With consensus building quickly toward 100% contactless payments as the way forward, issues surrounding how payments networks issue their fee structures around point-of-sale modernization, and card-less payments in particular, are surfacing.
The ability to integrate a customer’s preferred payment method while minimizing the hassle involved for the merchant and simultaneously reducing fees is powerful in this reality. Offering all this and more is London-based payments infrastructure provider PPRO.
Founded in 2006 in Germany by Philip Nieland and Tobias Schreyer, PPRO is the now London-based company providing payments infrastructure with a focus on cross-border payments. Today, it powers international growth for payment service providers and platforms that include Citi, Elavon, Mastercard Payment Gateway Services, Mollie, PayPal, and Worldpay. Its point of difference lies in the ability to allow shoppers to elect “to pay with their preferred payment method,” which strikes an exact nerve exposed by a COVID shaped world of online transacting consumers. With eCommerce booming more than ever, the ability to provide cross-border payments with preferred payment at a reasonable fee is one set to boom, and PPRO’s local payments infrastructure has resultantly faced the demand with rapid growth.
Enabling this growth will be the company’s latest investment round, resulting in an injection of $180 million that raises the company to unicorn status at a valuation above $1 billion. The investment comes only six months after the fintech raised $50 million from Sprints Capital, Citi Ventures, and HPE Growth. New investors Eurazeo Growth, Sprints Capital, and Wellington Management joined this latest round.
In a press release, PPRO representatives said, “The company doubled its year-on-year transaction volumes in the fourth quarter of 2020, expanded its global team by 60% in the last 12 months, and developed new strategic partnerships with local payment methods in high-growth markets like Indonesia and Singapore.” The company has offered growth to its roster of retail clients despite the limitations posed by the pandemic. Speaking on this, Simon Black, CEO of PPRO said, “By giving business the ability to offer payment choice, we’ve helped give people around the world better access to goods and services that improve their lives.”
By offering expert services help to customers, as well as industry best conversion rates in markets around the world, PPRO is proving that its payments infrastructure technology is the way of the future.
