What does your company do?
Adyen is a technology company that provides businesses with a single solution to accept and optimise payments anywhere in the world, across online, mobile, and in-store.
What is your USP?
With Adyen, brands have a single solution to accept payments online and in store across multiple markets. Because all transaction history is collected in one system, it enables retailers to build a picture of shopper behaviour across sales channels and use this data to drive customer loyalty and create omnichannel customer journeys.
“A shopper intuitively expects a consistent experience with your brand, regardless of whether they are on a desktop, smartphone or in-store”
Myles Dawson, Adyen
What are you currently doing in the ecommerce/multichannel markets?
Today, successful businesses are building a deeper engagement with their customers by fitting themselves around their lives as seamlessly as possible.
Crucial to this is letting local shoppers around the world pay in the ways they know and trust. Adyen powers payments for Spotify in 58 countries and helped The Cambridge Satchel Company grow conversion in China by 15% through our support of Alipay.
Another important factor is letting the customer dictate how, when and where they interact with a brand. This means providing a consistent experience across all channels and devices. Adyen’s single platform solution helps businesses deliver seamless omnichannel customer journeys and build a deep understanding of their shoppers across devices and locations. With Adyen, Hillary’s has streamlined its operations by managing both point of sale and online payments in the same system.
Mobile is a driving force for many businesses and a frictionless mobile flow can be critical to success. Adyen supports both in-app and browser-based mobile payments, including local payment methods such as Alipay. With Adyen, BlaBla Car ensures a consistent in-app experience, all the way through to checkout.
With a data-driven approach to payments, businesses can not only reduce fraud but also drive both conversion and credit card approval rates. Adyen’s built-in risk management system RevenueProtect draws on multiple data points, such as card numbers, machine fingerprinting and email addresses, to maintain the perfect balance between blocking fraud and approving genuine transactions. As a result, Delivery Hero found that chargebacks decreased by 78% and false positives were down by 50%.
Additionally, Adyen’s suite of optimisation tools, RevenueAccelerate, uses data and machine learning to adjust the payment request in real time and increase the chance of an approval. The Auto Retry feature, which dynamically retries a careful selection of failed transactions, proved successful for Jagex, with a 9.6% success rate for initially failed transactions.
What new functionality does your latest version give to retailers?
Our new tool RevenueAccelerate enables businesses to grow revenue with data-driven payments. It is a suite of automated tools which work in the background of each transaction to incrementally increase payment authorisation rates and accelerate revenue growth.
It exists because legacy payments systems are a black box, offering little visibility into why transactions are approved or declined. This is a big problem – up to 5% of transactions globally fail for no clear reasons – and it is on this 5% that RevenueAccelerate gets to work. For large brands, that can mean a significant uplift in revenue.
RevenueAccelerate is able to optimise payments in a way no other system can because the Adyen platform is the only system that spans the entire payment flow, from gateway, to risk management, to a direct connection with the card schemes. This enables it to collect and consolidate vastly more data than comparable systems.
What do you see as challenges for retailers over the coming year?
A shopper intuitively expects a consistent experience with your brand, regardless of whether they are on a desktop, smartphone, or in-store. Retailers know this and want to deliver this seamless quality of experience but they still face a lack of understanding of shopper behaviour across channels, due in large part to shopper data being dispersed across multiple systems in multiple markets. With omnichannel currently a hot topic, many retailers are working hard at understanding cross-channel shopper behaviour but it still remains a big challenge in the near term future.
What are the challenges for technology providers and how are you preparing to meet them?
The key challenge for any technology company is to consistently iterate on the core product to offer ever more value to customers. This requires an internal culture that is built around customer-centric innovation.
Adyen is a true technology company that has built and maintains its own infrastructure in-house, with development releases every four weeks. This enables us to iterate fast and move further ahead of legacy systems. One of our key internal principals is to “innovate to benefit all merchants”, and that is reflected in a steady stream of releases that can be deployed for the benefit of brands around the world.
Customer case study – Hillarys
For over 45 years, Hillarys has been adorning homes across the UK with made-to-measure curtains and blinds. Its repertoire now extends to shutters, curtains, awnings and carpets. Hillarys currently accounts for almost a third of the UK market, manufacturing 35,000 products each week.
The majority of the company’s sales come from its in-home business: 1,100 self-employed sales advisors provide a home consultancy, take orders, then process the payment in the customer’s home using a smartphone. These sales advisors are spread around the country, meaning the order and payment process must be watertight to avoid orders being missed and payments lost.
Despite the advances in the mobile network since 2005, one consistent problem is that, even today, about 20% of customers’ homes don’t have a reliable data signal. Hillarys wanted a new technology solution that would overcome the challenge of taking off-line payments, which account for £20m in annual turnover, while still adhering to the highest security standards.
Adyen provided Hillarys’ sales advisors with mobile point of sale terminals capable of capturing payment regardless of connectivity. In the case of high-value orders, the initial down-payment can now be taken at the customer’s home and the card details captured and stored securely on Adyen’s server. Prior to installation, the final payment is charged by way of a secure token. This means the second payment is processed securely with no further action required from the customer.
Most recently, Hillarys has also incorporated a new ‘pay by click’ functionality for sales advisors to finalise a customer quote remotely via email or SMS, and also moved payments in its online sales channel to Adyen. Now the company manages both ecommerce and mobile POS sales from the same payments platform. This not only streamlines Hillarys’ operations but makes it possible to map customer interaction across channels, building a deeper understanding of buyer behaviour.
“We are delighted with the early results we have seen since moving our online volume over to Adyen,” says Matt Barney, Hillarys’ head of web technology. “Already our conversions have noticeably increased. It is also a huge benefit for us that all transactions are processed in a single payments platform. This simplifies our operations, helping us to be more agile.”
ADYEN IN BRIEF
Date launched: 2006
Global reach: Adyen has 12 offices around the world – Amsterdam, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, Singapore, São Paulo, Stockholm, Madrid, Shanghai and Sydney. Adyen offers international payments (250+ payment methods and 150+ transaction currencies) for 4,500 businesses globally
Turnover: $50 billion processed in 2015
Customers: Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify, River Island, Superdry, Booking.com, Vodafone, Moss Bros, Mango, O’Neill, easyJet, Notonthehighstreet.com
Number of employees: 450
For more information about Adyen, call +44 (0) 203 814 8200 or visit www.adyen.com
