Innovative Card Issuers in Asia and Europe: Can Your Platform Outrun Theirs?

Celent’s answer is that “financial institutions must deliver exceptional experiences to their customers, in real-time, and remotely”. It concerns the entire customer experience flow — from onboarding and transaction processing to accounting, personalized offers, and data exchange via APIs.

In terms of technology, this experience requires a 24/7 fully online payment software platform. With a unified front and back office, data processing will encounter no delays. The processing system can analyze all data — both its own and those from integrated systems — and immediately apply all processing rules, so each transaction can be completed according to the optimal scenario. Users can see their data updated instantly, including account balances, transactions, available offers, and service terms.

Our Way4 platform is the only one in the market with online back and front office, real-time front-to-back reconciliation, and online accounting. This gives our clients significant competitive advantages in the customer experience. This experience concerns both retailers and consumers. For both, it is important that access to the account balance data, loan origination, and purchase completion take only a few seconds – which Way4 makes possible.

The truly online payment experience was a priority for LOTTE Finance, one of the leading credit card companies in South Korea, when they were rolling out their BNPL products in 2021 to enter a new market. Now they are using Way4 for the entire BNPL solution logic, including instalment management, end-to-end transaction processing, interest calculation, and real-time integration with third-party systems for digital identity, scoring, and contract processing.

The fully online architecture also gives a competitive advantage by saving time and cost. The digital lender or bank doesn’t need a separate system to store up-to-date balances or historic data, or initiate frequent front-to-back reconciliations. The data management efficiency was one of the major drivers for Tsesnabank (later rebranded to Jusan Bank) in Central Asia to migrate from BPC’s SmartVista platform to Way4. 

When a payment offering’s market entry is a widely adopted success, end users and data volumes increase. At this point the system must be able to withstand the increased transactional load without compromising the user experience. Scalability of proposition is an important criterion for evaluating a neobank or fintech and its growth prospects, as confirmed by Aite analysts.

SmartPay, an OpenWay client and a financial inclusion disruptor in Vietnam, boasts record volume growth. After launching their mobile wallet in 2019, they onboarded a million active users in the first year, then a mere two years later grew to 40 million consumers and 700,000 merchants. User account balances, transaction logic, payment processing, instant reconciliation and settlement between users are supported in real time by the same Way4 platform on which they launched the project and which they manage themselves.

But not everyone has had the luck of choosing the optimal infrastructure for their business model and growth right from the start, like SmartPay. We have observed that the lack of real-time straight-through processing and flexibility are typical pain points of actively growing fintechs that have outsourced payment functionality. During a growth spurt, this drawback is especially felt as per-transaction pricing becomes unprofitable. This is when fintechs begin migrating to payment platforms that they can manage themselves.

Sprint athlete Allyson Felix, the seven-time Olympic champion, once found herself in a similar, limiting situation. When she started to plan maternity leave, she asked her sponsor, Nike, for special contract terms that would take into account her impact on her capabilities, training schedule, and so forth. The sponsor was not ready to make concessions, and the athlete stopped cooperating with them. Instead, she partnered with experienced footwear designers willing to take into account Felix’s unique racing needs, foot parameters, and overall vision of how athletic apparel should feel like. As a result, she ran the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo in custom-tailored sneakers, set her next record and became the most decorated female track and field athlete in Olympic history. She boasted to UBS journalists, “And I was like, ‘I did this in my own shoes.’”

Many issuers use Way4 to roll out prepaid cards, but the product positioning may be dramatically different for each case.

National Bank of Oman has adapted prepaid cards to the requirements of their customer base. Their Badeel Travel prepaid cards come with fixed exchange rates, and the capacity to convert Omani Rial into nine of the most commonly-used global currencies; namely US dollar, euro, British pound, Swiss franc, Indian rupee, Thai baht, United Arab Emirates dirham, Saudi riyal, and Omani rial.

Banesco Panama, on the other hand, positions its prepaid cards as a social tool for the implementation of government programs for economic relief in the Caribbean region.

Enfuce, the innovative CaaS provider, recently won a government tender in Finland to deliver prepaid cards that will be used to disburse benefits and compensations to hundreds of thousands of Finnish citizens and those residing in Finland. Also, Enfuce and French social enterprise Welcome Place will pilot distribution of Visa-branded prepaid cards to refugees arriving in France.

Thanks to Level-3 data analytics, Way4 can analyze social card transactions in real time and decline them if restricted items are detected in the consumer’s basket, for example, alcohol purchases or gambling expenses. On the other hand, discounts will be applied to subsidized items like medicine or childcare products.

In the case of fleet industry cards, this functionality can be applied to create another set of payment rules: drivers can pay with their business expense cards only at selected gas stations and for predefined fuel types only, and not for purchases outside of their designated route.

In Vietnam, Mirae Asset Finance Company offers credit products as a digital-only experience – loan applications are made via smartphone. When customers want to use the approved loan to make a purchase, they scan the QR code in-store using the MAFC My Finance app, enter the transaction amount, and confirm the payment. Way4 manages customer and merchant information, sets up credit, creates instalment plans and calculates interest, and provides online transaction processing as well as accounting and merchant settlement.

In the same market, LOTTE Finance also offers Way4-powered BNPL products, where onboarding happens instantly during e-commerce checkouts.

Another OpenWay client in Vietnam, Timo, has entered the market as a cloud-based digital bank with a unique human-touch concept. Their onboarding routine is half digital, half human interaction-based. With just a couple of minutes on the digital app and 15 minutes at a Timo Hangout, the onboarding process can be completed securely and conveniently. Timo Hangouts look like trendy, minimalist cafes, for those who crave a light, moderate human touch while enjoying the privacy and convenience of the digital experience. For Timo customers the Hangouts can function as temporary workplaces or a meeting place, which increases the offering adoption.

As we already noted, for National Bank of Oman cardholders, multicurrency cards are a way to pay more profitably while traveling.

For cardholders of Halyk Bank in Central Asia, this functionality often works as a savings instrument. Since the rate of the Kazakh tenge fluctuates strongly and often, clients of this bank prefer to keep part of their savings in other currencies, such as euros, dollars, or yuan. Thanks to real-time processing in Way4, they can easily move their savings from one currency card account to another. The bank can also set up a rule: if the debit card balance in a certain currency stays above a certain threshold, the cardholder earns interest. It is a win-win for both the bank and its customer.

Enfuce has created My Carbon Action, a smart tool for calculating lifestyle carbon footprints from consumption. This not only helps consumers cut their CO2 emissions, but also increases their loyalty to their payment provider brand.

Enfuce will also power Science Card, which will enable customers to fund scientific projects of their choice at leading UK universities through their normal day-to-day payment activities.  

These and other ESG services can be bundled with any card product that Enfuce manages on Way4, including debit, credit and prepaid cards.

In Vietnam, SmartPay is attracting SMEs with a mobile wallet ecosystem that supports cost-saving QR-code payments and transfers.

In France, Enfuce and Memo Bank, the first truly independent bank to emerge in France in the last 50 years, are launching virtual and physical cards enabling SMEs to follow expenses directly from their bank account in real time.

When entering new markets, it is important to consider investments that are related to compliance and regulatory requirements. According to Celent, “compliance activities consume a considerable portion of available IT resources for banks.” Our clients save resources since Way4 already supports a large number of regional standards and protocols, for example: SEPA payment rails in Europe or Sharia-compliant loans in MENA.

By proactively gathering insights from our clients in different regions, we are able to develop the most innovative roadmap and meet planned milestones. It explains, for example, how Way4 came to be a pioneer among white label digital wallet software. It also helps Way4 and OpenWay gain gold medals in industry ratings, such as Aite Matrix: Payment Processing Platforms and Ovum Decision Matrix.

Our clients have leveraged our innovative roadmap to be the first to cross many finish lines and collect trophies themselves. Just a few examples:

• In 2018 National Bank of Greece was awarded for the Best Card Management System Project at the Bite Awards

• In 2019 Enfuce and OpenWay jointly won a PayTech Award as the Best Payments Solution for Payment Systems in the Cloud

• In 2020 Nets and OpenWay won a Paytech award as the Best Consumer Payments Initiative, for their Universal Digital Lending Platform, and this happenned a few years before BNPL became a sought-after and trendy payment option in many regions

• In 2022 Timo won the Vietnam Technology Excellence Award for Payments Software by delivering a smart, savvy customer lifestyle experience with a human touch

• In 2022 Enfuce won the Best Corporate Cards Initiative at the PayTech Awards

Our clients can also apply for a service that we call the “core team”. Designated OpenWay engineers can work closely with the client team, on-site and remotely for the entire project duration, to enable and speed up knowledge transfer and the overall efficiency in delivery. Our joint team can plan agile sprints together and detect various delivery obstacles and find solutions in a timely way.