Nwanguma: We Have Come to Make Payment Simpler and More Secure

Juliet Nwanguma, Country Manager of PayU, a Naspers Group Company and a leading global payment service provider believes Nigerians deserve better value as they carry out the age long act of making payment for good and services. 
Having worked for 15 years with banks and other financial institutions,  developing and implementing the most innovative e-business and e-commerce solutions in the country, the London School of Economics (LSE)-trained expert says PayU is the leader of the next generation of the industry because it is able to make sophisticated transactions extremely secured and amazingly simple. She spoke to Crusoe Osagie 
Why Nigeria for the PayU group?
Well, it’s because of the trends shaping the Nigeria payment system. There’s been increased regulatory oversight and progressive support of cashless economy in Nigeria as well as financial inclusion. And this has had an impact on increased awareness of electronic payment to consumers by stakeholders and also increased channels of transactions.
Additionally, other factors such as the population size and the massive youthful of about 60%, the number of internet and mobile subscribers which has led to increased penetration of 35%, and the size and growth of ecommerce have contributed to an exciting play of payments in Nigeria.
For us, all these open up opportunities for innovation and growth for PayU.
There are a lot of payment service providers in Nigeria, what unique value proposition is PayU offering in the market?
Indeed, there are a lot of payment service providers that has made the payment landscape sophisticated, unique and quite interesting in terms of solution offerings. Our value proposition is definitely our technology, our people and the dynamic and lean nature of PayU.
Through our technology we provide superior product offering and innovative solutions running on robust and scalable infrastructure with high availability. Our on boarding and enrolment process is simple according to the size and type of merchant. We provide simple payment solutions to enable merchants to sell and receive payments immediately with or without a website. We also provide a reporting interface to enable merchants handle their transactions from payments to refunds and even voiding transactions. Our objective is to make payments simple, secure and accessible to all.
With our people, we have a strong team whose expertise in payment processing works with businesses to develop a clear payment strategy allowing them to focus on their core business.
Another important aspect is the dynamic and lean nature of our company which means that we are easily accessible. Customers can talk to us and get in touch with our executives easily and this give us an edge over competition. As a result, we are able to provide expert support to our customers at any time.
What is the business of PayU?
First, PayU Payments Nigeria Limited with trading name as “PayU” is a recently established business in Nigeria and fully approved by the CBN. It forms part of the leading and trusted PayU group of companies (PayU Group) owned by Naspers. Globally, the PayU Group provides payment processing and related services to merchants and consumers. A key objective of the group is to make online payments simple, secure and accessible to all.
PayU Nigeria’s objective is to offer simple and secure online payment solutions to Nigerian merchants and consumers. This objective is in response to the growing market need and regulatory initiatives to go cashless and digitise the economy, whilst at the same time ensuring financial inclusion for all.
How does PayU fit in to the Nigerian market? How can it help merchants grow in revenue compared to other payment service providers?
PayU’s local approach to providing payment services gives us a deep dive into the challenges of payments in various sectors and therefore enables us to develop and offer superior and innovative solutions. For example, in ecommerce, payments are still largely based on cash/pay on delivery despite the number of cards in circulation and high usage at the ATMs.
At PayU, we take interest into these challenges which in turn are opportunities for us to deep dive into these problems, develop, and provide solutions that solve these problems.
Another example is our PayU Receive solution that allows merchants to receive payment securely from its customers without having a website. We also offer tokenisation and recurring payment solution which enables merchants to automatically collect payments from their customers on due dates.
These solutions reduce merchants’ cost of doing business thereby maximising revenue.
Essentially, we provide various innovative solutions to enable merchants receive payments from many channels whether online, mobile or offline.
Again, our objective is to make payment simple, secure and accessible to all. By accessibility, we mean providing various suite of solutions that enables merchants sell and receive payments.
How do you deal with payments and security and where does liability sit in online payments?
We provide 3D Secure and two-factor authentication on card transactions for online payment which protects the customer from unauthorised transactions. Our online platform is PCI-DSS level 1 certified ensuring the protection, confidentiality and integrity of cardholders’ data. We further provide ACI Red fraud management service to further protect our merchants from fraudulent transactions.
When merchants are enabled to accept 3D secure or two factor authentication, liability shifts to the card holders. Merchants have a liability shift if they accept non-3D secure or two factor authentication.
It is worthy to note thatthere’s a regulation on 2 –factor authentication for online transactions which secures both the merchant and the consumer in online payment processing.
How do SMEs in particular fit into the PayU business with the huge number of SMEs in Nigerian and their payment processing?
We have different types of services to meet the needs of small and medium businesses. We have our PayU Easy service that allows small merchants and start-ups to start accepting payments easily with minimum documentation removing the barriers to entry. Our PayU Receive solution allows merchant to receive payments with or without a website. We have pre-integrated payment plugins to popular shopping carts to enable merchants to start selling without the need of tedious integration work.
So we have a suite of payment solutions that fits the SMEs. However, we are dynamic in our approach and would like to have a deep dive with the SMEs to further understand their challenges in their entire business chain to help them grow revenue.

Related Articles