A new chapter for ProcessOut

Today’s a big day. Our new website and visual identity are going live for the first time which is an important moment in our journey. We think this rebrand perfectly embodies our bold ambition as a business, while reflecting how we’ve matured on our mission to create value for our customers. All driven by our 3 key pillars: Simplicity, Flexibility and Performance.

‍A glance in the rearview mirror

We began ProcessOut based on the intuition that something important was missing in the world of payments: while everyone was considering accepting payment as a commodity, the reality was different, and we could see global merchants battling with the technology, regulation or performance. Too often payment was a bottleneck more than an enabler. 

So for the next 5 years we arrived at the office every morning to answer two key questions: how could we help merchants take control of their payments? And how could we improve technical – as well as financial – performance?

Step-by-step, we built and scaled two products: Smart Routing and Telescope (a monitoring solution). Along the way we met some incredible people – and companies – that believed in what we were doing and helped turn our vision into a reality. The list is long and I hope every person who was part of this journey as an employee, a customer or a partner knows how grateful we are. With their support we went from zero to millions of transactions a week.

Optimum performance: the final piece of the puzzle

Building these products shaped who we are today because it’s where our ambitions of Simplicity, Flexibility and Performance were put to the test. During this process we learned something crucial that would shape the future of ProcessOut: we were in full control of delivering state-of-the-art simplicity and flexibility to our customers, but came to realize that achieving maximum performance meant combining good benchmarking insights with the ability to optimize ISO messages. 

The ISO message is created and sent by the Acquirer to the Issuer via the Schemes. It contains dozens of fields with all the parameters of a transaction. A simple change in one of those fields can have an impact on the acceptance or rejection of a transaction.

So, with the foundations of simplicity and flexibility in place, we set out to build connections with issuers, acquirers and schemes to access the ultimate performance target: ISO message optimization. Over time we built up our relationships in France with all the major banks and got them interested in what we were doing. We also had some fascinating discussions with acquirers all around the world to optimize for our common customers – and one that really stood out was our conversation with Checkout.com.

Partnering with Checkout.com

In 2020 we began our partnership with Checkout.com because we felt that they truly shared our passion to improve payment performance. We also wanted access to more opportunities to optimize ISO messages (for payment fans out there, the fact that Checkout.com was also developing their own issuing platform was a huge plus because being on both sides of the transaction gives you so many insights when you’re AB testing).

If the rationale of the partnership was obvious, the execution was key to getting it right. Ensuring  the right balance of collaboration between all key players in the ecosystem and maintaining their trust was essential. Checkout.com made this possible in three ways: their absolute obsession with performance, their ambition to build an open ecosystem and their focus on enterprise merchants (which are, by nature, leveraging multiple acquirers).

Every chapter of a company’s evolution comes with new challenges. And there’s no doubt that convincing our customers and partners that we could elevate performance while maintaining our independence was a big one. But we made it work – and the voices of our customers and partners are testament to that:

Szymon Zeslawski, Senior Director Fintech & Risk at Glovo

“We have been working with ProcessOut connected to several acquirers since 2018. We’ve come a long way - we know ProcessOut both as an ambitious and passionate startup, as well as a much more mature and serious company after the acquisition by Checkout.com. 

What’s important for us is that they have always stayed fully agnostic, flexible and innovative - now even more so, with better backing and structure. It allows us to keep increasing the impact and driving value for Glovo.”

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Bénédicte Brie, Head of Partnerships Global Merchants at Payplug

“Payplug has partnered with ProcessOut since 2018! We are both driven by our ambition to raise the bar of payments and share the same level of passion and commitment to bring the best performance and service to our common merchants and we have seen no difference before and after the acquisition of ProcessOut by Checkout.com and witness ProcessOut agnosticity on a daily basis.

ProcessOut’s team strives to identify merchants’ specificities and objectives and match them with the ideal local partners to maximise their success. If anything, our market share with ProcessOut has increased since 2020 and our partnership is stronger than ever.”

New look, same vision, more value

We’re now routing more transactions in a day than we were doing in a month 3 years ago. We’ve added dozens of connections all around the world. We’ve built best-in-class foundations to manage network tokens, authentication and APMs. And we’ve totally reshaped the way we manage support to deliver the best experience for our merchants. To put it simply, our platform has never been stronger!

So now the question is what’s next? Our new visual identity, website and dashboard (watch this space) are just the start, albeit a bold one. Our next objective is to bring Simplicity, Flexibility and Performance to another level with upgraded features, stronger algorithms, more connections, a wider geographical coverage and brand-new products to provide more value to the ecosystem. 

For us everything rests on those three pillars because that’s where the magic happens. It’s how we use payments to help our customers deliver their company’s strategy. And whether that's about velocity of expansion, growth, cost optimization or UX improvements, ultimately it all comes down to one thing: companies in full control of the way they collect money are in a better position to win or consolidate market share than those that aren’t. We’re here to make that happen.

‍Encore et toujours…‍

Simplicity, Flexibility and Performance. Those three simple words are key to transforming payments into an enabler. For us it’s always been this way – and always will be. On we go!