OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 23 - SafeCharge has focused on the iDating business and attended iDate conferences since 2004. They’ve signed numerous significant clients in the iDating business now. They know our industry. Here’s my interview with the their CMO, Shemer Katz. - Mark Brooks
Tell us more about SafeCharge. What do you do, and what's the founding story of Safe Charge?
SafeCharge is a payment provider, established in 2000. Today, we provide services to thousands of online mobile merchants, including some of the biggest dating companies. We provide them the connectivity to the acquiring bank risk management services, and our main objective is to give them the best payment conversion with minimized risk of fraud.
Can you tell us who you are working with?
We serve half a dozen of top dating sites in Europe you list on your European online dating ranking page on OPW.
Why are they using Safe Charge?
Because of our experience in the idating industry. We offer the best payment conversion because we know the statistics, we know how to reroute the transaction to the proper acquiring bank, and how to manage the fraud. We have a large negative database that has been built throughout the years specifically to this industry. So we know exactly who the fraudsters are and we know how to block them ahead of time.
Now that is interesting. You have a black list…..
Yes. The black list has been built throughout the 13 years that we have been serving the industry.
You work with idating as one vertical. What are the other verticals you work with?
We work with sports betting, gaming, online financial services, online games, retail, and many other digital services.
What would you say are some of the latest trends in the payment processing industry that are important for the internet dating industry executive to know about?
Mobile payment is definitely one of the hottest trends. We also accommodate our payment services to support the mobile payments. Our mobile payments page is HTML5 compliant and the users get a native payment experience.
In addition to that, dating merchants are increasing the payment options that are available on their checkout page in order to increase their conversion in each region. Of course that is a great way of increasing revenue, just offering more payment options.
What has been hot though in the idating industry specifically? What has done well in the way of alternative payment systems? What would you say would be the top two additional?
It varies by the geographic. I would say that mobile payments, premium SMS, and direct carrier billing are the most important payment options. Also the cash-based payment is growing in some regions.
Are there any new regulations that the industry should be aware of?
I think that the enforcement of PCI compliance by the card schemes is major. The merchant has to go through the process to become compliant with the PCI requirements. More and more merchants prefer to use an external card vault to safely and securely store their customer's sensitive payment information. This is actually the most effective solution that still allows for the one click payment for repeat customers while completely offloading the burden of PCI compliance to a third party like SafeCharge.
