Retailers have long faced challenges in reducing customer payment friction while also maintaining high levels of security. Payment platforms, too, are focused on fraud prevention and finding innovative ways to ensure payments are processed quickly and securely.
For Alessandro Bocca, CEO of Italy-based payment orchestration platform Axerve, the increasingly comprehensive regulatory environment that requires businesses to have strong security standards will no doubt have an impact on the payments space.
“If you’re not able to verify your customer, then you need to apply strong customer authentication, that is secure,” Bocca told PYMNTS in an interview. “We now see from our data that the fraud risk of our transaction manager without two factor authentication is very, very low.”
One of Axerve’s main goals is to make it easier for merchants to navigate these challenges and other payment issues so that they can focus on their core business.
“We also believe that as a payment orchestration platform, we can integrate this platform in a way that is able to not only manage the transaction, but to assess the risk, by deciding to verify a customer and also guarantee the transaction in case of chargeback,” Bocca added.
That combination of the services offered by Axerve can bring higher conversion rates and a low chargeback risk for transactions. While card transactions have become increasingly sophisticated and complex compared to five or 10 years ago, technological and innovation solutions mean there are other opportunities for merchants.
Beyond payments, the Italy-based firm can help improve inefficient services that are connected to payments through transaction risk analysis, resulting in low friction, more simplicity and higher conversion for merchants.
“We’ve understood that being open and being very effective in connecting our merchants to this ecosystem would be a great advantage in order to compete with the biggest players in the market,” he added.
Today, the firm serves over 100,000 active customers, offering over 250 payment methods on a single platform where any type of payments — from online and in-store channels — can be made in a secure way through physical and digital gateways, such as point of sale (POS), eCommerce solutions and applications.
In 2021, the firm recorded significant eCommerce transaction volumes of €3.5 billion ($3.8 million), with a nearly 35% increase in overall payments year on year among its clients, an indication of strong growth even during the pandemic.
Regional Expansion
Active in Italy and soon to launch in Spain, this month, the firm also announced the official U.K. launch of its global payment gateway aggregator, Payment Orchestra. The aggregator offers more than 250 alternative payment methods through a single application programming interface (API) and allowing businesses to make quick and secure cross-border eCommerce payments.
According to Bocca, the U.K. eCommerce market is very mature and merchants in the space are forward-looking, working and competing in one of the biggest eCommerce markets in the world.
“We [also] understood that we could not afford to enter this market by saying, ‘I’m another payment gateway that is offering the same solution as the existing one.’ It was important for our existing merchants to be able to switch and have a kind of redundancy in the payment management [space],” Bocca added.
He said the solution will gain traction in the U.K. because it has a mature market, with the size of the merchants being large enough to appreciate the benefits of the services they offer.
“The purpose of the proposition is to be able to enable a checkout without additional effort or without distracting investment from the merchant’s core business that could be selling product or services,” he added.
Apart from the U.K. and Spain, the Italian firm is planning to expand to France and Germany over the next couple of years, targeting the biggest eCommerce markets in Europe in terms of volume.
“We have also seen that there are interesting forecasts in terms of revenue growth and volume growth in payment orchestration, and these [two new] markets seem to be the most promising,” he added.
Going forward, Bocca said the company is working to enhance Axerve’s capabilities in terms of connections, adding new payment methods and new payment service providers. In his view, the biggest value they offer is not connecting the merchant to an ecosystem for an online transaction, but rather managing the reconciliation and the settlement by providing their own escrow account to offer an easy payout.
“You can benefit from the fragmentation without the issue of a fragmented framework where you have many connections, or many payouts and you cannot figure out who is paying what,” he said.
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