At least once a year, a major discussion on the subject of cash crops up in the media. At the latest when a new statistic shows the (further) decline in cash transactions in retail. So why don't we just do away with cash?
We are here to stay
Like a perfect spot, we're not going anywhere. Hello world, we are Paymenttools and we want to make the gray world of payments more colorful. How? You can find out here.
Yet another start-up with its own blog. The question of "why" automatically arises. Why yet another blog, with even more self-congratulation and smoothly polished buzzwords? Legitimate doubts.
Don't worry, we don't have the time and energy to polish every word and constantly give ourselves a thumbs up because we're working on something great. What we are working on and why we are doing it, we would like to talk about on a regular basis. Unpolished, that's a promise.
Instead, we want to take our audience, you, on a journey with us. Whether you are interested in our solutions or our company, we hope you will be inspired by our enthusiasm. In this sense: welcome to the Paymenttools blog.
The world of payments
Not many people are happy to pay for something, because it always leads to less of their own money. Even less people want to think about how to pay. They prefer to pay simply and quickly, and in Germany they still like to pay in cash. The options for paying, whether at the POS (Point Of Sale), i.e. the store checkout, or online in e-commerce, are diverse, to say the least. Girocard, credit card, Apple or Google Pay or Paypal - there is no shortage of ways to get rid of your money. What causes confusion among customers is no less challenging for retailers, because they don't want to offer too many payment methods, nor the wrong ones. The right mix of payment methods is something like the holy grail of the industry, because what is good for customers is not necessarily the same for retailers, because every payment has to be processed in the end and there are not only complex processes behind it, but also costs. Relationship status: It's complicated.
Can payments be done any other way?
Rhetorical question, of course it can be done in other ways. But another way is not necessarily better, neither for customers nor for retailers, whether they are brick-and-mortar or online. In recent years, we have seen a number of efforts to revolutionize payment transactions in Germany or Europe. Most of these efforts wanted to start this revolution either without the customers or without the retailers and this is where we think the mistake lies. We at Paymenttools do not believe in a revolution, do not believe in reinventing the wheel. But we can do it better and that is what we are working on with a motivated team of first-class developers, product people, payment experts and people who simply want to make a difference.
Payments can be done differently!
Paymenttools was not founded in a mountain village in the Andes, not in Silicon Valley by the guy who shook Steve Jobs' hand or by a secret consortium. Paymenttools was founded by REWE Group. The retail group that plays a role in the world of twelve million customers every day. The group that is represented in 21 countries and employs 384,000 people. In other words, we at Paymenttools, with REWE Group at our side, believe we have a good understanding of how payments work and what the needs of retailers and customers are. In a now fully digitized world, where the boundaries between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail are blurred, we need a payment system that can cope with this constantly evolving change. We believe in a payment OS, an operating system for payment transactions that bundles all services. A system that is not only easy for retailers to put into operation, but also much easier to administer. A system that can be easily extended and provides answers to the most important questions, resulting in customers having to worry less about which is the best payment method.
We are looking forward to our task. We are Paymenttools. We solve payn. ♥️