Other areas CFOs and treasurers should pay attention to when looking to enhance their e-commerce flows include being able to coordinate different departments to ensure a smooth transaction flow for the online business.

“At the end of the day, of course, data and reconciliation are always a challenge for treasurers with various e-commerce shops globally. You have different data streams, you have Excel sheets – they all need to be put into one bucket and reconciled. That agility has to come into play, and even more so and even more critically, is the need for multi-disciplinary teams,” highlights von-Quadt. “Treasury teams today, for example, are stretched into a new world of technological solutions to accept payments for collections. At the same time, if you look at the sales team, that has now stretched into the e-commerce challenge away from classic channels. If you look at the technology teams of merchants, they have to get used to working with external technology providers.”

These include regional and country specialists who know what is happening on the ground not only from a regulatory point of view but also from a payments landscape point of view. The third type of partnership involves payment instrument specialists, the fintechs that focus on special instruments such as QR codes.

“The value proposition cannot just be only partnerships. It should be on creating an end-to-end solution that is very simple for our clients to connect to and invisibly enable a very specific wallet in a very specific country in APAC without the difficulties of reconciliation of the different payment methods. That’s the value proposition we bring to the table all across APAC,” he stresses.

“We take away the complexity out of entering Asia with all the different payment methods and regulations”
Oliver von-Quadt, Head of Merchant Solutions, APAC and the United States, Corporate Bank Deutsche Bank

Earlier this year, Deutsche Bank acquired a strategic stake in Australian paytech company DataMesh Group, which can help the bank enhance its services to merchant clients in the region.² With DataMesh’s Unity payment orchestration layer, the bank can operate seamlessly with individual acquirers in different countries, enabling merchants to accept payments through online methods within individually regulated currency zones.

“We take away connectivity to local PSPs (payment service providers), aggregators or even different ones in one country. That is done by us. Aside from that, onboarding a PSP even for a global merchant is a challenging issue. They have governance frameworks they need to adhere to. We take care of that. The client doesn’t need to worry about picking the right partner that ticks all the boxes that a properly governed global company has to take,” says von-Quadt. “We take away the complexity out of entering Asia with all the different payment methods and regulations. At the same time, we keep the local flavour by having those local partners. We keep the local flavour but take away the pain points the local flavour usually brings along.”

Demand for merchant solutions is expected to grow in Asia as the competitiveness of marketplaces is expected to intensify. “In general, corporates look at a marketplace mostly because they understand that owning the customer lifecycle is very relevant. There is no better way of doing that than having a marketplace and continuing to have a commercial relationship with the client post the initial sale. The challenges for marketplaces are defining the business model that is appropriate, and it needs to be attractive for sub-merchants to join the marketplace,” he says.

Going into the future, von-Quadt believes solutions around cross-border payments – whether it be involving global or local wallets – will be something that the industry needs to keep an eye on.

This article and the accompanying videos have been reproduced from The Asset and can be viewed in their original form here.