ESW: Accelerating global expansion

The world isn’t slowing down. In fact, if the past 18 months have taught us anything, it’s that changes are only accelerating. ESW understands that speed is a critical success factor for brands, which is why it promises to help them scale fast. So fast in fact that it believes companies should be able to establish direct consumer relationships across 200 markets in as little as six weeks. Delivering on this promise has helped make ESW the world's largest provider of direct-to-consumer cross-border ecommerce solutions. And it counts some of the world's biggest brands amoungst its clients.

To learn more about how ESW helps power growth for so many well-known brands, we sat down with Vice President of Payments, Jason Macklin.

To ESW, international expansion is based on creating domestic-equivalent experiences across the entire ecommerce value chain from customer acquisition, through to delivery and returns, and payments.

“First of all, it’s important the shopper understands what they’ll be paying for when they’re checking out,” said Jason. “The next step is to ensure the experience is localised in terms of language, currency, and of course payment methods. Whether it’s international cards, domestic cards, mobile wallets, cash on delivery, or over-the-counter, it’s crucial to offer the right payment choices.”

But plugging in all these local payment methods separately can quickly become complicated, especially when you extrapolate that for every market. So, for ESW, it’s a huge benefit to be able to access them all in one place with Adyen, as Jason explained:

“We have access to hundreds of payment methods via a single API which is really valuable to us since it lets our customers easily offer the payment methods their shoppers want.”

Another important localisation aspect is currency. “Our brand partners are typically headquartered in North America, the UK, France, and Italy but they take payments from up to 200 markets,” said Jason. “To help us manage the currency conversion on their behalf we partner with Adyen. It’s been a huge help particularly where currencies are more restricted.”

ESW makes global expansion easier for brands by letting them consolidate their operations with just one partner. To do this, it has to be a local expert in every market on its customers' road-maps and Adyen is a helpful support.

“Adyen has a wealth of global insights that we tap into,” said Jason. “If we're focsed on growing a client in a specific market we can leverage Adyen’s experience and quickly deliver an optimised payment solution.”

With cards still the world’s leading payment method, card acquiring is an important aspect for any business trading internationally. ESW makes use ofAdyen’s global acquiring networkto ensure it delivers the best authorisation rates to its customers, as Jason explained:

“To help one of our large brands, we made use of Adyen’s local acquiring solution in Singapore. As a result, we saw a 3% uplift in payment success rates, which, in the ecommerce buisness, is enormously beneficial.”

Being a growth partner for the world’s leading brands, ESW must ensure its tech stack is robust, scalable, and streamlined. Which is one of the reasons it chose to work with Adyen.

“We liked the fact that Adyen offers a modern platform with a single API integration and standardised reconciliation,” explained Jason. “Adyen has also been able to strip out a lot of the complexity still presented by more traditional payments service providers.”

ESW is in the business of making things simple for its clients, so it needs to keep things simple on its end too. “We really value Adyen’s ease of integration and the fact we have a single point for reconciliation and reporting,” said Jason. He also values the fact Adyen is on-hand when needed: “Adyen is super responsive. There isn’t a question we've asked our account manager that he hasn't been able to answer within hours.”

Next, ESW plans to extend its domestic acquiring capabilities to keep up with growing demand. “We want to provide the best outcomes for our brands,” said Jason. “And our partnership with Adyen for global acquiring will be key. As we continue grow, we’ll be working closely with our account manager to make sure we consume everything we can from Adyen.”