Cologne, 31 January 2008 – Pago eTransaction Services GmbH, one of the leading international acquirers and payment service providers, has reported increased clearing volumes and further successful expansion of its international partner network in 2007 supplying further evidence of its ongoing success story. Clearing volumes, which are the monies collected on behalf of its merchant customers, increased by over 20%. The Pago Partner Program also expanded further with sales partners showing total growth of about 12%. The number of terminals now in service exceeds 8,000. “These figures are well above our budgeted targets. They show that E-commerce continues to boom. Increasing numbers of merchants are turning to tried and tested payment service providers and acquirers like Pago,” said Dr. Markus Weber, Pago’s Managing Director. “Merchants entering the virtual world increasingly value reliable partners for professional risk management, thereby avoiding learning expensive lessons.”
By introducing Maestro International in 2007, Pago has further extended its range of supported payment services. The Cologne-based provider had already been the first acquirer outside the UK to offer Maestro UK acceptance to its merchants. “Maestro International Acceptance further cements our position in the international payment market,” said Jürgen Herold, Pago’s Managing Director. “Online merchants throughout Europe can now use Maestro Acceptance as part of an overall strategy to offer all the important payment methods in every European country.” In addition Pago increased the number of settlement currencies available for MasterCard and Visa credit card transactions to ten. The portfolio of settlement currencies now also includes all the important Scandinavian currencies like the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Crowns as well as the Polish Zloty and the Canadian Dollar.
The sixth edition of the Pago Report, entitled “Trends in Consumer and Payment Behaviour in Key E-commerce sectors”, also came in for a lot of media attention last year and was supplemented with the first “Pago Retail Report: Consumer and Payment Behaviour in Online Commerce”. These reports are the only studies on E-commerce available in the world which reflect real life transactions and are not based on survey polls. “This year we will be analysing Maestro International transactions too and also performing more detailed analyses,” announced Dr. Markus Weber, “and, due to the strong demand last year, we will once again publish a special analysis of the retailing sector.”
Pago eTransaction Services was also able to display their know-how and expertise in tailor-made payment solutions for online merchants at the German Mail Order Congress and the Mail Order World in Wiesbaden. More than 1,200 visitors attended the trade event entitled “Simple, fast and secure – like cashless payment”. Pago also hosted a special trade symposium and executive briefing on online consumer and payment behaviour and security at the renowned European E-Commerce Academy. The event was organized by Forschungsinstitut für Telekommunikation (FTK), a research institute for telecommunications in Dortmund, and highlighted expert presentations and analyses from Deutsche Bank Research, Pago, CompuTop Wirtschaftsinformatik and Pixum. Jürgen Herold, Pago, drew a positive conclusion, “The large amount of interest and the positive feedback has encouraged us to host similar symposiums in the future.” A similar event is already being planned for 2008.
In the payments field, Pago will be focussing more on bricks-and-mortar merchants. “In the context of our “one stop shopping” strategy, from the beginning of 2008 we will be including Maestro POS in our range of services thereby providing this very successful internationally and future-orientated debit payment method to conventional stores,” added Jürgen Herold. “We aim to offer more transparency and simplification in payment processing. Our customers can process all their cashless payments on one statement and can monitor all their transactions on one centralized system – now expanded to include Maestro POS.”