Worldline believes that it is numero-uno in online transaction globally and when it comes to point of sales (PoS), the company manages about one-third of PoS transactions in India. In a one-on-one interview with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN), Managing Director, Worldline e-Payment Services (South Asia and Middle East), Deepak Chandani talks about some of his crucial strategies
Kindly give us an overview on Worldline and its role in the payment system.
Worldline is rapidly expanding as a global player and the European leader in business and payments transactional services. We provide business enabling IT services and industry expertise to support our customers with top line growth through innovation and by enhancing their competitiveness.
Worldline used to be a company under AtoS till we spurn out and is currently listed in the European Exchange. Globally, Worldline is about 7,500 people with an annual turnover of 1.3 billion Euros; with our established presence in 17 countries. We are therefore a large global player based out of Europe with our focus on financial processing, licensing of products, merchant services, payment terminals and internet payment gateways. We also work in e-mobility for ticketing systems for metros in railways and all over the world, except USA. We have been in Indian market for close to six years now and bought a company called Venture Infotech in August 2010. Over the last five years we have been focusing to build our brand in the country and today we are the leader in online payment business, issuance of cards, internet payment gateway transactions and we offer a host of whole new products and solutions including fraud and risk management solutions. We provide a whole suite of our services to banks and also merchant besides big corporations across the world. With increasing digital transactions, challenges of dealing with frauds have also been gone up.
How would you like to comment upon the evolution of technological frontiers in the financial transactions?
Being in the e-Payment sector, Worldline extensively use technology in its products and services for customers. When we deal with payment transactions, it has transformed with time into physical cash to plastic money and the entire transaction happens in the digital space. With time, it has moved from internet to mobile transaction, which is even more advanced as you can complete a transaction through a QR Code and do not need any card number. The second evolution of technology is less requirements of documents to do the transactions or open bank accounts. From two-factor authentication of transaction which takes place through validation of One Time Password (OTP), the next level of online transaction lies on trusted authentication to ensure that transactions are secure. The trusted authentication enables us to identify the machine from which the transaction request is coming. Then there is evolution that happened in transaction processing in a big way. Lastly, evolution also took place in fraud management with new technology, we can check on this online and real-time, which wasn’t there in the market even few years ago. In Europe, we launched a technology called Host Card Emulation and introduced it to all leading banks there. We are contemplating to launch it in India in the next six months wherein all essential card information of yours is stored in your phone as a proxy system in the cloud. Thus, in each and every segment of payment systems, there is an evolution which has made significant contribution in the industry. Worldline is presently leading the space globally.
How effective is your presence in the public and private sectors in the Indian market?
What are your plans to augment your penetration in India? Presently, we are the numero-uno processors of online transactions across the world and in India and when it comes to point of sales (PoS), we manage about onethird of PoS transactions in the country. We are the leaders when it comes to acquiring as well as issuance of license for cards and payment instruments. We have also emerged successful in our loyalty program, while working with national brands like Bharat Petroleum, Indian Oil Corporation, Shell and offer them loyalty programs for their customers. We also work with All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and offer them prepaid programs so that students can avoid payment by cash and avail benefits from digital transactions. We are also working with several big ticket malls and smart cities like Lodha Pallava, while we make an effort to replace cash with digital transactions. Though we have been working in Indian market since the past six years, however, we feel that the Indian market is huge and opportunities are enormous. With the advent online market space like Flipkart, Amazon and the lot, we are also efficiently tapping the market and there are huge opportunities.
How does your solutions serve the telecom providers?
All major telecom service providers in India have their own mobile wallets. We as a service provider we provide them with the solutions for better acceptance of the wallets among the users. They look for more and more places where their wallets can be used. Worldline works with the telecom service providers to take their mobile wallets to newer places, wherein those products can be used to serve a variety of purposes like shopping or paying utility bills.
Brief us about market competition. How do you stay ahead of the stiff competition from your competitors?
We don’t have any such market competitor as we are a service provider whose products are unique to themselves. Though there are companies which provide similar sort of services, but we as of now are the largest service provider globally. The approach that we follow is to work with all the payment schemes like Master, Visa and Rupay to understand where they are driving payments. We work with our prime customers, banks to understand their move towards electronic payments and the trending technologies in the sector of operations. We work with large merchants to understand how electronic payments system affects their business and work with global teams to figure out the current industry trends and update ourselves with the same on a regular basis. Taking all these inputs into account, we then devise strategies and product categories, improvements and upgradation required for changing our business methods to keep at par with our competitors. We have our own in-house innovation teams who work closely to unveil new products, which we then test amongst limited set of customers to determine the products usefulness and hit factors in the market.
SALIENT FEATURES
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Worldline is about 7,500 people with an annual turnover of 1.3 billion Euros and presence in 17 countries
Did you face any roadblocks while operating in Indian market?
Not really, that we faced any kind of roadblocks while operating in the Indian market. There is a lot scope and opportunity to innovate in the Indian market. The government agencies too are closely involved to work in newer sectors of operation every day. Seeding of Aadhaar information with bank data has been one such key measure.
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