Q&A: Bing Dai, Account Director NER, Merchant Services at Worldline
Worldline are the number one acquirer in Continental Europe, and the number one European payment processor, as well as a global leader in their field.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
My name is Bing Dai and I joined Worldline about a year ago as an account director. I manage the commercial relationships with some of our valued merchants in the grocery and quick service restaurants sector. Prior to joining Worldline, I had been working in the payments industry for about 12 years incorporating a broad range of commercial roles, including account management, marketing, and partnership management – working with industry-leading payment providers to drive new solutions that provide a better customer payment journey and add value to the partnerships.
And what, from your perspective, would you say is Worldline’s key USP?
We are the number one acquirer in Continental Europe, and the number one European payment processor, as well as a global leader in our field. Our USP is that we provide the full end-to-end payment solution to merchants of all sizes, across a broad range of verticals, including retail, hospitality, transportation, and even not-for-profit organisations. Being able to cover the whole payment value chain from hardware, software, payment processing and acquiring services means that merchants only need to work with one partner and Worldline can address all of their current and future payments needs, greatly reducing their management and operational costs.
How does Worldline’s approach differ from other market players?
Our platform is highly resilient, robust and reliable, and we have been working with many of the largest merchants across the globe. Significant investments have been made in our people, processes and infrastructure to make sure that our platforms deliver the highest performance for our customers. In an industry where the security standards and regulations, are constantly evolving, here at Worldline we ensure that, through our managed payment service offering, the solution deployed for customers is kept up to date with PCI acquirers and card schemes and thereby reduce the resources and costs associated in maintaining those payments and remaining compliant.
What advantage does engaging with Worldline’s platform specifically provide?
We help merchants scale up, while allowing them to sleep at night. So, as their businesses grow, by working with Worldline, merchants do not need to take unnecessary risks with their revenues and the customer experience. With new transaction volumes across our platforms, Worldline delivers reliable services at scale for some of the largest retail brands in the world.
What does implementation of a product or service look like and how do you measure success from that?
Ensuring costs, resources, and timelines are under control, is absolutely critical to the project implementation process. As experts in change management and project management, we work with our customers every step of the way to ensure a smooth implementation that will help drive their business transformation growth and profitability. We have a proven track record of delivering projects on time and on budget. We have also handled some of the most complex global retail rollouts. A key component of this approach is customer involvement from the very start.
Worldline works closely with our clients to obtain a deep understanding of their business, and we design an approach that best fits their technical and business requirements, allowing for a more efficient long-term partnership to be established.
How are retailers using your systems to gain that competitive advantage?
Retailers, depending on their own unique challenges, use our system and solutions in different ways to gain competitive advantage. For example, some of the grocery retailers use our omni-channel solution to offer new consumer experiences and journeys across multiple sales channels. They use our tokenisation services to gain consumer insights which then facilitate tailored marketing campaigns.
Are there any specific companies that you might partner with that enhance or assist with this system implementation?
We work with different industry leading organisations such as Apple and Google as part of our merchants’ loyalty programme. We also work in parallel with companies such as WeChat Pay and Alipay, to enable merchants to attract Chinese shoppers.
What do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities for retail for the rest of this year and beyond?
The Covid pandemic has changed many consumers’ way of shopping. From a retailer’s perspective, to compete with purely digital shopping experiences, businesses have been forced into merging the offline and online shopping experience. This framework involves the integration between the instore and e-commerce payment platforms. Customers would expect to learn all the information about the particular product online, even if they might decide to make the purchase at the physical store later.
In essence, shoppers are now expecting a consistent checkout experience, regardless of whether the transaction was processed online or offline. We are certainly seeing a shift from a multi-channel to a true omni-channel payment solution where retailers can ensure a seamless shopping experience across different platforms.
How is Worldline addressing the challenges that retailers are facing and turning them into successes for merchants?
I believe that retailers’ requirements and needs constantly evolve are primarily being driven by consumers shopping behaviour. Being at the forefront of the industry, we are already working with many merchants to address their omni-channel payments needs. Worldline recognises that innovation is a crucial enabler for a merchant’s growth, so each year we invest a significant amount of our annual revenues into research and development. We help Merchants shape their customer journey and embrace new technologies, to harness sales today and into the future.
What’s next for Worldline? What else is on the horizon?
We offer merchants through innovative solutions such as voice commerce, live shopping, chatbots, in-App payments. So we help keep merchants at the forefront of payment technology by offering an evolving customer experience, enhancing the sales process and generating sales. This will give an innovative edge to a merchant’s brand, increasing revenue by attracting new generations of shoppers for years to come.
