The nature of EveryPay is very straightforward. However, according to the company’s CEO Lauri Teder, that is only the tip of the iceberg. At the moment, EveryPay offers its services to three major banks in the Baltic region – SEB, Swedbank, and LHV. The CEO met with Life in Estonia to discuss the future plans for the company as well as his dreams for digital payments in general. He also reflected upon how the company might change now that it’s owned by LHV Group, the owner of LHV Bank.
Popular e-commerce software and custom integrations
“EveryPay is a payment gateway platform for financial institutions. We don’t actually offer the service directly to merchants. They use our platform to make card and open banking payments, through financial institutions, mainly banks,” described Teder.
If an online shop wants to use EveryPay’s solutions they just need to contact one of the three banks and sign a contract. It’s as simple as that. EveryPay has taken online payments a step further and is additionally offering very powerful API-s for custom integrations as well as payment extensions for widely used e-commerce platforms such as Magento 2, WooCommerce, OpenCart, and PrestaShop. “The merchants use our platform but they are not necessarily our direct customers,“ Teder confirmed.
Two payment solutions that have yet to garner popularity in the Baltics are Apple and Google Pay, however, merchants will soon be able to use EveryPay to offer these options to their customers.
If EveryPay is so simple to use then why does a merchant even need to deal with the middle man – meaning financial institution? EveryPay offers its payment gateway services to banks because this way the end-customer (merchant) is getting faster and better service. The logic behind this is actually very simple. Each merchant most likely already has a bank account and an ongoing relationship with at least one bank, so it is much easier and less time-consuming to get a variety of services from one institution rather than to be forced to communicate with several different ones.
A thing of the future – buy now pay later
When asked about whether crypto-payments could become the future of digital payments, Teder said that they are monitoring what is going on in the field of crypto, but they have yet to focus on it.
“We are monitoring what exactly will happen with cryptocurrencies. With these payments, the nuance is that since our customers are banks, they have their own set of rules as to what they do and how they do it. At the moment, we don’t deal with crypto-payments, but we definitely will be keeping our eyes and ears open.”
“We are also looking towards ‘buy now pay later´ payment methods as they are gaining popularity. At the moment, we are discussing with banks what their options are and how open they are to using third-party solutions.”
When asked about his dreams for EveryPay, Teder hopes that all payments will eventually be invisible to the end-user. For example, people no longer have to spend time making recurring monthly payments such as rent, electricity, etc. They are aware that you have to pay for the service, but paying in itself is so easy that you don´t even think about it. He hopes that all modern payment solutions have become a common place and all merchants, as well as businesses, are fully aware of what they are and how to use them. And of course, the goal is that most large financial institutions globally use EveryPay’s platform to offer their customers the best payment solutions available.
The CEO believes we still have plenty of work to do in order to promote the use of the solutions developed so far for the Baltics and future markets.
“Our overall mission is to educate businesses, either by interacting directly with the merchants or through banks, so that they know what technical solutions can make their customers’ lives much simpler,” Teder said.
Simpler solutions also have the positive side effect of reducing the man-hours spent on accounting for merchants. From the outset, EveryPay’s goal was to become the main payment gateway solution in Estonia, according to Teder, they have now achieved this.
Even fines could be paid automatically
To illustrate the above, he gave a peculiar example that would seem like science fiction in many other countries. However, in Estonia, terms like State Portal (eesti.ee) and digital signatures are widely-known to everyone.
“For instance, let’s take traffic fines. When you accidentally exceed the speed limit and get caught by a speed camera, the current process of paying the fine is quite cumbersome. The fine is e-mailed to you and you need to copy-paste the bank transfer details from there. It would be much easier if you give the state access to your bank account through the state portal and just check the box that you are okay with the money deducted from your account to pay the fine.”
No business is successful without some failures along the way – EveryPay is no different. Teder does not deny that there have been some mishaps over the years but for EveryPay, these have all been important lessons that will further improve our payment platform.
If we look back at the very beginning then maybe the most surprising was to fully understand the working processes of large financial corporations.
“I do not want to say that we, as a small FinTech company, are fast and they are slow. As they are heavily regulated we couldn’t even anticipate at first how long these processes might take. It will take years of work for the contract to finally pay off”.
The CEO makes it no secret that EveryPay has plans to expand. During the last two years, plans have been hampered for reasons of which we are all aware. Talking from experience, Teder sees that selling their solutions to potential customers like banks and financial institutions works better in face-to-face meetings, rather than Zoom calls or e-mails.
LHV Group recently bought 100% of EveryPay’s shares. Teder affirmed that they will still offer their services to other banks and the change of ownership will not lead to immediate changes in the company’s structure or daily business.
“As we expand into new markets, we will add market-based payment methods. Be it open banking or local market methods. Just like in Estonia, there are market-specific methods in various countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Poland,” added Teder.
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