Fellow PSP Computop partners with PayU to provide more international payment options to its customers.
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.
It should come as no surprise, then, that PayU has a longstanding partnership with Computop – an international payment services provider (PSP) based in Bamberg, Germany. Computop was founded in 1997 during the early days of e-commerce, and has been a significant European player in online payment processing ever since. As Computop has expanded its international reach on behalf of the merchants that it serves, the company has been working with PayU since 2012 to offer more international payment methods in countries around the world.
We asked Henning Brandt, Head of Communication at Computop, to share a few thoughts on the nature of the company’s partnership with PayU – as well as today’s e-commerce market, payment optimization and approval rates, the impact of the pandemic and more.
Read Henning’s responses below.
Computop started in Germany. We’re addressing large companies that want to internationalize, and so they have to add alternative payment methods in different markets. Working with PayU was a logical move.
With PayU, Computop was able to integrate many new payment types and countries within a very short time.
Computop has been working with PayU since 2012, with the partnership established in 2015. We were the first payment services provider to integrate all four platforms that PayU had at that time. Since then, we have increased the number of payment methods we can offer from 60 to over 350. PayU has been a big part of that.
Giving merchants the right payment methods is how Computop services merchants in different markets. We see ourselves as “consultants” to merchants focused on optimizing payments. For us it’s about offering the appropriate payment methods in the relevant locations.
Merchants are expanding in e-commerce to different countries very fast, and in these countries, it is important for a newcomer to establish customer trust and provide good service by being able to offer local payment methods.
To do this right and conquer new markets even faster, it’s necessary to have the right information about the local payment methods that customers expect.
At the same time, merchants need to be able to show quick successes because investors expect fast results. So, it’s that balance between good information and fast technical integration. As far as our partnership with PayU, the ability to integrate new payment methods quickly has been helpful when it comes to this merchant need for speed.
Take BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) for example – the ability to help merchants react to this trend quickly has been helpful for Computop to stay out in front of the market.
In order to provide 24/7 service to our merchants, availability and reliability are key to us. Also, good documentation and direct contact to payments experts make a difference.
For card payments, we are finding that fraud detection is really important as well as the capability to quickly authenticate customers.
As an omnichannel payment service provider with a strong share in e-commerce, like everyone else we’ve seen revenue shifting from brick-and-mortar to online during the pandemic.
Managing the overall increased volume of transactions was one thing. At the same time, we’ve found ourselves offering more omni-channel solutions. Specifically, we’ve worked with some of our merchants that have a large brick-and-mortar presence to better bring together retail and e-commerce. We’re working with them to integrate all retail transactions into one place with Computop.
Interestingly, the move toward omni-channel ends up going beyond payments alone to other aspects of commercial strategy. For a retailer, omni-channel payments help enable omni-channel processes (such as click and collect, QR codes in windows, showroom model, self-checkout, etc.). It’s harder to quickly implement these kinds of trends when payments are in multiple places or siloed between retail and e-commerce.