PayU partner feature: Increase

In addition to working with over 450,000 local and global merchants around the world, PayU also collaborates with a number of strategic partners eager to grow their payment footprint, capabilities, and more.

 

Since August 2021, the Latin American company Increase, based in Buenos Aires, has been working together with PayU to help scale the infrastructure for its subscription payment product IncreasePay. Serving more than 30 industries across 5 Latin American markets, Increase needed a solution that would help the company to serve its broad customer base spread across one of the world’s most dynamic regional markets.

 

We asked Sebastian Cadenas, CEO of Increase, to share a few thoughts on the nature of the company’s partnership with PayU – as well as today’s e-commerce market, the impact of the pandemic and more.

 

Read Sebastian’s responses below.

Why did you partner with PayU?

IncreasePay is the subscription management engine that empowers businesses throughout Latam. We focus on helping SAAS companies to scale and in supporting insurers, banks and financial institutions when it comes to evolving their recurrent payment systems.

 

We were looking for a global strategic partner that would allow us to offer local, secure and scalable payments for the customers who needed to automate the management of their subscriptions.

 

After extensive research, we decided that PayU could offer us what we were looking for and we partnered with them to scale our payment infrastructure.

 

 

How long has it been since you began your partnership with PayU?

We signed our partnership in August 2021. During two months, both the Product and Tech team started working on the integration while the Sales and Customer Experience teams polished processes and documentation.

 

Our first customers started operating during November 2021 and so far we are seeing the expected results.

 

 

What benefits do you find in your partnership with PayU?

The main benefits we found working with PayU are:

• Working together – going the extra mile to provide a great experience to our customers.
• Mutual trust between a top global payments provider and an agile company with spectacular technology to manage subscriptions. 
• Sales and technical opportunities we deliver together.
• A shared vision of security and scalability.

 

How central is payment optimization in your company?

Managing payments is essential for the survival of any company. In our field, managing recurring payments and retrying and charging missed payments becomes a competitive advantage and the backbone of companies seeking to scale without the need of in-house development.

 

With IncreasePay, the burden of managing recurring payments and subscriptions is shared with a company focused on solving solely this problem. Our success as a company depends on helping companies to achieve higher collection rates and reduce costs, while gaining the necessary capabilities to operate regionally. So optimizing payments is critical.

 

 

Can you point to how your operation has changed since the beginning of the partnership?

During the time working together to integrate both platforms and to certify the process, we were happily surprised by the quality of the documentation, for how stable the testing environment was and for how quickly and clearly all questions were answered.

 

The growth observed during the first 4 months of our partnership shows the scalability of the synergy between PayU and IncreasePay:

What are the main pain points you find in today’s payment market, and how is PayU helping you to improve your payments?

Companies looking to grow and expand into Latin America markets need a solution that allows them to scale their operations as new markets develop. Just to share a few key facts:

• International payment gateways like Stripe or Paypal have less than 60% in payments acceptance rate in Latin America.
• Latin America customers are used to paying in local currencies. Scaling businesses need to integrate with either a cross-border payment platform or a leading payment gateway in each country.
• Payment gateways often require a bureaucratic process to allow new merchants to enable recurring payments and subscriptions. 
• Due to the high inflation rates, local businesses need innovative business models with more flexibility on the amount and cycles to charge their customers.

 

IncreasePay offers an omnichannel and scalable solution to manage subscriptions and recurring payments locally throughout Latin America. 

 

We specialize and serve some of the top companies from four industries, SAAS, Insurance, Banks and Financial institutions and Education. So the main pain points we have been able to solve are that they no longer need to understand, negotiate and integrate with each payment provider. Instead, Increase negotiated and integrated to the top ones and they only need to set their payment logic and to wait to see their incomes grow.

 

Together with PayU, we give our clients the possibility of making their collections in different currencies at a lower cost, facilitating their commercial development in the different regions that our clients target.

 

 

What factors do you find affect approval rates the most?

We see the reasons for the approval rate for different companies, industries and countries. On average the main source of unapproved transactions is the lack of funds, the second one are conditions recognized and stopped by the anti-fraud engines and the third one is that for recurring transactions the security code can’t be null.

 

We share a list of recommendations that need to be taken for companies seeking to increase their approval rate. 

 

 

Have you seen a change in user behavior since the pandemic? Can you share which adjustments you had to implement?

We started developing IncreasePay at the end of 2019. We had it as an internal product and we decided to bring it to the wider market.

 

During Covid-19 new consumer behaviors span all areas of life, from how we work to how we shop to how we entertain ourselves. These rapid shifts have had important implications for businesses and consumers and accelerated the adoption of recurring services.

 

The adoption of IncreasePay accelerated as we were the first subscription engine focused on Latam, which accelerated businesses who noticed their consumers value buying comfortably from their homes and accessing a variety of products and services with a certain frequency.

 

We are now helping these businesses to automatically manage their recurring charges, to have control over their income flows and to increase their collectibility to keep scaling even as the pandemic hopefully recedes.