Mollie is one of the fastest growing online payment solutions providers within Europe, helping merchants of all sizes grow at their own pace by facilitating a variety of payment methods. Founded in the Netherlands in 2004, the company was initially set-up to facilitate payments via SMS text messages. Today, they have a 350-strong team operating in 4 different countries and service more than 100,000 merchants daily.
Here, Eline van der Lugt, Head of Risk at Mollie talks about the company’s partnership with SureCloud, and the importance of shared values and a good cultural fit when choosing technology partners.
The online payments sector is one of the most dynamic markets in the financial world. It has come on in leaps and bounds in the past decade, with advancements in technology constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. If merchants are to grow and be successful, they need to present a variety of payment options, and consumers are increasingly more and more demanding in what they expect from retailers and other merchants.
Because of this market dynamism there are great opportunities for providers of online payment solutions like us. Our aim is to help merchants to react to the pressures and challenges of the market by offering a simple and clear API that gives buyers multiple payment options in a concise, uniform way.
We started working with SureCloud to address the compliance, security and risk challenges that come with the online payment sector. Our primary focus was around integrity, IT, cyber, operational and data privacy risk, and we needed a platform at Mollie to monitor and manage all aspects in an easy, simple way.
In an age where compliance and data security are of paramount importance, financial organisations like ours must demonstrate that we’re in control. SureCloud is helping us to gain that control and demonstrate it in a clear, organised way.
We chose SureCloud partly because of their status as a ‘Challenger’ in Gartner’s IT Risk Management latest Magic Quadrant. We are an agile, growing organisation and we wanted to partner with a company that had similar values, and that would be able to work closely with us and tailor their service for our needs.
In SureCloud, we’re delighted to have found a partner that shares our culture and vision, as well as our appetite for simple, clear communication. Their solution has helped us take things to the next level and we’re already enjoying better visibility. This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what will be possible as we continue with the implementation.
We already had a dedicated risk and compliance function, but the technology supporting our team needed to be modernised. We wanted an end-to-end solution that would allow us to easily link data together and spot control gaps. User experience was of paramount importance, and we needed an interface that would be accessible to everyone and that even non-compliance/risk employees would be able to use effectively with minimal training.
We wanted to get this off the ground really quickly and skip the usual spreadsheet phase. We knew that SureCloud could offer some out-of-the-box frameworks for the likes of PCI-DSS, COSO, ISO 27001 and NIST SCF, what we really needed was a tailored approach to explore what was possible.
The solution that they have provided for us is designed to tie disparate processes together, while fully integrating them in an easy-to-use risk and compliance solution. This is great for us as it helps us eliminate duplicate work, lower administrative overhead, eradicate manual reporting, and reduce the need for additional manual communications such as email-based instructions.
So far this has resulted in better record-keeping, easier decision-making, and the ability to demonstrate how risk, compliance, security, and data privacy impacts the organisation today and any future growth plans.
SureCloud’s technology will help us gain a holistic view of our risk and compliance program, enabling us to identify our priorities for the coming year more easily. The gap analysis will show us exactly where we need to focus our energy; resulting in quick wins as well as more sustained efforts to improve, which in turn will translate into better engagement from our stakeholders as we begin to demonstrate value back to the business. These benefits should ensure an accelerated return on our investment and allow us to create a more effective strategy longer term.
Within the next year at Mollie, we hope to achieve real visibility of risk and compliance throughout the organisation, automated control monitoring, and a shift in their processes to become more data-driven. These are our key metrics of success, and so far, we are well on track to achieving them.
