Payment gateway aggregators and X-Border payments

Retailers have long faced challenges in reducing customer payment friction while maintaining high levels of security. Payment platforms are also focusing on fraud prevention and finding innovative ways to ensure fast and secure payment processing.

For Alessandro Bocca, CEO of Italian payments orchestration platform Axerve, the increasingly comprehensive regulatory environment that requires companies to have strict security standards will undoubtedly impact the payments space.

“If you are not able to verify your client, you need to apply strong client authentication, which is secure,” Bocca told PYMNTS in an interview. “We now see from our data that the risk of fraud from 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 overcome these challenges and other payment issues so 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 we can not only manage the transaction, but also assess the risk, deciding to verify a customer and also to guarantee the transaction in the event of a chargeback,” Boca added.

This combination of services offered by Axerve can bring higher conversion rates and lower risk of chargebacks for transactions. As card transactions have become increasingly sophisticated and complex compared to five or ten years ago, technological and innovative solutions provide further opportunities for merchants.

Beyond payments, the Italy-based company can help improve inefficient payments-related services through transaction risk analysis, resulting in lower friction, more simplicity and higher conversion for traders.

“We understood that being open and being very efficient 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 company serves over 100,000 active customers, offering over 250 payment methods on a single platform where any type of payment – from online and in-store channels – can be made securely. through physical and digital gateways, such as point of sale (POS), eCommerce solutions and applications.

In 2021, the company recorded strong e-commerce transaction volumes of €3.5 billion ($3.8 million), with a nearly 35% increase in overall payments year-on-year the other among its customers, a sign of strong growth even during the pandemic.

Regional expansion

Active in Italy and soon to be launched in Spain, the company also announced this month the official UK launch of its global payment gateway aggregator, Payment Orchestra. The aggregator offers over 250 alternative payment methods through a single application programming interface (API) and enables businesses to make fast and secure cross-border e-commerce payments.

According to Bocca, the UK e-commerce market is very mature and traders in the space are looking to the future, working and competing in one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world.

“We [also] understood that we could not afford to enter this market by saying: “I am another payment gateway that offers the same solution as the existing one”. It was important for our existing merchants to be able to fail over and have some sort of redundancy in managing payments [space]“, added Boca.

He said the solution would gain popularity in the UK as it is a mature market with the size of merchants large enough to appreciate the benefits of the services they offer.

“The purpose of the proposal is to be able to enable checkout without additional effort or diversion of investment from the merchant’s core business which could be the sale of products or services,” he added.

Besides the UK and Spain, the Italian company plans to expand into France and Germany over the next two years, targeting Europe’s largest e-commerce markets by volume.

“We have also seen that there are exciting forecasts for 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 improve Axerve’s connectivity capabilities, adding new payment methods and payment service providers. According to him, the greatest value they offer is not in connecting the merchant to an ecosystem for an online transaction, but rather in managing reconciliation and settlement by providing their own escrow account to offer easy payment.

“You can benefit from fragmentation without the problem of a fragmented framework where you have many connections or many payments and you can’t tell who pays what,” he said.

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