Winners of Worldline’s 3rd e-Payments Challenge show the importance of putting customer experience at the centre of digital payments solutions and innovations

The ongoing global health crisis is driving a huge adoption of mobile and online payments solutions and this trend will only continue, particularly during the forthcoming holiday shopping season. Customers are increasingly turning to digital channels to manage all aspects of their lives and new creative ways to forge stronger ties with them has become more critical than ever. 

In line with this new perspective, Worldline’s third e-Payments Challenge, which took place on 17 and 18 September 2020, was primarily dedicated to focus on the fundamentals: co-create a less cash society powered by data -and a seamless customer experience for sustainable future. All five Fintech finalists that were chosen to present their solutions for the Grand Prize applied advanced technology and design thinking to enable and foster a smooth user experience.

Marc-Henri Desportes, Deputy CEO of Worldline: “Our e-Payments Challenge is a key event for Worldline to ensure we keep our promise of pioneering the next smart innovation in digital payments. The event has attracted many Fintechs who are diverse in their thinking, ideas and solutions and eager to interact with Worldline customers and experts. Throughout the online event we saw many engaging and incredible pitches from participating Fintechs. It was fascinating to see how the five finalists competing for the Grand Prize shared similar obsessions for convenience, ease of use, ergonomics and a strong focus on the end user experience. I believe this is the strategy to take for businesses to stay resilient and accelerate their innovation.” 

Winner of the Grand Prize is ReceiptHero, a Finnish Fintech venture that won the challenge of “Linking Payments Efficiency with an Ecological Ambition”. They built a fully digitalized receipt platform to eliminate millions of printed receipts. Based on a full integration into electronic cash registers, POS and PSP partners and payment solutions, merchants can transmit their customers receipts into banking apps and accounting platforms in a digital format. The jury valued their strong ecosystem thinking, fully covering the complexity of the payment landscape, linking the payer, payee and various partners within the chain.

Chris Moore, COO of ReceiptHero: “We're thrilled to have participated in the e-Payments Challenge and the feeling of winning, not just the digital receipt track, but being crowned overall winner is fantastic. Our goal for the event was to get closer to Worldline and understand their thoughts and ideas for digital receipts. We have now come away knowing the right stakeholders and a shared goal of working together. Worldline as a PSP partner for ReceiptHero can unlock large markets for us and we are relishing taking our next steps together.”   

XcooBee was announced as the winner of the challenge presented by Accor “Re-invent Hospitality through Contactless Solutions”. Their solutions bring together multiple technologies and techniques from printed paper to mobile payments in order to improve customer experience and increase operational efficiencies for the hospitality industry. This includes room service terminals, quick checkout using QR codes, quick pay at restaurants and remote payment for self-checkout experience. 

Gilles de Richemond, CIO, Accor: “The impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality sector has been immense. Our key challenge now is to provide trust and reassurance to our customers and explain that hotels are a safe place. Brand trust is one of our main assets, we need to inspire continued confidence and create the right customer journey, develop new models for customers but also reinvest in ourselves. Worldline e-Payments Challenge has served this purpose exactly and we are always happy to support the journey working with fintechs. I would like to congratulate XcooBee for winning our challenge. Their solutions addressed our objectives and combined all the important touchpoints of customer check-in and check-out coupled with a smooth payment experience.”

Bilal Soylu, CEO & Founder of XcooBee: “The XcooBee team saw the Worldline e-Payment Challenge as an intense world-class boot camp and learning event, and it delivered on all fronts. It brought our team together to showcase what we have built to address a changing contactless customer experience expectation against the backdrop of COVID-19. We were able to receive critical and immediate feedback and see the incredible proposals being offered by all participants. We are grateful to have been selected to continue refining our solution with co-operative client engagement in one of the premier hotel groups in the world.”

A special award was given to A3BC, a French Fintech venture that provides biometric digital ID and data storage protocol, and their solution for the “Seamless Transport Experience” challenge, presented by the French Transportation Group Keolis:

Daniel Courcol, Customer Experience Director of Keolis: “We were impressed by the proposal of A3BC to use biometric and fingerprint technology to make customer transport journey experience frictionless and secure without a need for cash, card, wallet or phone. This is the direction we would like to go.”

Dinesh Ujoodah, CEO & Co-founder of A3BC: “The e-Payments Challenge is an amazing opportunity to meet with ‘real’ corporate customers, Worldline assets managers and business lines and test the market appetite for our solutions. This year’s e-Payments Challenge was a remote event and for A3BC if offered the chance to e-meet with really kind and smart people. I would strongly recommend this event to any start-up within the payment industry.”

Worldline’s e-Payments Challenge – it’s more than just a Hackathon

The e-Payments Challenge is Worldline’s proprietary co-creation programme and collaboration forum where Fintech start-ups and Worldline’s customers work together to create solutions for digital payment challenges of today. This year in particular has made the co-creation journey different as all keynote speeches, challenges presentation and the co-innovation work were all carried out within an online setting, making the e-Payments Challenge the first fully-digitised co-creation journey within the payments industry.

The e-Payments Challenge is an integrated part of Worldline’s co-innovation strategy and it is used as a platform to leverage Worldline’s massive scale and global reach to enable Fintechs use its industrial assets. Furthermore, the e-Payments Challenge emphasizes Worldline’s commitment to build partnerships that is both sustainable and provides mutual win for all parties involved – Worldline, customers and Fintechs. 

Guro Røed, VP Global Sales at LINK Mobility, confirmed that being part of the challenge really opens a new market together: “Combining the services of Worldline with our assets emphasizes that collaboration will bring true Conversational Commerce.” LINK Mobility’s ambition is to make the mobile interaction and modern conversation as easy and efficient as possible."

A total of 28 Fintechs and 14 customers participated in the e-Payments Challenge, making this event a much bigger one in scale compared to the previous years. Many of the Fintechs participated for the second and third time this year and some actually participated in more than one challenge. 

CPG, a German Fintech, won three challenges, among them some posed by one of Worldline’s biggest customers and returning corporate sponsors of the ePayments Challenge:  BNP Paribas as well as Šiaulių Bankas from the Baltics. 

Martin Berger, CEO of CPG Finance Systems: “Worldline’s e-Payments Challenge was a fantastic experience for us and we learned so much from the excellent business challenge cases to tackle and to solve issues with our existing payment products. It was also a great opportunity to explore payment solutions from Worldline and figure out integration possibilities. The e-Payments Challenge was an excellent event to network and build partnerships and we hope to participate again and hopefully meet in person next year.”

Andrius Kamarauskas, Director of Daily Banking Department at Šiaulių Bankas concluded: “Banks and large corporations can learn a lot from Fintechs’ spirit and unconventional approach. We appreciate the professionalism and a profound understanding of the industry of the Fintechs we met at the e-Payments Challenge. The interaction with Worldline experts and Worldline’s assets is taking the co-creation process to yet another level.”

The CSR award, another 2020 novelty, was received by Worldcoo through the virtual hands of Morgane Graffion from UN Global Compact, a voluntary initiative based on CEO commitments to implement universal sustainability principles and support the United Nations’ goals. 

Other category winners were Cashsentinel, CountrPOS, Copsonic, Greenly, and OneVisage. 

About Worldline

Worldline [Euronext: WLN] is the European leader in the payment and transactional services industry. With innovation at the core of its DNA, Worldline’s core offerings include pan-European and domestic Commercial Acquiring for physical or online businesses, secured payment transaction processing for banks and financial institutions, as well as transactional services in e-Ticketing and for local and central public agencies. Thanks to a presence in 30+ countries, Worldline is the payment partner of choice for merchants, banks, public transport operators, government agencies and industrial companies, delivering cutting-edge digital services. Worldline’s activities are organized around three axes: Merchant Services, Financial Services including equensWorldline and Mobility & e-Transactional Services. Worldline employs circa 12,000 people worldwide, with 2019 revenue of circa 2.4 billion euros. worldline.com

Detailed Information on the e-Payments Challenge: https://fairs.worldline.com/content/worldline-fairs/epayments-challenge-2020/home.html

Press contact

Susanne Stöger
+43 1 71701 6524
susanne.stoeger@worldline.com