Paul Clarke, Product Director, Barclaycard, Global Payment Acceptance
What does your company do?
Barclaycard Global Payment Acceptance’s core business is providing customers large and small with the capability to take payments, whether online or face-to-face, and with a consistent experience through any number of new and emerging channels such as mobile and contactless.
Barclaycard celebrates its 50th birthday this year and the company has seen significant and pioneering changes in that time. In recent years our business has evolved from a traditional card acquirer to a business that offers sophisticated gateway solutions. This enables us to offer our customers a range of tools that help manage fraud and cyber security.
“We have a clear vision of our future – to ensure we provide solutions that enable our customers to transact, no matter what device they are using, where they are located and whatever method of payment they want to accept, and do this in a seamless and joined up way.”
WHAT IS YOUR USP?
Our USP is our people. I believe our technology is leading edge, we have a strong history of innovation and when it comes to reliability and security, we have an excellent track record – but what makes the difference is the experience and depth of knowledge of our people.
The service our people provide based on experience, expertise and a desire to help our customers be more successful is what makes our customers join us and stay with us.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR BUSINESS AREA’S VISION?
We have a clear vision; we want to help make our clients more successful and help them make the sale every time. We do that by delivering the best technical capability we possibly can, being committed to reducing complexity that our clients face within the payments world and by constantly innovating the solution and services we provide.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING CURRENTLY IN THE ECOMM PAYMENTS MARKET?
There are quite a few things happening in the ecommerce space, and as ecommerce, mobile and other ways of paying start to merge this creates both new opportunities and issues for our customers to think about.
Top of the list for us is simplification; how we can bring all these emerging technologies and opportunities together in a way that makes it simple for our customers to use, in the UK, Europe and beyond. A large part of our investment is going into simplifying each piece of the ecommerce journey, from how our customers and partners can integrate and use our services, to simplifying the data and analytics we provide to help our customers understand more about their business.
Other things we are working on include payment optimisation (helping our customers to ensure that they stop bad transactions whilst increasing the number of good transactions that get processed); improved fraud solutions; looking at intelligent behavioural tools that will help our customers pin point fraudulent activity prior to checkout and, as ever, constantly looking to add new and emerging payment types, whether that is local international solutions or emerging capabilities such as Android Pay, Samsung Pay and Apple Pay.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOING?
All of our products and services are market competitive and we are constantly gaining insight from our customers to evolve and enhance our solutions. We offer a breadth of products and services beyond payment acceptance and therefore our competitors are wide ranging and far reaching. Our approach to proposition development is to engage the customer as early on as possible to test, change and get the most fit for purpose product out to market. As a technology-led organisation with long standing heritage and expertise we are well positioned to become a single point for UK merchants looking for a range of products and services.
WHO ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Our customers range from a corner shop to a major UK-wide supermarket. They have varied requirements and our products are developed to address their specific needs.
We have organised ourselves to address the needs of the different sectors our customers exist in, for example hospitality and travel, and have built specialist knowledge of the needs of these customers over time. We work really hard to engage with and understand our customers, getting them involved in initial product development and service ideas. We additionally support our customers’ growth ambitions globally – enabling them to process different currencies.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS CHALLENGES IN THE COMING YEAR AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MEET THOSE CHALLENGES?
The challenges ahead include continuing to simplify for our customers all of the regulatory and scheme changes that they are faced with in an ever-changing payment industry. Also to foresee any change as a result of the UK move to leave Europe and supporting our customers through any potential required change. Also, we’ll continue our focus on fraud and security to ensure our customers and their customers are protected from any potential breach.
To meet these challenges, we are investing heavily in technology and people that will enable us to continue to deliver our strategy of simplifying the payments experience for our customers and enabling them to make a sale every time.
