ECOMMPAY aims for personalised payment services with ThoughtSpot

ECOMMPAY is a global payments solutions provider that offers direct acquiring capabilities, over 100 alternative payment methods, mass payouts and a single, unified portal for its merchants to accept and issue payments to customers around the world. 

However, ECOMMPAY wants to be a different kind of payment partner to its customers. It aims to provide a bespoke solution to each merchant, depending on their needs and the industry that they operate in. With this in mind, it seems appropriate that the company looked to BI platform ThoughtSpot for its analytics needs, given that ThoughtSpot too looks to take a different approach. 

We at diginomica have highlighted recently how ThoughtSpot hopes to kill off BI dashboards and instead shift the customer experience towards a ‘Google-like' experience, with search and predictive outcomes at the centre. ECOMMPAY is now using ThoughtSpot for its internal analytics and is providing its customers with more and more capabilities, with the aim of a personalised experience. 

Arthur Gots, Head of Operations and Customer Service Department at ECOMMPAY, explained how traditional tools weren't cutting it for the company and it looked to a more sophisticated approach. He said: 

Our main target is to make it more tailored to each specific merchant we are working with. 

We have been in the market for more than eight years and grew our volumes 2x each year. With this growth it caused problems evaluating all the transactions that were going through. At the beginning we were just using a simple method - downloading data and doing analytics from our side. 

Of course, when the volumes grew, it was not very comfortable doing this and we added alternative payment methods that actually increased our profile of payment methods that we are offering to our merchants. This caused some problems reviewing data, doing analytics, and having the real data in front of you when you come into work and you need an overview of what happened the previous day. 

Millions of transactions

ECOMMPAY is currently processing 1 million transactions per day, which is a huge amount of data when you consider that each transaction has different parameters. Gots said that the company was drawn to ThoughtSpot because of its different approach to analytics, particularly around the ability to search for what you need and have the answers served to you. He said: 

They offered quick analytics with a simple approach, where you can search for what you need and receive the data. We wanted to tailor solutions to our merchants - and when we are providing them with these analytics, it's not a standard approach for everyone. Because depending on their business, depending on the countries, they need specific data to be analysed and to be monitored. Thoughtspot gave us the flexibility to provide the data that each specific merchant wants to receive. 

In terms of the varying needs of merchants, they often need to analyse their volumes, as well as the conversion rate of each transaction that is passing through the system, which allows them to understand how many declines are occurring when end users cannot pay on a website for services.

Another comment query, is understanding the information they are looking at, within the context of previous periods. So, for example, a merchant will want to understand how their day is likely to end in terms of revenue, based on previous periods. This will also vary depending on different regions and industries. Gots said: 

There are a variety of parameters that they are analysing and Thoughtspot covers everything. 

You do not need to be an IT guy to understand how to combine information with ThoughtSpot, it's only the basics that you need to know in order to send the request to the system and receive the necessary data. 

Gots said that the speed and flexibility of the ThoughtSpot system, in terms of catering to the needs of individual merchants, proved particularly useful when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020 and service providers had to adapt in order to respond to the disruption. He explained: 

It's important that we can quickly retrieve the data from the system and can quickly change our requests - because the market is changing very rapidly and you need to be in line with the market and understand what is happening. 

For example, with COVID-19, we needed to monitor in real-time what was happening with our volumes, what was happening with each specific industry within our portfolio, in order to predict how the market will be changing. This will help us to understand what to offer to our merchants now, rather than waiting for some specific action to happen. We can predict something will change and offer some solutions to our merchants to help them deal with COVID. 

Fixing your data

Gots said that the implementation of ThoughtSpot was pretty quick and seamless, but that companies that are shifting to a new analytics tool need to start by understanding their data and making that data workable in terms of what they need out of it. In order words, there is no point in your database being a mess and then hoping ThoughtSpot will serve up accurate answers nonetheless. One follows the other. Gots said: 

It's a system that analyses the parameters you are getting. So when you're downloading or uploading this data to the system, you need to clearly understand that in order to achieve a better result, you need to structure your parameters and your data more precisely. This will allow the system to analyse more quickly and more easily. 

If you have a mess in your database before uploading to Thoughtspot, that's not going to be effective. You need to have it sorted on both sides. 

You also need to understand the people that will be using the system. If they are managers they will need an easier solution to retrieve this data. If you're using it only for IT, they understand the scripts and how to code, so for them it's easier for them to retrieve the data. Understanding your users and how they will be using it will depend on your implementation, what data you need to upload to the system and how it will be structured.