Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Erich Litch, Chief Revenue Officer, 2Checkout (Part 3)

Erich Litch: As you get to smaller companies, they tend to make company-wide decisions and want simplification. They want something that’s cheap, quick, and easy and doesn’t over complicate their lives so that they can spend most of their time focused on the business. They don’t have the liberty of hiring teams of people to do specific functions. They need a lean operation. They’re right for something like an all-in-one monetization platform.

If you’re doing anywhere from a $100,000 in sales all the way up to $200 million, you might be one of those kinds of businesses which we call small to medium. Then there’s the microsegment. If you have an antivirus solution or some kind of endpoint security product that is applicable anywhere, you really want to maximize your reach and reach everybody possible. You want to support every currency that’s out there.

In order to do that, you’re competing with other products that are the same. You want to maximize your conversion rate in terms of customers coming to your site and completing the purchase. In order to do that, you really need to be able to support local payment methods because every single country has different preferences in terms of how they prefer to make payments. PayPal is one of the most used payment methods in Germany. Installments payments is one of the most popular payment methods in Brazil. If you’re in China, you need to support Alipay.

If you want to support 45 payment methods, which we do, you’ve got to do a lot of things to set up entities, bank accounts, and relationships. That takes a lot of money, investment, time, and resources. If you come to a company like us, we’ll say, “We’ll take care of all of that for you. By the way, we’ll take good care of all your regulatory and tax compliance as well.”

Most software companies today are also subscription companies. Let’s say you’re just a subscription business, you got to do all these in terms of not just thinking where your subscribers are going to be but also how you’re going to serve and support them, how you’re going to maximize your authorization rates on your payments, how you’re going to accept the most number of payment methods. You have a lot of the same issues. If you are in that small to medium space, you’re going to say, “I’d like somebody to handle all this for me.”

Sramana Mitra: With the customer and vendor point of view in mind, if you were starting a company today, where do you see gaps in the business?

Erich Litch: I think there’s a lot of progress to be made in the security industry. Not just end point security but overall identity management and authentication. I think there’s a lot of innovation and opportunities there. I think that’s probably one of the hottest spaces right now. That’s an area that is ripe for a lot of transformational vendors to come in.

Sramana Mitra: We have a series called Thought Leaders in Cyber Security where we cover that intensely. Cyber security has always been one of the most active areas of entrepreneurship. With all this digital payments and digital everything, the opportunities for fraud are more.

Erich Litch: Another area that also gets a lot of attention is creating an extremely personalized and targeted buying experience, which requires a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning and the capability to dynamically present content and offers. There’s a lot of progress to be made in that area as well.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Erich Litch, Chief Revenue Officer, 2Checkout
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