Q&A with Floris de Kort:Digital Payments and Future Trends
Following on from an interview with Ron Kalifa, the new
CEO of payment processing provider WorldPay, EPI
sits down with another of its new appointments. Floris De Kort,
managing director of e-commerce at WorldPay, who tells Louise
Naughton what he has planned for the business and why the
management team will only have themselves to blame if things go
wrong.
Q: What encouraged you to take up your position as head of
e-commerce at WorldPay?
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A: There are a wide variety
of reasons, one of the most important being that I really like the
plan and the vision that the private equity owners Advent
International and Bain Capital and CEO Ron Kalifa have for
WorldPay.
I agreed to take the job before the sale of
the company to Advent and Bain was finalised and had
the sale not gone through, resulting in The Royal Bank of
Scotland (RBS) retaining ownership of WorldPay, I would not be
here today.
On a personal level I had the opportunity of a
promotion from being a CCO at Global Collect to now overseeing the
e-commerce business as a whole including operations and IT.
Q: Why was the purchase of WorldPay by
Advent and Bain so important to your decision?
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By GlobalDataA: Working within an
e-commerce environment means that you have to compete with
companies such as CyberSource or PaymentTech for the business of
Amazon or Expedia for example. These types of merchants move fast,
are ambitious and use the latest technology. You need to keep up
with their speed and this is easier to do under certain
ownership.
A private equity owner is looking for growth,
investment and a five-year vision. They want to hear what employees
plan to do to drive the business to make sure this vision is
realised. Those are discussions that have not taken place within
WorldPay in the last 3-5 years.
Q: What is the short-term strategy for
WorldPay’s e-commerce unit and its long-term vision?
A: The short-term plans
centre around getting the e-commerce organisation together as a lot
of people from across WorldPay have come together to form this new
business unit.
Our long-term objective is pretty
straight-forward. We want to be the preferred supplier of any
merchant that offers Customer Not Present (CNP) transactions
and believe there are five key components of that service where we
need to excel to become a major player. We need to have a gateway,
a global acquiring solution, a global alternative payment solution,
fraud prevention and FX conversion services.
By focusing on these five key components and
delivering them through a single connection we really hope that
WorldPay can become a ‘one-stop shop’ for the market. Our ambition
is to become so much more than just cards.
We are sitting on a really good fraud
prevention product called ‘RiskGuardian’ that we haven’t sold yet
as nobody has been marketing it. I am very pleased that we have the
product and it will be integral to our go-forward strategy to
position WorldPay as a leader in the fraud prevention market.
We tested ‘RiskGuardian’ during my first few
weeks in the job and while it is ahead of a number of our
competitors products in terms of product, functionality,
customisation and reporting, it is not quite up to par with what I
consider to be the market leader, Accertify. We plan to get
there by May/June.
Q: Why is it so important for
WorldPay to become a ‘one-stop shop’?
A: Cards are by far the most
important aspect of WorldPay’s business, but in order for it to
sustain and grow; you need to find areas where you can distinguish
the company from the rest.
If you don’t separate your company from the
rest, it becomes a pennies game.
We are coming from behind. I don’t mean that
negatively, it’s just a matter of fact. Unfortunately, WorldPay has
a tradition of growing but growing slower than the market, which
means that it has been losing market share. At a minimum you want
to be growing as fast as the market and then we can think about how
we get ahead. This is a nice challenge to have, as WorldPay is
currently a profitable business. If we were not growing fast enough
and losing money, that would be a completely different story.
Q: What trends do you see emerging in
e-commerce market that WorldPay could capitalise on?
A: A market I am very
interested in looking at, much more so than we have done in the
past, is the downloadable software market. More traditional
software providers are now at least thinking about moving their
software solutions online. It will be very interesting to see
whether people will still be buying Microsoft Office for example,
in a box in-store in the next few years or whether it will be
available as a download.
It is my gut feeling that more software sales
will move online and there is very interesting growth potential. We
can see it happening around the big players and we are keeping an
eye on when it starts to mature to the next level. This will not be
an overnight process but I’m sure the larger players in the
software market are now investing resources to find out how
this can be achieved.
Q: What are the biggest challenges for
the e-commerce team?
A: I think the biggest
challenges are behind us – that being the separation from Royal
Bank of Scotland (RBS). It is not easy to separate from a large
organisation and become a stand-alone business without certain
things falling over – ranging from technology to simple things such
as making sure all the employees receive a pay-slip.
Going forward, the biggest challenge is
executing on the strategy and getting the right structure and
people in place. We have a lot of recruiting and training to do.
The investment that we have planned is exciting and will be fun to
do but not necessarily easy and will not bring in growth figures
straight-away.
If we can’t make this work then we really only
have ourselves to blame. We are starting with a healthy, solid
and stable company with the right owners and back-up behind it. It
is up to Ron Kalifa and his team to turn WorldPay into a success
and it can absolutely be done, especially in the e-commerce
arena.
