The challenge

We worked with an online wine retailer with local operations in UK, US and Australia. The business operates on a subscription basis with discounted prices and special wine categories only available to members. With a focus on customer acquisition led growth, internal capabilities around payment management had taken a back seat. Payment management was fragmented and buried across local finance, technology and customer success teams. The client had previously signed a single payment provider to provide acceptance in all 3 markets, but it too was extremely fragmented and slow and could not fulfil the promises it made to provide a single global platform. This created a variety of problems for the client which ultimately impacted on the customer experience and the ability of the business to grow. This impact on growth triggered a strategic review of payments

How EDC helped

EDC assisted the client in 3 ways. First, we applied our 360⁰ payments diagnostic to efficiently perform a short yet in-depth assessment of the clients core business. This included a comprehensive analysis of the total cost of payment acceptance for the business across all 3 operations in USA, UK and Australia. Full transparency was provided to the client based on data requested directly from the clients single global acquirer. The assessment included internal costs, as well as transaction fees. We conducted one on eon interviews with all internal stakeholders across the business that touched payments in some shape or form. From IT, customer success, product development, sales, through to legal, finance and Country heads. We also facilitated group strategy sessions with individual teams as well as the client’s executive management team.

Second, we took all the data and insights away to define a clear set of strategic goals and developed a fresh payment strategy.

The strategy defined key business requirements and a wish list of expectations from external payment partners and proceeded to select a new payment provider that could best meet these needs via a short RFP process.

Finally, we identified specific areas where payment capabilities needed improving to successfully implement and execute the strategy.

This included re-organising and repositioning the payments to be more customer centric. We developed a focused cross functional payments team design with responsibility embedded within existing teams across the business and geographies including product, customer success, marketing, finance, legal and IT.

Our clients correctly identified that excelling at payments management was critical to their success and continued growth. Our support, advice and assistance enabled them to put in place a modern payments capability that has released and accelerated sustainable profitable growth.

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