In a recent interview with SBC News, AstroPay CEO Mikael Lijtenstein emphasised how the firm is focusing on the expansion of its presence in Europe, in particular the UK.
Having commenced the journey 12 years ago, the firm has undergone significant growth – and is now seeking to further strengthen its UK footprint as the market evolves.
Commenting on why security in the sector has become such a focus, he told SBC: “Both consumers and merchants have always regarded security as an extremely important aspect in the payments sector and its prominence has continued to increase due to the uptick in the number of digital payments processed daily.
“From our perspective security is not something people can achieve just by using a certain tool or technology, but it’s holistic, and more about a way of doing things in different layers to make the product and the process secure.
“Over 12 years’ experience working in emerging markets has helped us acquire a strong understanding of the risks and challenges faced by the payments industry as well as customers. Therefore, our team applies all that knowledge and uses the latest technology in an integrated and ever-evolving design environment to develop our products and to make them more secure. We also have strict KYC and compliance procedures to assure a secure environment to our clients.”
On the enhanced attention the firm places on the customer journey, he added: “We devote special attention and resources to provide an elevated user experience by executing A/B testing, surveys and listening to our consumers’ feedback to understand their needs and what they value most. In fact, user feedback is one of the key pillars of our engineering process.
“We devote many resources to specific tools to get this information and to process it. We also use different metrics to measure conversion rate and then make tweaks and adjustments when necessary. AstroPay is unique as it’s very agile and quick to respond which is why it can make changes easily.
“There is clearly a big shift in the focus from products to experiences, in fact, buying has become much more about how we do it and how we feel about it, than what we purchase. Each touchpoint has an incidence on the perception of a brand, and the payment journey is no exception.
“There is a need to remove all traces of friction at the checkpoint to increase the conversion rate and avoid losing users during the payment procedure. Therefore, it is important that merchants consider the relevance of making users feel at ease when processing their payment.”
