On the road to digital transformation, Vodafone Egypt focused on delivering an online-first experience for its customers, including online account top-ups and the ability to pay telecoms bills on the Vodafone website.
The company identified a need to focus on an enhanced payment experience. The telecoms provider wanted to allow customers to safely top up as frequently and by as much as needed, while also broadening the range of payment cards accepted on the Vodafone Egypt website.
Vodafone needed to find a payments partner with strong technical capabilities to deliver an improved payments solution. The new payments partner also needed deep relationships with financial institutions to ensure the high level of card acceptance that would support growth at Egypt's leading telecoms brand.
What was the challenge?
Customers increasingly prefer to transact online rather than offline and do so more frequently than before. Today’s online-savvy customers expect high levels of flexibility when paying online. Coping with these high customer expectations can be challenging – particularly when companies need to simultaneously guard against the risk of fraud.
Vodafone Egypt wanted to improve the level of payment flexibility it offered to its customers to ensure that customers could effortlessly make payments. For example, Vodafone needed to make sure that customers could top up their prepaid accounts as frequently as wanted – and by an amount that met their communications requirements.
Similarly, the company wanted to give customers the ability to pay using their preferred payment method, including most locally issued payment methods as well as payment cards issued outside of Egypt.
However, increased payment flexibility had to go hand in hand with increased protection against fraud to ensure that payment systems remained safe and secure, and that increased payment flexibility did not lead to an associated increase in fraud.
What makes for the ideal payments partner?
Finding an alternative payments partner was challenging given the scale of Vodafone Egypt’s customer base. A new payments processor needed the technological brawn to be able to cope with very large payment volumes within a complex technology environment.
The enormous brand value behind Vodafone also meant that the company needed to partner with a payment processor that could be trusted to deliver a consistently good customer experience.
These requirements led Vodafone Egypt to Amazon Payment Services in large part due to our proven ability to handle payments for one of the Middle East’s biggest online shopping portals, souq.com.
Our proven capacity to deliver combined with souq.com’s reputation for a smooth payment experience re-assured Vodafone that Amazon Payment Services had the reputation and the capabilities to handle payments on behalf of millions of Vodafone customers.
How Amazon Payment Services proved to be a good fit
In addition to a proven reputation, Amazon Payment Services also had specific solutions for each of the challenges faced by Vodafone Egypt.
Vodafone’s concerns around fraud and the associated restrictions on payments were relieved thanks to the Protect Plus feature from Amazon Payment Services. Protect Plus delivers intelligent anti-fraud capabilities that facilitate secure payments by identifying fraudulent patterns and by enabling rules-based controls against fraud.
Card acceptance is another strong point at Amazon Payment Services. As one of the Middle East’s largest payment processors, we maintain strong relationships with financial institutions in the region and around the world. Vodafone Egypt could therefore rely on our established relationships to safely start accepting international payment cards as well as a broader range of local cards.
During the implementation process, it quickly became apparent that the telecoms operator’s platforms were relatively complex, which posed several integration challenges. Nonetheless, integration was a complete success given the flexible approach from the Amazon Payment Services team members who quickly found solutions for obstacles.
Nour Mohamed, “Digital Products Marketing Manager” says:
"Thanks to our engagement with Amazon Payment Services our customers now have greater flexibility in terms of when and how much they can pay, and greater freedom in their choice of payment methods. We are also seeing fewer cases of fraud. The team deftly navigated a complex integration, smoothly addressing queries as these came up. I highly recommend Amazon Payment Services to anyone seeking a secure and trusted payment processing provider."
Clear benefits and an ongoing relationship
With Amazon Payment Services now on board as payments partner, Vodafone Egypt’s customers enjoyed more freedom to pay how they wanted to, and when they wanted to.
The company also enjoyed increased protection against fraud, reducing the costs of fraudulent payments, while customers who hold cards issued outside of Egypt can now top up their mobile accounts and pay their bills with an international card.
These improvements quickly filtered down to the company’s bottom line – with a noted increase in Vodafone Egypt’s total payment volume over the year, while the payment success ratio also increased to reach a much higher level.
Signing with Amazon Payment Services made for happier Vodafone customers and also delivered growth opportunities to Vodafone Egypt, but that’s only the start as the team at Amazon Payment Services continues to roll out advanced payment features in partnership with Vodafone Egypt.
