Specialist
Former SVP at Swarovski AG
Agenda
- Merchant decision-making criteria in selecting e-commerce payments providers, highlighting details of RFP (request for proposal) process
- Adyen’s (AMS: ADYEN) continued competitiveness in e-commerce, how rival merchant acquirers are reacting and ease of switching away from Adyen
- Adyen’s unified commerce offering assessment – strengths and weaknesses over rival omnichannel offerings and how it aligns with merchant demands
Questions
1.
How should a merchant assess omnichannel? How does it actually work? What do you need a payment provider to offer to deploy omnichannel effectively?
2.
What does omnichannel mean to you as a merchant? Almost all PSPs [payment service providers] seem to focus on the data and how omnichannel enables their merchants to unify that data and capture that customer journey. Whether they’re paying online, in-store or click and collect, you can unify that data. What does all this actually mean in principle? Can you deploy true omnichannel if you have many different merchant acquirers or PSPs, or for true omnichannel do you need to use just one merchant acquirer with which you consolidate almost all of your volume to gain that single view of the customer and its data? How can omnichannel work in practice?
3.
You talked about tokenisation. Do you think that for true omnichannel and capturing customer data, most volumes need to go through one provider? Some PSPs talk about token sharing. Why can’t you just use multiple merchant acquirers and do this token sharing where the merchant uses BI tools to capture all these different tokens and gets that unified view of customers?
4.
Clearly you’ve assessed Adyen’s unified commerce offering. Who else have you considered who is equivalent to an omnichannel offering?
5.
Worldline now references a unified commerce offering that it calls One Commerce. Players such as Adyen seem to argue that legacy players can’t truly offer omnichannel because they’re made up of many different acquisitions and back-ends and the data integration just isn’t there relative to a unified platform such as Adyen. Is that true? What’s your experience of a newer platform such as Adyen vs Worldline or WorldPay? What are the benefits of a company such as Adyen?
6.
What was the scope of your RFP [request for proposal] process? Was it Europe-focused or a global roll out?
7.
When comparing providers during your RFP you alluded to Worldline being somewhat clunky. What was your actual experience? How could you tell that Adyen was more streamlined? What were the components of this RFP that led you to believe that Adyen was better vs why the legacy providers weren’t at Adyen’s level?
8.
What are your thoughts on Adyen’s flexibility and whether you encountered such issues? In a recent Interview [see Adyen – Product Offering & Competitiveness in Omnichannel Payments – 17 November 2021] with another merchant, they complained that they found Adyen very inflexible. They said that if you work with Adyen you have to take everything bundled in, including the payment gateway and its acquiring. They also complained that Adyen’s tokens aren’t interoperable with other PSPs in the way that Worldline’s are.
9.
Do you think tokenisation is a capability that merchants would want to build themselves if there were that kind of inflexibility with Adyen? Could you do that as a merchant before integrating with different service providers, or is this Adyen’s competency and you just leave it to the company?
10.
Did you have the same issues with WorldPay as you did with Worldline around being slightly more antiquated than Adyen?
11.
Why did you choose Adyen over Stripe? Was this all when you were considering omnichannel?
12.
Which categories were the most important to you during the RFP process? You mentioned usability, integration, stability, the reporting and analytics, customer support and so on.
13.
Could you outline the quality of Adyen’s POS offering vs that of Worldline or WorldPay? Clearly this is the newer part for Adyen and it seems Worldline or WorldPay might be better on that side.
14.
How does the pricing work for unified commerce at Adyen? Is it all just still done on a fee per transaction?
15.
How does Adyen’s fee per transaction for unified commerce compare to when you were just an e-commerce customer? Does the company increase the pricing or take rates, or decrease them because it knows it will get more volume?
16.
It seems there’s not much functionality difference around the unified commerce of each of the players we’ve discussed, but that it was your relationship with Adyen and its customer service that really swayed your decision. Is it fair to say that there’s not much difference in the cold hard metrics of a customer and a merchant’s experience of the data speed and quality, and the authorisation?
17.
What were you doing during the RFP process? Were you actually testing out and comparing each provider by making an online payment and then maybe going into a store and making a payment, or doing a click and collect to determine if the quality of data or the user experience was any different?
18.
Do you think you’d switch away from Adyen? The differences between it and providers such as Worldline and WorldPay don’t seem massive. You mentioned the gap might close as well. What would make you switch away from Adyen for unified commerce? Do you think that process would be easy?
19.
I heard that Adyen was quite expensive. Have you found that?
20.
Were legacy providers such as WorldPay and Worldline pricing much lower than Adyen when you considered them, or a similar rate?
21.
How important is price to you? If Worldline or WorldPay offered to price 10% below Adyen, would that be compelling, or would it have to be half the price?
22.
Is price key for you or would it become the key decision-making factor if the legacy players catch up to Adyen?
23.
Do you use Adyen as a one-stop-shop? You obviously use it for unified commerce but are you using functions such as customer insights, revenue optimisation and risk management? You said the company ranks lower but are you or were you using Adyen for these capabilities?
24.
During a previous Interview, a merchant claimed they wanted to split out Adyen between the gateway and actually using Adyen as the acquirer. Adyen is bundling the two and really pushing that. What about in countries where Adyen doesn’t have that local acquiring capability and has to partner with local providers? I don’t know whether third-party costs make it slightly more expensive, or maybe it’s not quite as robust as merchant acquirers who have local presence. How do you assess that relative to the ease of having one platform such as Adyen rather than having to integrate these different PSPs? Would you also find it compelling to want to split Adyen out as just using its gateway if you knew that another acquirer would be better in certain markets?
25.
When you rolled Adyen out did you have a back-up still, or was almost everything’s just going through Adyen?
26.
How has Adyen’s innovation evolved during your years of exposure to the company? There’s Checkout, Stripe and a few other payment providers on a singular platform. Have you noticed any changes that would lead you to believe that Adyen’s innovation isn’t as strong as it once was or it’s losing that start-up feel and could potentially become legacy technology?
27.
Is there anything that we haven’t covered today that you want to draw our attention to? Do you have any concluding statements?