Online Grocery Retailer Akwaaba Taps CellPoint Digital’s Payments Orchestration Solution

Online grocery retailer Akwaaba has partnered with payments orchestration firm CellPoint Digital.

Akwaaba is leveraging the firm’s payments orchestration solution to optimize its operations as it expands beyond the six countries in Africa and the Middle East in which it is already active, CellPoint Digital said in a Tuesday (Jan. 31) press release.

“To date, we have experienced a strong consultative relationship with the team at CellPoint Digital,” Akwaaba CEO Kingsley Whyte said in the release. “They have provided us with invaluable advice regarding potential payment partners in different countries, and we are incredibly excited to implement CellPoint Digital’s payment orchestration capabilities and see how this enhances Akwaaba’s ability to scale.”

Payments orchestration brings multiple parties into a platform setting — payment providers, acquirers and banks — to help increase conversions, route payments and improve security, CellPoint Digital CEO Kristian Gjerding told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted Jan. 24.

Companies that embrace payments orchestration enjoy the benefits of increased conversion rates, especially with cross-border transactions, the automation of a significant number of back-office functions and avoidance of the pain points of the “soft decline” in which transactions are denied because of false positives or technical failures, Gjerding said at the time.

Preventing these declines is a top priority for merchants that offer digital payments, according to the “Payments Orchestration Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration.

One case study found that a business that adopted a payments orchestration system reduced its decline rate to between 5% and 8% of all transactions while reducing false declines by up to 35%, the report said.

CellPoint Digital’s payments orchestration platform was initially designed for airlines but has since been applied to eCommerce, education, gaming and — with the new partnership with Akwaaba — grocery eCommerce, according to the press release.

“Our payment orchestration platform has continually supported our partners to increase revenue by optimizing their operations to maximize conversion rates and increase average transaction value,” CellPoint Digital Global Head of Revenue Greg Worch said in the release. “We are very pleased to welcome Akwaaba and recognize a long-term opportunity to expand this merchant into new geographical regions and support the offering of new products.”

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