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With a presence in over 50 markets, UniversalPay has become a leading payment solutions company in partnership with banks and vendors.

Raimundo Sala Albert CEO, UNIVERSALPAY

UniversalPay has positioned itself as one of the main payment solutions companies. What has the evolution of UniversalPay in Spain been like?

The company entered the Spanish market through a JV with Banco Popular to grow and manage the bank’s business portfolio by delivering specialized card acquiring products. Some of the main achievements include the completion of the 50% stake by Banco Popular, which helped to move toward the group’s global platform. The next step was to develop our own technology in Spain: we have direct connection with payment network companies, e.g. Visa or Mastercard, which is not that usual in Spain; we were also the first to offer businesses the possibility of depositing their sales to their preferred bank. In other words, we do not oblige them to have an account with us, which is typical in Spain too. Once we have implemented our own technology, UniversalPay launches to develop its business with different distribution channels. We work with several partners including a distribution agreement with Liberbank in 2017 to support its business portfolio. In October 2018, we acquired a payment gateway, ClearOne, a company focused on payment solutions for businesses that allows us to integrate the payment with the technological solution of the store. Thus, we completed a portfolio of solutions that we did not have before because we depended on suppliers.

What are the differentiating aspects of UniversalPay?

We are the single company in digital boarding, which means customers do not have to print any documents when they contract our services, allowing even digital signatures with absolute security. We are significantly expanding our services among restaurants including the top groups. These services help to register a client’s order in the restaurant in a digital way and make payment simpler. Everything is integrated, meaning the sales system and the payment collection are always in synch. This significantly helps restaurant’s operations, and this technology can be applied to any sector making the ERP or POS of choice seamless.

What is your strategy to approach new clients?

Our strategy is extremely different because the distribution strategy has to adapt to each client and the collaboration with the different partners we have. We have a team of direct sales, which focus on larger opportunities, big corporates. We also have a bank sales channel that get new medium-sized clients: and for the smaller businesses, we have a partner’s channel— mainly integrated software vendors (ISVs) that refer customers to us. ISVs help us approach clients to offer service to integrate their payment methods.

Virtual wallets from Apple, Google, and Samsung are clear competition for banks. What is your view on that trend?

That is a trend to stay. Mobile phones are a part of everything we do and using other platforms can be faster than using a bank. It is easier to use one solution than several. Banks typically prefer to have everything integrated around their solutions, though that is not that comfortable for users. Banks have many challenges in this area today.

UniversalPay has presence in over 50 markets. What are your expansion plans?

We have announced new operations in Chile, and we continue to see many opportunities in Latin America. We are also looking at opportunities in Asia Pacific. We want to continue growing in Portugal as well. The rest of Europe is currently progressing well; we have operations in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the UK, and Ireland. In every country, we also work with one or more banks: In Mexico, we work with Sabadell and Citibanamex, for example. In Poland, Spain, and Germany, we have several partners, such as Deutsche Bank, PKO and Liberbank among others.

What are your goals for the year ahead?

We want to increase our partner channel, as ISVs continue to grow in providing integrated solutions to retailers in almost any industry. We recently signed an agreement with the leading software provider in hospitality and hope 2021 will see that cooperation grow significantly. We will also complete the migration from legacy systems.

“We continue to see many opportunities in Latin America. We are also looking at opportunities in Asia Pacific.”