AWEpay: Fueling the Payments Industry

Owing to the radical evolution of Fintech companies, heightened customer expectations for value-added services, and ever-changing regulatory landscape, the prominence of payment technologies has undeniably risen to new heights. These dynamics are reinvigorating the traditional financial landscape and enabling merchants to tap into the potential benefits of nascent technologies. At the same time, moving away from conventional methods of payments is bringing unprecedented opportunities to carry out international trade for both sellers and buyers. Although the disruption in the payments landscape seems stimulating for global trades, not all ventures gain from them as stringent compliance standards often undermine the use of technologies for cross-border transactions. Enunciating the same, Casey Seow, managing director of AWEpay, mentions that the new breed of technologies is revamping the entire payments space, enabling companies to cater to the untargeted market segments. He further delineates that merchants can adopt blue ocean strategies to explore markets that still employ conventional payment mediums.

The Helping Hand

AWEpay strives to create a payments ecosystem that not only targets the unbanked but also provides value-added services to consumers employing payment instruments such as debit or credit cards. Backed by a team with over 30 years of experience in the electronic payments industry, AWEpay brings market-proven expertise to facilitate seamless online payments for banks, merchants, and buyers. With an impressive track record of assisting a vast client base in Europe, Asia, and Africa, AWEpay provides targeted and customized payment solutions for each of its customers by identifying gaps in their respective markets. “We create solutions that are cost-effective, convenient, and compliant with local legislation and regulations,” states Seow.

A Robust Payment Platform

AWEpay brings a single robust platform to meet the dynamic business needs of partner banks, financial institutions, payment service providers, prepaid card issuers, remittance partners, and money service operators. Powered by state-of-the-art technologies, AWEpay’s unified platform features fully automated and intuitive KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business) systems.

It further minimizes risks and maximizes profits and longevity of legitimate businesses in Asia. The platform comes with multi-currency gateway features to facilitate cross-border transactions. It allows merchants to create a single point of contact for all banks and financial institutions, and accept payments through different modes on their website including credit and debit cards, PayPal, and other online payment options. The AWEpay platform also boasts an in-built API feature for cost-effective integration with the existing online business structure of a firm and enjoys extensive use in more than 170 countries.

Another proprietary offering of the firm— AWEwallet (Accountable Worldwide E-wallet)— facilitates instant transactions with simple two-level authentications that bring forth endless possibilities for seamless international transactions. Merchants can use AWEwallet like any other conventional wallet and it supports all currencies to underpin seamless transactions.

A Merchant’s Guide to Payment Security

As security is paramount to any industry today, AWEpay ensures that payments and settlements take place within safe boundaries and via trustable finance firms. To minimize the ever-increasing cyber threats in the payments sector, AWEpay enables online merchants to filter transactions before banks authorize them. “We ensure secure transactions and peace of mind for our customers as we constantly update and monitor the AWEpay system for any fraud or foreign breaches,” says Seow. He further highlights the two types of threats—cardholder and merchant frauds— that prevail in the payments industry at present. To mitigate these, AWEpay gateway features a suite of internal risk rules that limit exposure to threats, identify transaction laundering from unauthorized websites, and receive chargeback alerts directly from cardholders’ banks for initiating refunds and reducing potential breaches. “We examine the best third-party risk management companies to identify frauds and develop prevention techniques to reinvigorate our payment solutions continually,” states Seow. To create a more comprehensive picture of the firm’s capabilities, he elucidates the case of a merchant with high fraud rates and chargebacks. To address the threat factor in their transactions, AWEpay applied 3D Secure code to attenuate losses caused by fraudulent activities.

After partnering with AWEpay, the merchant was able to reduce chargebacks and frauds from eight to less than one percent, which is the fraud threshold for both Visa and Mastercard. AWEpay’s solution also proved significant for a Malaysia-based forex merchant that was facing difficulty in online trading as there are no regulations or licensing for forex trading in the country. AWEpay assisted the merchant in incorporating regulatory jurisdiction as per the EU guidelines and eventually linking them to banks that carry out forex trading for merchants.

To constantly foster long-term relationships with its customers, the firm treats them as partners rather than clients. Prior to deploying its solutions for any of the clients, AWEpay tries to comprehend their unique needs to ensure optimal delivery of services. With years of pertinent market experience, the company’s cross-functional team is committed to creating new solutions that can realize central banks’ and regulators’ vision of creating a cashless society. Going forward, AWEpay aims to develop a fully converged and integrated solution for both merchants and consumers to streamline cross-border transactions across Asia. “We are focused on offering a comprehensive, integrated web application comprising card issuance, KYC (Know Your Customer) processing, remittance and foreign exchange, available to all our valued clients and partners,” adds Seow.

Over the years, AWEpay has carved a niche for itself by assisting banks and other financial service providers in maintaining compliance by leveraging the benefits of leading-edge internal and external technologies. Further, in a bid to continually excel in the market and introduce best-breed of solutions, AWEpay has also developed partnerships with several fintech companies and other strategic payment firms. “We along with our partners are committed to bolstering the payments space and assisting clients in mitigating risks of illegitimate access to funds by unscrupulous people,” says Seow.

"We guarantee secure transactions and peace of mind for our customers as we constantly update and monitor the AWEpay system for any fraud or foreign breaches"

Initially started as a two-person firm, AWEpay has come a long way since its inception abiding by a simple mission statement: Accountable Worldwide Epay (AWEpay). Over the years, AWEpay has efficiently simplified the way payments are processed across boundaries, rendering stability, reliability, and sustainability to organizations in the payments sphere. Forging ahead, the firm plans to continue fueling the payments space by developing innovative solutions for merchants that still process payments only in cash.