Know our partners

Dear Ms. Campbell, we are looking forward to working with Payone in the future. Please give us a brief introduction of your company.

PAYONE is the leading payment provider in Germany and Austria and part of the Worldline Group – the European market leader in payment. In stationary retail, mobile or online – PAYONE helps merchants and service providers with the challenges surrounding cashless payment. As a full-service payment provider, PAYONE ensures digital payment processes that work quickly, easily and reliably. PAYONE develops individual solutions for all industries and company sizes according to the highest security standards.

The forward-looking omnichannel concepts from PAYONE help merchants offer their customers cross-channel shopping experiences. In doing so, PAYONE pursues the goal of enabling integrated payment across all touchpoints. PAYONE processes more than 3.8 billion transactions per year for over 260,000 customers. With over 1,600 employees at six locations, the company also offers numerous value-added services that go far beyond the traditional payment business. PAYONE is a joint venture between Worldline and the DSV Group (Deutscher Sparkassenverlag). PAYONE works throughout Europe for well-known global brands as well as for small and medium-sized companies. These include Deutsche Bahn, Rossmann, PUMA, home24 and Sansibar. For more information, please visit our website: www.payone.com.  

What changes have you observed in the hotel industry over the last 5 years with regard to your core business?

The share of cashless payments, especially with credit cards, was and is comparatively high in the hotel industry. Nevertheless, we are still seeing increases in this sector as well. However, the mere acceptance of cashless payment methods is not enough. Integration of payment in a wide variety of environments such as property management systems, restaurant cash registers, check-in/check-out solutions, etc. is increasingly expected by hotel customers, so that processes become easier for hotel staff and they can concentrate on what is really of fundamental importance: the well-being and full personal care of guests. The range of interfaces and requirements is as individual and complex as the individual hotels themselves.

How is your company responding to the changing needs of the hotel industry? How do you adapt your product portfolio and communication to this?

In addition to a wide range of current payment solutions, PAYONE has a clear ambition to support its customers in optimizing and expanding their business. This naturally also includes responding to individual requirements of the hotel industry together with partners such as Hotelbird. Recently officially embedded in the Worldline Group, the world’s number 4 in payment and transaction services, we will use the synergies resulting from the merger, especially in the area of innovative and intelligent services, for the benefit of our customers.

However, even a large provider like PAYONE cannot satisfy all the needs of every industry on an ad-hoc basis with independently developed solutions. This is precisely why partnerships and cooperations are playing an increasingly important role. Hotelbird is a prime example of this, having very quickly and successfully established itself in the hotel industry and given the entire sector a real “digitalization boost” at the right time. Our partnership now enables both sides in a joint discourse to react in an uncomplicated and fast way to the extended and specific requirements of the hotel industry, which has been under pressure not only since Covid-19, by offering suitable solutions.

We accompany our cooperation with communication – supported by the common idea of technological innovation – on social media channels or with corresponding content on our website as well as participation in industry-specific events, to name just a few examples.

Let’s take a look into the future: Where do you think technology will impact your business and where do you see the greatest potential in your core business?

The Corona pandemic in particular has significantly driven digital initiatives across industries in the past year.

This is also the case at PAYONE. We responded immediately and consistently to Covid-19 in several ways to stand by our customers as a true partner in the crisis and actively support them: With the “stayopen” initiative, we provided free access to the “One-Stop-Shop” online store construction kit for small POS merchants who had to close down due to the nationwide regulation. On the sales and marketing side, we pushed favorable entry-level models with transparent fixed costs and enabled the suspension of monthly terminal rental costs for 3-6 months. In addition, we launched the fully automated Bluecode contract acceptance route, to name just a few of our initiatives.

The prerequisite for this was significant investment in digital sales channels, internal collaboration tools, and an optimal home office environment for all employees so that we can continue to serve our customers at the usual high level.

In this context, technological ecosystems and the ability to link them together are playing an increasingly important role. Through our second shareholder, the DSV Group, we are integrated into the savings bank network, which is unique in Europe: This allows us to offer our cooperation partners not only access to 260,000 merchants, but also potentially the opportunity to interact with the “savings bank” ecosystem. At the same time, we also want to become part of new ecosystems ourselves:  Thus, our partnership with Hotelbird is emblematic of the perfect “win-win” constellation to benefit from and with each other in the interest of our customers. We attach great importance to cooperations of this nature for the development of our core business and technological market leadership, the potential of which we intend to exploit in the future with further carefully selected cooperation partners.