Weaving the Web – An exploration into Kinguin’s leading payment solutions

 

Kinguin has been able to grow its audience across the globe, but with this amazing expansion, comes a major challenge – ensuring customers can pay with their desired payment solution. With the rise of new payment options cropping up simultaneously in different countries, Kinguin has to ensure all bases are covered and pull out all the stops necessary to make sure that the customer’s purchasing experience is seamless. Faheem Bakshi, Payment Lead, and his team have weaved a web that encompasses over 150+ payment solutions and are looking to expand this even further.

 

We sat down with Faheem and discussed his role within the team, how his experiences have shaped his approach to this key challenge, and how Kinguin is looking to enhance the international customer experience across its platform.

 

Faheem joined Kinguin in 2015 firstly as a Senior Business Analyst and then as Head of Payments, tasked with developing Kinguin as a leader in accessibility to customers through all payment means. Faheem has come from a FinTech background with a major in economics and computer science along with previous experience at Microsoft and on the stock exchange. He has been truly enveloped in the financial technology industry. These experiences are key to the role that he plays within the team and allows him to thrive and adapt in the ever changing world of payments. 

The Payment Lead’s role is, in simple terms, to manage the payments on Kinguin’s marketplace – but this role is far from simple. With such a large international audience, each customer needs to have the ability to securely and comfortably pay for a product with their service of choice and this is where the challenge lies. Kinguin customers range in age, location along with many more variables, and for Kinguin to ensure that each and every customer is content with the service offering their trusted payment provider. This solution is to integrate as many trusted payment solutions as possible! Kinguin currently boasts over 150 different payment methods and we are looking to expand this to 200 by the end of 2022.

Comparing a customer from Argentina to a customer from South Africa, two emerging markets for Kinguin, will provide insight into how tailored the solution needs to be. When a new customer is introduced to the marketplace, no matter where they are based, they need to see a payment method that is not only favoured for their region, but is also trusted and secure; an example of this is American Express for American customers, or Klarna for Scandinavian customers. Kinguin wants to ensure that every customer has full accessibility and feels secure with their purchases on the site, while at the same time, has a wide selection of choices available to them. 

To find upcoming payment solutions, Faheem and his team conduct market research in local and emerging markets, which include primary and secondary research methods; whether that is customer surveys, networking at industry events or researching the community online. This research is key for Kinguin, as it ensures that the onboarding process of monitoring each solution is a success. This ongoing monitoring requires account management on each payment solution, so Faheem and his team are constantly in contact with customer support representatives across the globe to manage the many solutions effectively.

With all of these wide-array of solutions in place, Faheem also has to look to the future and to new market opportunities to decide what will be key moving forward. This key is Open Banking, a direct and instant version of payment, offering endless potential and modern security solutions when compared to traditional banking. This method bypasses third party intermediaries and allows users to transfer directly to each other with the click of a button. This market is slowly growing, with Polish payment system Blik being an amazing case study of the solution in action. Currently, open baking is limited to regional operations but in the next few years, this limitation will most likely be phased out. Pairing this with the fact that banks are currently cooperating with each other on backend API solutions to make the service even more secure, we’ll most likely be seeing more of this solution in the future – and when the time comes, Faheem and his team is ready to pioneer the future at Kinguin!