Going Global with Local Payments

Meeting the Needs of Today’s E-Commerce Consumer

So when location becomes less important, what now matters most to the empowered consumer? The one key driver for the consumer to complete a transaction, reaching the last mile of the payment transaction, is trust. That trust is built on many factors, including familiarity with the brand, experience with the business and the ease with which the online shopper can complete a transaction.

As consumers, when we see payment methods we are familiar with, we have more trust in the brand. That trust helps to reduce shopping cart abandonment. For businesses, that means creating sites in local languages and selling goods in local currencies, all the while being sensitive to how different cultures make payments.

Seamless. Frictionless. Local.

In Australia, for example, consumers who have grown up with debit cards for in-store purchasesprefer to use scheme debit cards for online purchases. Debit and scheme debit cards are seeing phenomenal growth in Australia compared to credit card use. In the U.S., online buyers are comfortable using credit cards. But in LatinAmerica, customers prefer electronic cashpayments and in Northern Europe, online direct debit is very popular.

With 22 percent of e-commerce transactions expected to be cross border by 2022 across the globe, making consumers’ shopping experiences as seamless as possible and offering familiar payment methods, is the key to growing cross-border connections.

Take the humble traveller. Tourists no longer walk into the travel agent’s office and explain what they want, requesting information from the provider. Now, they log on to travel websites that push those services toward the customer, offering discounts for hotels and flights booked together and suggesting that a car rental might be in order. What has not changed is the bottom line. “Whether it’s a push or a pull relationship, it’s important that the traveller feels comfortable paying,” said Prasanna Varadharajan, Head of e-commerce for Fiserv in Asia Pacific.

That’s where Fiserv comes in. We facilitate the payment and close the transaction. If every journey begins with a single step, we get you past that last mile. There is no doubt that there are huge benefits to being able to browse world markets and select from an infinite number of goods, all from a device cradled in your hand. But without the ability to connect to customers in ways that make them comfortable to pay, the images and offers popping up on our devices are nothing more than window dressing. To build trust and move consumers from the storefront to the cart and ultimately across borders, businesses need to offer familiar payment options, local currency choices and the scale and trust that Fiserv provides.

“That’s exactly what we had in mind when we partnered with Huifu Payments Ltd.,” said Sarah Wu, General Manager at Fiserv China. “The partnership allows us to provide global online retailers with a superior domestic e-commerce acquiring solution offering their Chinese consumers a local language experience and the ability to pay with familiar local payment methods.”

The China e-commerce market is expected to grow from an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2019 to $2.6 trillion by 2023, it’s definitely worth getting it right for the consumer. Indeed, expanding online into China could prove to be an immense growth opportunity for online retailers, but setting up a business and transacting in China can be complex, especially with little knowledge of the cultural and regulatory landscape.

As companies go global, they understand the need to offer local payment options familiar to the consumer. Fiserv understands the pitfalls of dealing with a portfolio of partners, solutions and complexities – that become too confusing and difficult to navigate. Our mission is to streamline connectivity by giving merchants the ability to simplify their business models by using us as their single-source solution to connect to a full range of markets and payment methods globally.

When it comes to going global with local payments, Fiserv offers the most comprehensive solution in the market. A powerful proposition combining on the ground expertise with global scale and a robust infrastructure of product and service delivery.

As a leader in e-commerce across 118 countries and offering over 195 local payment options ensuring consumer preference and cultural differences are catered for, Fiserv offers businesses the ability to deliver seamless, frictionless payment experiences to consumers around the world leveraging a single source, secure solution.

The age of the consumer is upon us. It’s time to think beyond borders. It’s time to think about local payment options and it’s time to think about the importance of trust.