Facilitating Cross-Border Expansion With Open Payment Architecture

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Executive Summary

1. Case

Peach Payments, a South Africa-based payment service provider founded in

2012, had achieved great success in its home market by early 2015. To build

upon that success and take advantage of its innovative, next generation-

type payment services, Peach Payments planned to enter several new

African markets with the aim to ultimately expand across the entire African

continent.

2. Challenge

To achieve its goal of rapid expansion, Peach Payments needed a

technologically advanced white label payment gateway. The gateway

needed to feature streamlined and rapid merchant integration, the ability to

use plugins, and consolidated mobile and traditional online payments. As

Peach began to target and onboard larger and more demanding merchants,

it became increasingly clear that the company’s payments gateway

needed to meet the variety of complicated technical challenges modern

payment providers face. With transaction processing technology becoming

increasingly commoditized, Peach Payments wanted to dierentiate itself

from the market while avoiding the signiﬁcant investment needed to build a

payment solution from scratch.

3. Solution

Peach Payments integrated to ACI

Payments Orchestration Platform™

payments gateway whose underlying open payments architecture makes it

one of the most advanced and ﬂexible payment solutions on the market.

Facilitating Cross-Border

Expansion with Open

Payments Architecture

Speed

30%

faster merchant

onboarding

Business Growth

400%

Peach Payments

achieved a 400%

increase in monthly

transaction volume in

less than one year

A Case Study of Peach Payments

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4. Result

ACI’s payments gateway helped Peach Payments achieve their targets and

expand their monthly transaction volume by 400% in less than one year,

without a proportionate cost increase. The resources created by Peach’s

increasing revenues enabled the company to increase its focus on

expansion and future growth. The gateway quickened Peach’s merchant

onboarding process by 30%, allowed Peach to easily build plugins for

merchants, and provided integrated e and mCommerce payment options

through a single uniﬁed API. The gateway’s global payments network,

featuring hundreds of acquirers and alternative payment methods globally,

gave Peach Payments the ability to expand to Namibia and Mauritius and

plan to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and beyond.

RESULTS

Single RESTful API

All Channels and Devices

Connectivity to an Extensive

Global Payments Network

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Case

Peach Payments was founded in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012. Through a

fresh and innovative approach, it quickly became a leading payment service

provider in the South African market. The approach brought international best

practices such as one-click payments, reconciliations and recurring billing

directly to African merchants. Building these solutions took time and eort,

often because convincing local banks and acquirers of the value for their own

businesses was not easy.

Yet Peach Payments’ eorts were well rewarded. Their unique approach

gained them a steadily growing list of loyal clients, at ﬁrst medium and large

enterprises focused primarily in fashion, retail, food delivery and online

marketplaces. Most of these clients’ businesses grew in conjunction with

Peach’s own growth and as Peach’s reputation and capabilities expanded, it

began to land even larger clients in new sectors such as cloud services and

internet service provision. As Peach’s success began to snowball it saw an

opportunity to take action towards its ambition to become one of the leading

payment service providers on the African continent. Yet it lacked the payments

gateway technology needed to fully take advantage of these new opportunities.

Challenge

As Peach Payments surveyed the African market — with an eye on taking the

next step towards becoming Africa’s preeminent payment service provider —

the company realized it needed a payments solution that possessed four key

traits:

• Rapid and simple integration and merchant onboarding

• Fully integrated mobile capabilities

• The ability to accommodate Peach-built shop plugins to integrate payments

within merchants’ overall business activities

• Access to Africa’s most important alternative payment methods and local card

acquirers

Customer service is an important dierentiating factor for Peach Payments and

ﬁnding a platform to help the company deliver ﬁrst-rate service was of the

utmost importance.

THE CLIENT:

FACTS AND FIGURES

2012

Company founded

Leading PSP

in the South African market

Operations

South Africa, Namibia,

Mauritius

Sectors

Retail, fashion, food delivery,

cloud services, internet

service provision

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Integration and Merchant Onboarding

Successful expansion in Africa, perhaps even more than

in other regions, requires payment providers to have

advanced and user-friendly technology. Merchants often

lack the resources to throw at a complicated integration,

which means platforms warranting little integration eort by

merchants are highly competitive. Thus, Peach Payments’

expansion across Africa relied upon ﬁnding a platform with

simple and rapid merchant integration.

Mobile Solutions

Yet the importance of simple and rapid integration does

not mean merchants will accept a platform that is unsecure,

unable to simultaneously process many transactions or

has few capabilities. For example, in Africa it is important

payment providers oer omni-channel solutions because

although less than 25% of Africa’s population has a bank

account, more than 80% have access to mobile devices.

Most African shoppers use mobile devices for internet

access and it is predicted by 2016 there will be more than

100 million mobile payment users in Africa.

mCommerce

is the only way to eectively reach certain shopping

segments. Thus, Peach Payments needed a solution that

would enable a seamless user experience across both

mCommerce and eCommerce.

Shop Plugins

Another challenge for Peach Payments and its focus on

medium-sized enterprises was a plugin strategy for shop

management systems such as Magento, WooCommerce

and Shopify. These platforms are important to most

medium-sized businesses because they use them rather

than build custom shop management systems. Peach

Payments needed to ensure their payments gateway was

ﬂexible enough to incorporate these plugins easily.

An Extensive Payments Network

The ﬁnal challenge for Peach Payments was its need to

connect to a variety of acquiring banks and alternative

payment methods across Africa. Developing the

connections to the major banks in South Africa took

signiﬁcant time and eort for Peach Payments, and in order

to expand more rapidly, it required a gateway with an

extensive payments network across the entire continent.

The Need for a Technologically

Advanced Solution

Creating technology that meets all these requirements

from scratch is both costly and time consuming. While

Peach Payments had the ability to build such technology,

the large undertaking would have entailed diverting

signiﬁcant resources away from the company’s overall goal

of becoming the foremost payment service provider in

Africa. Expansion and other business activities would slow

signiﬁcantly as Peach designed and built its gateway from

the ground up. Meanwhile, Peach Payments’ competitors

would not take such a hiatus and would likely continue

expanding into the very markets Peach had set its sights

upon.

Peach Payments required a payments platform that

delivered a solution for each of these four challenges

without sapping the resources the company needed to

devote to growth and expansion.

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Solution

The underlying open architecture of ACI’s payments gateway was launched

in February of 2015 and shortly thereafter, Peach Payments integrated it for

transaction processing. Peach Payments’ merchants now onboard through the

gateway and use it for their payment services. The gateway’s features include:

• A single RESTful API (application program interface) and interactive

documentation for rapid and ecient merchant integration

• A mobile SDK (software development kit) and mobile responsive payments

widget COPYandPAY for coordinated e and mCommerce payments

• An open system for simpliﬁed assimilation of shop plugins

• An extensive network of African “connectors” (acquirers and alternative

payment methods), currently numbered at 40 in 35 countries and continually

increasing

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Result

Peach Payments quickly found that the gateway’s

underlying open architecture helped it overcome each of

the four obstacles to its growth: fast merchant onboarding,

e and mCommerce assimilation, openness to shop plugins,

and access to African acquirers and alternative payment

methods.

Speed and Simplicity: Merchant

Onboarding

Two aspects of the gateway’s open architecture made it

particularly easy for Peach to onboard merchants quickly:

the single RESTful API and ACI’s interactive documentation.

By lowering the number of integrations for merchants

to only one, and by basing it on the well known RESTful

standards, Peach saw improvement in merchant onboarding

times, especially as the open payments gateway became

more familiar to Peach.

According to Peach Payments co-founder Rahul Jain, “The

open payment API is an extremely developer-friendly API

and helps our merchants integrate up to 30% faster. The

uniﬁed API for front-end and back-oce processes has

simpliﬁed integration eorts signiﬁcantly for our merchants.

It has helped Peach Payments deliver on its developer ﬁrst

approach to market.” More than just a matter of improved

service to new merchants, Peach Payments’ sales team

touted the single integration to potential clients with the

advanced technology drawing many onboard.

The interactive online documentation, white labeled by

Peach Payments as API Docs, also contributed to the

improved experience for merchants’ developers, helped

reduce integration times and automated the entire

process. The API Docs’ thorough, interactive, and step-by-

step guides equipped developers with the tools needed

to complete integration quickly, lowering the required

resources for merchants and easing Peach Payments’

support burden.

Flexibility: Mobile Solutions

In addition to better integration, the gateway’s open

architecture gave Peach Payments an assimilated e

and mCommerce solution. The gateway’s mobile SDKs

for iOS and Android native apps and payments widget

COPYandPAY with its responsive mobile design, helped

Peach deliver the omni-channel product that it needed

for the African market. Most African merchants sell across

websites, mobile-optimized sites, and in-app, making such a

solution a key requirement for success.

Flexibility: Shop Plugins

Peach’s third challenge, enabling shopping cart plugins,

was also overcome through the payments gateway’s open

architecture. Through the gateway’s RESTful API and

JavaScript widget, COPYandPAY, Peach was able to build

world-class plugins for Magento and WooCommerce with

more forthcoming. Peach’s clients are never forced to

choose between Peach Payments and their preferred shop

management system; they can have both.

Simplicity and Flexibility: An Extensive

Payments Network

The payments gateway’s open architecture also helped

Peach Payments access the right acquirers and alternative

payment methods. Integrating to the gateway gives

payment providers immediate access to both ACI’s white-

label payment processing capabilities and its entire global

network — two tools essential for cross-border payments.

Of the network’s hundreds of “connectors” (acquirers and

alternative payment methods) globally, 40 currently oer

coverage in 35 African countries and ACI continues to grow

the network. The ACI Payments Orchestration Platform

grants Peach Payments access to a payments network

that is extensive enough for immediate expansion and is

growing to accommodate future strategies.

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Obstacles Overcome, Growth

Accelerating

Peach Payments was an early adopter of the ACI’s open

payments architecture because it promised to help the

company overcome the four payment obstacles it faced.

Like with any new product or service, Peach experienced

some bumps as the open payments gateway’s capabilities

and unique features were reﬁned. Yet ACI built the

payments gateway as a fundamentally “open” product

which made it easier to continuously improve based upon

user feedback. The open payments gateway’s inherent

ﬂexibility has allowed Peach Payments to shape the

platform into the exact kind of service their clients need. As

a company that focused on high-quality customer service to

dierentiate from competitors, the open payment gateway

proved to be the perfect technological conduit for Peach to

delivers speed, simplicity and ﬂexibility to its clients.

This speed, simplicity and ﬂexibility has been fundamental

to Peach Payment’s recent growth. In late 2014, Peach

Payments began to see strong growth as its eorts in South

Africa began to reach a tipping point. However, by early

2015, growth had started to plateau. Peach had foreseen

the need to upgrade its payments gateway technology

and switching to the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform

helped resume Peach’s upward growth trajectory. The

solution gave Peach Payments the technology it needed

to onboard clients quickly, better serve them through

coordinated mobile payments and shop plugins, and

ensured growth continued unabated. As a result, from

February to November 2015, Peach Payments saw growth

of approximately 400%.

This success has given Peach Payments the resources

to expand into Namibia and Mauritius; expansion into

Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana will soon follow. Although just

the beginning of the company’s long-term strategies, Peach

Payment’s current and upcoming market expansion reaches

some of Africa’s most lucrative markets. With a sound

business plan and the ACI’s open payments gateway as its

underpinning payments technology, Peach Payments’ future

is very bright.

Transaction volume (% change from Feb. 2015)

ACI Worldwide is a global leader in mission-critical, real-time

payments software. Our proven, secure and scalable software

solutions enable leading corporations, fintechs and financial

disruptors to process and manage digital payments, power

omni-commerce payments, present and process bill payments,

and manage fraud and risk. We combine our global footprint with

a local presence to drive the real-time digital transformation of

payments and commerce.

LEARN MORE

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About Peach Payments

Peach Payments provides payment solutions to online and

mobile businesses enabling them to easily accept payments

from consumers across the globe and especially from those

in the emerging markets. Its speciﬁc focus is on Africa and

the BRIC countries where the local infrastructure requires a

unique and tailored approach to online payments.

Peach Payments oer merchants a state-of-the-art

payments solution with the most comprehensive product

suite which enables them to accept payments across all

their channels including their website, mobile site and

their mobile apps (iOS, Android etc.). The company also

gives merchants access to all relevant payment methods

including credit/debit cards, bank transfers, mobile wallets,

electronic wallets and mobile operator billing to help

them succeed in the emerging markets. Peach Payments

currently oers payment solutions in Europe and South

Africa directly and in Brazil and Turkey through partners.

Statistica, “Africa and Asia Are Embracing Mobile Payments,” http://www.statista.com/

chart/332/mobile-payment-users/