Payments and transactional services provider Worldline is expanding its e-commerce payment solution into South Korea whilst bolstering its authentication process through a partnership with FIDO Alliance.
Addressing the recent evolution of its e-commerce payment solution, the move hopes to facilitate the specific needs of businesses who are looking to enter or expand their online operations into the promising markets of South Korea. The proposition is set to help process local payments and provide access to this strategic market without the need to establish a local business entity.
When investigating the optimism that’s present within the South Korean ecosystem, in the last year alone cross-border e-commerce transactions equated to $9.5 billion with 75% of online consumers shopping cross-border. Out of the 52 million-strong population, mobile shopping forms 65% of the total e-commerce value, causing the nation to rank fifth in the world for the ease that’s associated with doing business with them.
In addition to this, South Korea holds a 97% internet penetration rate, the highest in Asia, making it one of the continent’s most interesting and dynamic markets.
Following in-depth analysis of the market’s potential, Worldline has gained extensive expertise of South Korea’s financial ecosystem, which will ultimately help merchants abide by local rules and regulations.
The move will help global e-commerce merchants overcome payment challenges in one of Asia’s most digitally advanced nations and will cater carefully to the needs and preferences of their local customers and allow them to access a compelling digital commerce market. Worldline’s new solution supports customers with:
- A solution for processing in South Korea that’s void of the requirement to form a local entity;
- Local cards processing and currency conversion rates
- Access to local acquiring;
- The ability to avoid high cross-border fees with all-in blended pricing, and no cardholder surcharges.
- The ability to limit foreign exchange risks through same-day exchange in a preferred currency, for example in EUR or USD.
Roger Niederer, Chief Market Officer Merchant Services at Worldline comments: “South Korea is one of the largest and most digitally advanced markets in Asia, making it an exciting opportunity for almost every large online business. The solution we built cuts through the complexity and optimizes payment performance across the board.”
For what Worldline has done to facilitate its expansion into South Korea, it’s taken equal measures to ensure that its offering is made as secure as possible, and as a result, Worldline has become the newest member of the FIDO Alliance, a worldwide organisation that aims to standardise and bring interoperability in the authentication world.
Through this membership, Worldline is taking a further step in its online identification strategy, as it is convinced that strong authentication, interoperability, and the use of biometrics are crucial in this regard.
“The FIDO Alliance welcomes our new sponsor member Worldline and thanks to them for their commitment to strong authentication in the interest of the online community of providers and users. Worldline understands the need for a new model in user authentication that both confirms and protects user identity, while simplifying the user experience,” says Christina Hulka, Executive Director and COO of the FIDO Alliance.
The FIDO Alliance is a global open industry association that aims to create authentication standards to help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords. To this end, it promotes the development of, use of, and compliance with standards for authentication and device attestation.
The FIDO Alliance is working to change the nature of authentication with open standards that are more secure than passwords, simpler for consumers to use, and easier for service providers to deploy and manage. Worldline fully endorses these initiatives and is proud to collaborate with the FIDO Alliance and its other members in these areas to provide safe and user-friendly identification solutions to its clients.
What are the benefits of joining the FIDO Alliance?
The FIDO Alliance membership offers several other key benefits to Worldline and its customers:
- The alliance aims to develop interoperable identification solutions that minimise the reliance on passwords for all markets and use cases. This would make it both easier and more secure for consumers to identify themselves or authenticate online decisions.
- The objective of the FIDO2 standard is to offer biometrics authentication without the need of having a mobile application. For Worldline, this for instance means they can offer it through their WL Trusted Authentication on the browser.
- With FIDO, merchants can use their own authentication for e-commerce payments. They can use delegated authentication and keep the full user journey and do not have to use the authentication of the issuers.
“To us, it’s really important to be a member of the worldly renowned FIDO Alliance”, says Wolf Kunisch, Head of Strategy and Public Affairs at Worldline. “It gives us the opportunity to be part of this important working group, which defines the specifications of the relevant standards for safe online identification. In addition, it helps us to stay up to date regarding the latest trends in this field and to ensure that the results of the working group become part of our own product roadmap. As a result, we will be able to further optimise our services towards our customers.”
Worldline’s entry into South Korea is part of the group’s strategic global approach to help global businesses enter high-growth markets. Indeed, this payments solution follows propositions already launched for Brazil, China, India and Russia.
To support merchants in their efforts to penetrate these unique ecosystems, Worldline conducts analysis to ensure businesses comply with local governmental regulatory standards and tailor solutions to the preferences of the consumer to help drive cross-border growth.
