Global Payments: Omnichannel payment solutions

Country Manager of Global Payments Malaysia, Robin Rangel, talks to Enterprise IT News about how they are minimising impact of lockdowns and social distancing, upon their merchants.

EITN: Please share who and what is Global Payments, and what does the brand focus on here in Malaysia?

Robin: In 2019, our parent company Global Payments Inc. combined with TSYS to form the leading pure play payments technology company, bringing the value chain of payments under one roof to better serve our customers around the world. Today, Global Payments is a worldwide leader in delivering the total value of payments and integrated software solutions. The combination of Global Payments and TSYS establishes the leading pure play payments technology company with 1) unparalleled payment software capabilities for market of specific business verticals and 2) ecommerce and omnichannel solutions, operating at scale in fast growing markets globally.

• Software-driven payment solutions for specific verticals: Our vertical markets software solutions provide advanced payments technology that is deeply integrated into business enterprise software solutions that we own. We distribute our vertical markets software solutions primarily through the following businesses like event organizers, medical clinics, education, gaming & restaurants. We provide cutting-edge payments and software solutions all under one roof to help startups to enterprise businesses simplify commerce and cultivate their vision of success.
• eCommerce and omnichannel capabilities: Global Payments offers omnichannel cashless payment solutions– from traditional swipe/dip options with a card, digital wallet using your mobile phone, as well as a variety of online payment options for ecommerce merchants. Our customers value our capabilities and worldwide reach, enabling them to offer seamless payment experiences in-person, online, on device, and over the phone across a wide range of markets. Our omnichannel approach simplifies global payments like never before. Across both physical and virtual channels, we help our customers enable a frictionless customer experience and accept payments anytime, anywhere and from any device. Our strategy has created a differentiated model in the payment’s technology landscape. Leveraging our unparalleled global presence and deep local-market expertise, we deliver highly competitive ecommerce and unified commerce solutions in a global economy.

EITN: What business outcomes and economic outcomes can you enable in-market, and how does this benefit the country’s consumers?

Robin: Malaysia is among the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, rising from MYR9.6bn ($2.3bn) in 2016 to MYR30.2bn ($7.4bn) in 2020. The recent Government initiatives and the pandemic have further pushed consumers to favour electronic payments – particularly contactless. Therefore, merchants have to upgrade their payment processing tools to accommodate the ever-changing demand.

Soon, we will be going to introduce QR-code wallets AliPay in Malaysia, to prepare merchants reaching a broader foreign customer base when inbound tourism resumes post-COVID19.

We believe that Global Payments’ payment solution reshapes the point-of-sale ecosystem of traditional merchants in Malaysia. To showcase, we can support mobile checkout on in-room TV screens where hotel guests can use their smartphone to complete purchases by scanning a QR code. This would address guest’s concerns of requiring them to present themselves at the Front Office to settle the bill and also do away with card terminal devices in order to avoid exposure to potential disease vectors such as cash and POS terminals.

Soon, we will be going to introduce QR-code wallets AliPay in Malaysia, to prepare merchants reaching a broader foreign customer base when inbound tourism resumes post-COVID19.

EITN: Who is your target audience or target sector; how do you work with them?

Robin: Globally, we target the business sector where we hope to provide seamless methods of payment to consumers everywhere. Our customer base consists of associations, e-commerce partners, financial institutions, independent software vendors, point-of-sales dealers, small businesses, multinationals, and developers. In Malaysia, we provide cutting-edge payments and software solutions all under one roof to help startups to enterprise businesses simplify commerce and cultivate their vision of success.

Global Payments offers omnichannel cashless payment solutions – from traditional swipe/dip options with a card, digital wallet using your mobile phone, as well as a variety of online payment options for ecommerce merchants. Our customers value our capabilities and worldwide reach, enabling them to offer seamless payment experiences in-person, online, on device, and over the phone across a wide range of markets. Our omnichannel approach simplifies global payments like never before. Across both physical and virtual channels, we help our customers enable a frictionless customer experience and accept payments anytime, anywhere and from any device. Our strategy has created a differentiated model in the payments technology landscape. Leveraging our unparalleled global presence and deep local-market expertise, we deliver highly competitive ecommerce and unified commerce solutions in a global economy.

EITN: What are Global Payments’ innovative solutions and services that you have for merchants in Malaysia? How niche are these services?

Robin: Throughout this pandemic, Global Payments has remained focused on supporting customers across all of our businesses, including our small to medium-sized merchant customers in the markets most impacted by the virus.

We have worked tirelessly to assist customers by enabling new capabilities to support their business operations, including rapidly equipping merchants who did not previously sell online with a full omni solution. We also swiftly enabled contactless acceptance for our merchant customers. Globally, we have seen growth in contactless during this period. According to The Mastercard Impact Studies, which was held in May, it revealed that Malaysia reported higher cashless payment transactions compared with other Southeast Asia markets. In April 2020, the number of Malaysian consumers doing cashless payments increased by 18%, with credit and debit cards being the main beneficiaries of Malaysia’s cashless trend. During the same period, cash usage declined significantly by 64%, and the number of people using their contactless credit and debit cards increased by 22% and 26% respectively

We partner with card brands and digital wallet providers to further accelerate contactless growth in light of the pandemic. We believe this will provide an edge for our customers in the future, as we expect the shifts from cash to electronic forms of payments to accelerate post the pandemic.

Some of our specific customer initiatives in Asia for Covid-19, include:

• In the physical store environment, we are providing contactless payment as pandemic is transforming the way to get paid. In the retail industry, the need for social distancing has brought contactless payments at the forefront of our shopping experience. This shift in consumer preference is clearly visible at the checkout counters. Contactless payments become the new norm for shoppers. It offers consumers a safer, cleaner way to pay, reduces long queues at checkout counters, and more control over physical proximity during such tough times. From a survey from Mckinsey, 79 percent of people worldwide and 91 percent in Asia Pacific say they are now using tap-and-go payments. This is a game-changing moment as more people will be inclined to use contactless cards
• In the online environment, we provide online acceptance solutions such as payment gateway that help merchants sell remote during social distancing requirements
• We also provide pay-by-link solutions that will enable traditional physical store businesses to go omnichannel and transform in the new era. Pay-by-link technology allows you to send a customer a secure payment link while on email or on phone for ecommerce checkout. Any virtual touch points can become buy points. During the “Movement control order”, nobody will take the risk to visit a shopping mall for leisure purposes or kill time.  Merchants are no longer required to be visited by customers on-site under movement control order (MCO). They can close the deal via any chat tools like email, whatsapp, or social media inbox, and customers can follow the payment link in the chat box to proceed payment. This solution outperforms traditional website where merchants will need to hire a developer and build a site from scratch, including website building, photo-shooting, writing product descriptions and logistics delivery. “Email Payment” is a web-based plug-and-play solution where no complex integration nor technical knowledge is required.
• We believe providing multiple payment methods can allow customers to feel securely with their preferred payment options. Apart from traditional credit or debit cards, we introduce a variety of mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay & Google Pay. Coming up , we are going to introduce QR-code wallets AliPay in Malaysia, to prepare merchants reaching a broader foreign customer base when inbound tourism resumes post-COVID19.
• Ensuring merchants get paid of their settlement funds without delay. (quarantine has delayed receipt of payments for some merchants).
• We continually provide merchants with insights on how companies and leaders can reset for growth beyond coronavirus via Webinars with industry experts and partners on different topics/industry vertical solutions.
• We saw a 95% increase in the volume of transactions processed in Asia Pacific via our Global Payments eCommerce solution in March 2020 (COVID period) compared to April 2019 (non-COVID period), with luxury fashion houses, cosmetics brands and professional services firms like accountants and lawyers joining the platform in the first few months of 2020.

We partner with card brands and digital wallet providers to further accelerate contactless growth in light of the pandemic. We believe this will provide an edge for our customers in the future, as we expect the shifts from cash to electronic forms of payments to accelerate post the pandemic.

EITN: Global Payments ability to use data, insights and its technology to dig a bit deeper into transactions, so that merchants can get a more holistic view of their customers that can help all parties make informed decisions for the future of business growth. Can you share an example of the data and insights your technologies can work with? What kind of informed decisions can you help all parties make? Who are these parties?

Robin: Global Payments provides transaction management tools to merchants, allowing them to  transform raw business or transaction data into interactive dashboard or infographic that is easy to read and comprehend; The data comes in real-time which merchants can manage the performance of multiple shop outlets from remote. They can perform business data analysis by collecting transaction raw data like payment types, currencies or locations and driving meaningful insights which are relevant to the business like :

• rank the performance of different shop outlets
• understand the purchase power of your customer from average ticket size
• identify customer demographics like housewives, millennials or tourists by the type of payment method or card schemes they used
• chargeback-to-transaction ratio to understand how chargeback or fraudulent transaction is impacting your sales volume/bottomline

According to Visa Online Platform, fraudulent chargeback stemmed from Card-Not-Present transactions are 149 times higher than regular card-present transactions. eCommerce merchants have to put quite a lot of effort in resolving chargeback cases than physical stores. Fraudulent or suspicious transactions will expose your business to chargeback, and create a significant impact on your business’s finances including refund, loss of products or fees incurred. To minimize chargeback and fraudulent transaction, our fraud detection radar is able to identify suspicious fraud behaviour. Merchants’ historical transaction record can be used to back-test the effectiveness of fraud prevention strategies which are customizable to your business needs.

• For example, blacklist cardholders of certain BIN, block transactions from suspicious IP addresses or block transactions of card-issuer country does not map with the shopper’s IP country. You can test the effect of fraud strategies against your historical transaction data in minutes. Through gaining machine learning insights from 68 billion+ annual card transactions, our tool is able to detect potential fraud transactions real time during checkout. Make good use of your past transaction records to run a simulation to gauge how these fraud-prevention rules improve your business in reality through our solutions.

EITN: What can Malaysian businesses expect from Global Payments in the short and long term?

Robin: Global Payments’ Competitive Advantage: Our regional and global footprint is highly appealing to MNC merchants who are multi-jurisdictional. Unlike other local banks who only serve the domestic market, our global coverage enables one single contact point for merchants who operate in different countries. It is suitable for Malaysian domestic merchants who would like to expand offshore, or overseas merchants who would like to extend their business to Malaysia. Merchants can save time and effort in training global staff on daily operation, transaction management or bank reconciliation.

Looking into the future, Global Payments has launched various services to help Malaysian businesses stay on top of the game. For example, the IoT payment technology for connected devices. This helps businesses to integrate payments into their infrastructure and leverages Global Payments eCommerce SDKs and simple gateway interface to securely process the IoT payments.

EITN: What other important insights can you share to attract and entice the local market?

Robin: While the global health crisis ushered in a seismic shift for digital commerce in 2020, the trends of 2021 will take digital experiences to the next level and pave the way for broader participation in the digital economy. Together with payments experts from Visa, Google Pay and American Express, we identified five commerce and payment trends that will underscore the need for businesses to remain agile to respond to consumers’ evolving preferences and deliver exceptional commerce experiences:

• Trend 1: Contactless payment adoption accelerates and becomes a driving differentiator
• Trend 2: Omnichannel options expands to ensure delivery of superior strategies for online businesses.
• Trend 3: Embedded fintech dominates across industries; thus creating value well beyond transactions.
• Trend 4: Advances in technology help businesses keep pace with digital commerce will prompt businesses to embrace technologies strategically to drive sustainable growth.
• Trend 5: A focus on financial inclusion will help consumers shift to digital commerce; while digital wallets help everyone participate in commerce, including the underbanked or unbanked.”