MOVO: Mobility from Madrid

Since starting out from a small garage in Madrid’sProsperidaddistrict in April 2018, MOVO has grown fast. And now they’re off the ground, scalability is on their mind. 

As the sharing economy goes from strength to strength in Spain, we’re working with MOVO to ensure their growth is smooth, and without teething problems. We spoke to their founder, Alvaro Pellejero, about starting a business within a booming industry: mobility.

MOVOis an electric scooter sharing service with a presence in Madrid and some of Latin America’s busiest cities; Santiago, Lima, Bogotá and Mexico City. The company’s mission is to offer beautifully designed, energy efficient sharing scooters that get gas guzzling mopeds and cars off the streets.

Like most modern mobility companies, MOVO’s product is built around an easy to use app. Users can register, reserve and make payments for scooters in a few clicks. When starting up, their payment needs were clear:

"Since this is a very competitive market, one failure in the service can cause the user to go with one of our competitors", explains Pellejero."We needed a unified payment platform that could be integrated easily with our app and would provide secure management of our customers' payments".

When we started working with MOVO, they came to us with three main goals: speed, user experience and scalability.

Since its launch in April 2018, MOVO has grown by 60% month-on-month, so getting the integration right, fast, was a major priority. 

The aim of our account management team when helping a fast growing start up like MOVO is to develop a partnership rather than a client/merchant dynamic. Being close to the project meant that we could help make MOVO's implementation smooth and fast, offering practical advice and guidance. We've been on hand from the post-sales stage through to the present. Now we're helping them expand into new markets.

"The Adyen team helped us so we didn't have to dedicate any additional resources in correctly implementing the payment platform".

User experience is key to the success of any service involving in-app payments. The MOVO team wanted to make sure that this aspect was also a priority during the implementation process.

"To use our services, the user has to enter their card details in the app. This process can be complex with some mobility companies. It can take a while to verify the user and often a small amount is charged to their account. We didn't want our customers to have to go through that.''

Thanks to our Account Updater tool, previously stored card holder information is kept up to date without having to re-enter payment information when a customer's card expires. A card-on-file business like MOVO can simply make a payment request, then Adyen requests and swaps account updates from Visa and Mastercard in the authorization stage before sending the information to the issuing bank.

Pellejero adds:"Tokenization will be essential to our business. If the user's card expires or gets lost and replaced by a new one, the system will recognize it."

Related:A new Account Updater — for buying in real time

The sharing economy is expanding in new markets all the time and mobility is a hot topic. In busy Latin American cities, mobility companies are booming, with shared cars, bikes and scooters seen as a solution to traffic congestion and pollution.

Being a solution to pollution is one that motivates companies like MOVO to grow into certain regions, but expanding a business internationally is not easy. When it comes to managing payment methods, each country has its own requirements, as well as approval and verification processes. That's why using the expertise of our account management, our risk tools such asRevenueProtectand our knowledge of local payment methods can help take MOVO into new territory.

Pellejero concludes: "The ability to expand our service in new markets without having to face extra development or implementation costs around our payments setup has been essential to our business."