Worldline plans to launch new applications and payment services that, among other things, will cover the B2B needs of businesses. In fact, some of these launches will take place by the end of the year, as announced by Ioannis Kitixis, Country Head & Managing Director of Worldline Greece, welcoming representatives of the press on Wednesday, October 2, at the company's new offices in Neo Psychiko.
COOPERATION ME KEYVOTO & ISPACE
"It is the needs of society that guide our next steps. With this in mind, we work on products that we believe the market needs," he said. The aim, he explained, is to introduce new payment tools and to add additional functionalities to those already available, such as, for example, the ability to transfer money from account to account (account-account) without the need to use a card. New applications, of particular interest to retail businesses, will emerge, as Kitixis revealed, and indeed, soon from the collaboration with keyvoto and iSpace, at the moment as a member of EPI (European Payments Initiative), Worldline is working on the launch of the digital euro. At the same time, the company is working on ways to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in order to, he said, "speed up and make things faster for our customers.".
GOING FOR DEVELOPMENT 2% OF THE GROWP 2023
was a more than satisfactory year for Worldline, with global revenues exceeding €4.6 billion. In the first six months of this year, the group has already recorded revenues of more than €2.3 billion. and is on track for growth in excess of 2% year-on-year—a not insignificant figure considering that "we are in an environment where European households have reduced their spending rates, which is having an impact on the results of all the groups," as Kitixis pointed out.
THE POS CHALLENGE
The head of Worldline Greece took stock of the past eight months, during which the company was asked to manage the challenge of interfacing POS with cash registers. "It was a very difficult project for the entire Greek market and I believe that we successfully completed it," he stressed, explaining that, among other things, incoming calls to the company's call centres increased by more than 75%, while the duration of calls multiplied in order to provide solutions to the problems faced by merchants. All this, he said, had an additional operational cost, which Worldline did not pass on to its customers. According to the figures quoted by Kitixis, so far the company has completed the ECR interconnection of over 150,000 terminals, with the POS integration rate reaching 94% and increasing daily. In terms of interconnection with ERP systems, out of the 90,000 terminals undertaken by the company, 85,000 are ready and are being interconnected on a daily basis, and there are about 5,000 remaining that belong to specific categories, which will however progress within the month. In any case, the ADC's announcement of an extension until November 29 will aid in the project's successful completion for the market as a whole.
SMART POS USERS AT 40,000
Mr. Kitixis estimates that in the coming years demand will intensify for the easy transaction packages launched by the company, which from the beginning of their availability have been very popular with small merchants, relieving them, among other things, from dealing with the burden of supplies. Equally high, according to him, is the interest in the AllIn-One application that converts the POS into a cash register and on which the company has integrated technologies for the specific needs of sectors such as catering, retail and tourism. In addition, the number of customers using Smart POS, an application that turns a mobile or, alternatively, tablet into a POS terminal, now reaches 40,000 daily. As Mr. Kitixis said, the initial targeting of this product was tourism and catering businesses, but now there is strong interest from other sectors such as taxis.
