. The firm picked up $38 million and change to help battle the giants in the space including Western Union and others. The service is now expanding into Canada, where the newest tally came from a Series C round led by Stripes Group. The alternative currency realm got a little coin this past week, too, as Japanese bitcoin exchange BitFlyer secured $27 million tied to its blockchain efforts. Rounding out the double digit rounds was Lendix, where $13.5 million raised will help the P2P platform expand across Europe.
Taking stock of the month, the rebound has been palpable, with a resurgence into the billion dollar threshold, though nowhere near what had been seen at the beginning of the year. See below for how it has all shaped up thus far.
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