Innovating in Payment Technology: Plimus CEO Hagai Tal (Part 6)

Sramana: Are you saying that you want to build a platform for larger enterprise customers on which they can develop their own API extensions?

Hagai Tal: Yes, we want to build a platform like Salesforce where people can build what they need. That is the main target for us. At the same time, we still need to give professional service to our smaller clients. Our challenge is to balance our needs between those two goals. A good friend of mine is running a company called Magenta, and we share the same challenges. How do we keep the platform open while providing professional hands-on services?

Balancing our open platform may be our biggest challenge, but we have additional challenges. Another challenge that we face that other companies may not face is that we have additional regulations to deal with because we touch the money. Visa and MasterCard are always changing the rules.

I think another challenging aspect of our business is how fast innovation occurs in this space. Amazon, Apple, and PayPal are all innovating in this space. We need to find a solution for the SMB and create an app store for those businesses. We need to be able to adopt to those new business models in the marketplace. I buy things through the Apple marketplace for 99 cents, but if it was not that easy to purchase from them, I would never purchase those products. My challenge is to figure out how to take those types of solutions and apply them to my clients’ businesses. We have started to look at that, and it is not an easy process.

Sramana: You said that most of your 6,000 clients are small companies. What do you define as a small company?

Hagai Tal: I would say that 90% of our clients are small businesses. We classify small businesses as ones that generate less than $100,000 a year of payment processing.

Sramana: They must be paying very high rates for the transaction charges, then. Is that correct?

Hagai Tal: First of all, we provide a full solution. We are not just taking their money and making the transaction. For example, if a developer has made a new game and they want to go online and sell it, then they have to figure out several things. First, they have to figure out how to put the game up for sale online and how to collect payments for that game. They then must figure out how to collect payment for that game in all different currencies around the world. That means they must have a lot of credit and reserves in order. They must also deal with invoicing and manage fraud. After that, they need to deal with customer service when it comes to billing. They also need to balance taxes.

We offer all of those services. In addition, we could allow the developer to let customers try the game for 40 days before they purchase it, or allow the developer to set it up as a subscription service. We also will empower the developer to use coupons and let them do an email marketing campaign. We have so much functionality on our platform that we allow the developer to focus just on the game.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Innovating in Payment Technology: Plimus CEO Hagai Tal
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