X-BORDER PAYMENTS OPTIMIZATION TRACKER JUNE 2016 A MONTHLY UPDATE ON THE TRENDS AND PLAYERS DRIVING CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS Horn Sounding On The Future Of Freight Delivery Paysafe’s payment technology can now process more than 100 currencies 57 percent of gamers are using PayPal or credit cards to make Alibaba reported a their online purchases year-on-year mobile growth of 192 percent X-Border Payments Optimization TrackerTM Table of Contents 03 What’s Inside 04 Cover Story 08 Methodology 09 Top 20 Rankings 14 Watch List – New Additions 15 X-Border Payments Optimization LandscapeTM 16 News & Trends 20 Scorecard 68 About © 2016 PYMNTS.com all rights reserved 2 What’s Inside By all but eliminating physical boundaries, cross-border solutions are giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “it’s a small world.” In an age where the fiscal distance from the U.S. to Europe to China has been reduced to a few swipes on a smartphone, international economies are increasing their digital dependence on each other. This month, a number of countries embraced this global shrinkage, while others attempted to rebuild borders through the tightening of trade policies. With a more interactive international market comes new hurdles for the freight industry. For June’s cover story, PYMNTS sat down with Andrew Fine, CFO of Freightos, a sales automation platform for the shipping industry, to discuss these challenges and the technological future of cross-border trade. Also included in this month’s Tracker are news highlights from throughout the cross-border payments movement. Here’s a peek at some recent headlines that showcase the global scope of cross-border initiatives. Leveraging multi-player collaborations to create cross-border opportunities Amazon China recently forged a partnership with the city of Hangzhou, China, the capital of the country’s Zhejiang Province. The metropolis is joining forces with the eCommerce giant in an effort to create more cross-border opportunities for local merchants. Hangzhou’s retailers will now be able to set up Amazon-hosted digital shops, which will allow them to market their products to an international audience. As small-scale Hangzhou merchants begin to expand their cross-border operations, retailers in Turkey may soon have to do the opposite. Per government orders, Turkish retailers will no longer be able to accept payments made via PayPal starting June 6. The digital payment solution, which was banned for failing to meet federal requirements, was utilized by numerous Turkish businesses – for whom its absence could be financially detrimental. Despite Turkey’s backpedaling on cross-border payment adoption, plenty of consumers around the world are facilitating international transactions every day. Nowhere is this trend more visible than in the online gaming world, which has become an unexpected source of major revenue for the online payments industry. allpago released a survey that revealed digital gaming communities, especially those within the U.S., Russia and Latin America, to be significant participants in cross-border commerce. Gamers are most likely to pay for purchases via credit cards and PayPal. X-Border June Tracker Updates In this issue, we’ve profiled 93 global payment service providers, including four new players: Apco Pay, Global Payments, ONPEX and Planet Payment. We’ve also updated four players: Chase Paymentech, Computop, First Data, Paysafe and TSYS. © 2016 PYMNTS.com all rights reserved 3 Cover Story ...a technological evolution “ taking place in the world of cross-border trade...” Horn Sounding On The Future Of Freight Delivery Today, thanks to convenient technological advancements, a vast number of merchants – from mom-and-pop shops to traveling retailers – are increasingly able to accept payments via mobile solutions. Even lemonade stands can take credit cards if they’re equipped with a smartphone or tablet. It may come as a surprise, then, that the freight shipping process involved in transporting many merchants’ products has traditionally lagged behind in technological adoption. Andrew Fine, CFO of Freightos, which provides a sales automation platform for clients in the freight services sector, explained that cross-border B2B trade has yet to complete the transition from paper to digital. “The industry is very, very old-fashioned – we’ve been getting paid by paper checks by some of our app customers – this is how outdated the industry is,” he said. “Every shipment has to have physical documents shipped with the shipment or FedExed over before the shipment gets there, it’s actual paper that’s still involved here.” With Freightos, Fine is attempting to change all this. The software-as-a-service platform is an intermediary solution where international importers and exporters can organize contracts and manage/automate quotes and sales, all from their own web pages. According to Fine, the technology is bringing a “paradigm shift” to the shipping industry. “It’s bringing freight forwarding online,” he explained. © 2016 PYMNTS.com all rights reserved 4 Cover Story PYMNTS recently caught up with Fine to take a closer look at what’s happening in the world of cross-border shipping and to discuss the digital future of international trade. Breaking down the barriers of cross-border shipping Even the simplest cross-border transactions present numerous challenges on both sides. When just one item is purchased from an international consumer, a slew of factors – from taxes to shifting currency rates – affect the payment process, as well as the price. The freight industry deals with this concept on a much larger scale (according to Fine, around a trillion dollars is spent each year on international shipping). The sector’s financial magnitude, paired with its constantly fluctuating nature, creates what Fine calls a “fragmented market.” “The difficult thing is that rates for quoting freight shipments are very, very complex,” he said. “It’s not like Amazon – where you have ...for smaller companies a price of a book or a CD or a watch or anything else – or any other marketplace. With any shipping request there are potentially 6, 7 or who need the level of 8 different prices to get the quote out to a customer.” “ service only afforded Add paper checks into the mix, and the industry’s complexity only to companies with a intensifies. For Fine, a way to consolidate this intricate and largely antiquated process in a streamlined digital format seemed like the hundred billion dollars freight industry’s missing puzzle piece. in turnover, it’s very Enter Freightos, which offers shippers a virtual home base for their challenging.” freighting needs. “We had to build a platform that took rates – which are structured differently with every single freight forwarder – to develop a unified format which was being kind of adopted throughout the industry on our side of it, having to create and upload it into a system, so that when a shipper, let’s say, is able to request the shipment quote, and we have the unified format to actually pull in quotes from all the different freight forwarders on the marketplace,” he explained. Currently, Freightos is part of a technological evolution taking place in the world of cross-border trade, as it’s helping fill financial shipping gaps with digital services. The solution has proved particularly useful among smaller companies, most of which don’t have the resources to forge personal relationships with banks. These connections are useful, if not necessary, in the cross-border shipping game, as even the smallest shippers require some degree of personal attention from their financial institutions. “[Big-name players] probably don’t have that much of an issue, but for smaller companies who need the level of service only afforded to companies with a hundred billion dollars in turnover, it’s very challenging,” Fine said. © 2016 PYMNTS.com all rights reserved 5 Cover Story Global challenges and the future of freight While widespread international trade offers numerous benefits to consumers, merchants and local economies, being a truly international company presents many challenges. Although Freightos has leveraged technology to help simplify worldwide trade, its status as a global company means that obstacles are omnipresent. “It’s incredibly complex being cross-border, and by definition of freight is cross-border. The freight industry as an industry is very, very regimented. The process is very, very clear. The financial process behind that when building a marketplace does not exist,” Fine said. Since banking guidelines vary immensely from country to country, Fine explained that expanding to provide services across the globe is easier said than done. For example, he cited Chinese banking regulations as extremely strict, and that they differ greatly from those in the U.S. and other Western nations. When a company is focused on enabling streamlined cross-border trade, however, creating international solutions that transcend varying banking structures is essential, he said. “Being a global company as a startup is very, very challenging. Identifying where you save money – but by definition also spend money – and have the infrastructure established is what’s challenging,” Fine said. In addition to discrepancies in global banking regulations, Fine also cites a lack of international real-time banking as a key operational struggle. “There are massive gaps between making payments and actually receiving funds. They can’t just have some kind of setup where I can get Identifying where identified, any solution