Zooz, Interview with CEO Oren Levy

rsz_oren_levy_new_headshotPayment tech company Zooz has just raised 24m in funding. In conjunction with the announcement, Oren Levy, CEO of the Israeli fintech company, answered our questions about the product, the funding and future plans.

FinSMEs: Hi Oren, let’s speak about Zooz…Which problem do you want to solve?
Oren: One of the major challenges merchants face today is change – consumer needs and expectations are constantly evolving, and merchants need to accommodate these requirements. While technologies are released and updated all the time to ease these pains, integrating these multiple technology providers can be a complex, time-consuming and costly process.
For example, as cross-border shopping becomes increasingly popular, customers want to pay in their local currency with regionally preferred payment methods, even when purchasing on a foreign website. To enable payment with a wide variety of global payment methods in different regions, the merchant has to individually integrate each payment device, credit card scheme and e-wallet, and ensure that every new technological system functions seamlessly alongside other integrations, such as tax calculators, fraud detectors and more.
Even if the merchant is able to manage all of the provider integrations, there is still a substantial risk that the cross-border payment will be rejected – whether because it is falsely flagged as fraudulent or because the payment provider processing the transaction is not optimized for accepting payments from certain regions. In most cases, merchants cannot even assess the true cause of a payment rejection, due to a lack of data transparency on the part of their providers. Merchants invest considerable time and resources into maintaining payments solutions, but are unable to improve performance because they are missing vital data analytics that would help them comprehend the reasons for declines, fraud, chargebacks and other problems.
Zooz provides a data-driven payments platform that is designed to help merchants address these complex challenges.

FinSMEs: How does it work?
Oren
: Merchants integrate the Zooz payments platform via a single API, which enables them to connect with multiple financial institutions; seamlessly integrate acquirers, e-wallets, alternative payment methods, fraud management and other third-party services; and intelligently route transactions to the optimal providers for accepting the payment. Zooz also consolidates and analyzes all payment data in order to provide valuable insights to merchants.
In short, our solution enables merchants to reduce decline rates, increase revenues and meet the challenges of the dynamic global market.

FinSMEs: Where is Zooz in terms of growth?
Oren
: Since our last funding round in 2014, we’ve expanded our global reach. We’ve opened offices in London, Berlin and San Francisco – our flagship office outside of Israel. Our staff has more than doubled – totaling around eighty global employees – and our sales efforts and customer base are constantly growing worldwide. At present we have over 30,000 customers.

FinSMEs: You just raised a massive round of funding…how are you using the funds?
Oren
: We will use the funding to bolster our international presence, build strong teams in every region to meet market demands, and develop new products that optimize the way global businesses accept payments and maximize their results.

FinSMEs: Future plans?
Oren
: Our plans for the future include promoting global growth, introducing our product to new markets and continuing to develop innovative payment technologies.

FinSMEs

08/05/2016

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