Globalisation and digitalisation has allowed many opportunities for people to move to a foreign country. However, home often holds a special place in people’s hearts, especially the feeling of homesickness that arises from those that move far away from where they were born.
The Thai diaspora is no exception to feeling homesick. With 1.1 million of them across the globe, it’s certain that some would turn to digital means to reminisce about Thailand.
This is where SeesanTV, a streaming platform specialising in Thai media, and by extension Asian media from India, Japan, Korea, and more, comes in to fill the void. With more than 40 live channels and video-on-demand playback made available less than an hour after the broadcast, the team behind SeesanTV works hard to update their listings 24 hours a day. Thus ensuring that their viewers are able to stay on top of their favourite series anytime on any smart device.
To achieve the lofty goal of reaching out to the Thai diaspora, SeesanTV not only needed the library of media made available, they also needed a steady infrastructure in place to allow Thai users to subscribe to the platform and stream the content seamlessly. However, recent revisions to Thailand’s anti money laundering laws proved to be a challenge with many global payment providers taking a hit in their operations.
SeesanTV had previously partnered with a global payments platform to allow their users to pay for their subscription services. While it had worked well in terms of providing a seamless global checkout, it was limited in that there were only two ways their users could pay: through the platform’s eWallet or through debit and credit cards.
On top of that, the government’s revision of anti money laundering laws also caused a hitch in most global payment providers operating in the country, including PayPal which had to relaunch their services in Thailand.
With these bumps on the road in a dynamic legal environment for payment operations, SeesanTV needed to find a payment platform that could ensure a seamless checkout without operational hiccups, preferably one with a local presence so that they could stay on top of legislative changes.
This is where Tazapay’s solution comes in.
Through Tazapay’s international payment gateway, SeesanTV was able to keep their checkout smooth while also offering new payment options for their customers.
Since Tazapay has local payment partners in Thailand, Tazapay’s international checkout enables users to pay beyond just debit or credit cards. SeesanTV’s hosted checkout page with Tazapay now offers PromptPay and local bank transfer as accepted payment methods when customers subscribe to their streaming services.
These localised partnerships also mean that the Thai diaspora can pay with their preferred payment method from all across the world, leading to a 10% growth in user base ever since integrating with Tazapay.
With Tazapay checkout, not only did this enable their users to pay the way they like, SeesanTV also enjoyed a further 2% in cost savings. This benefit is carried over to their users, who won’t need to pay an additional fee when they choose to checkout via Tazapay for SeesanTV’s subscriptions.
“Not only is Tazapay easy to install and easy to use, our customers can pay more easily and can choose from many different payment methods thanks to Tazapay.” - Wirin Chimsuwan, Director of SeesanTV
By integrating with Tazapay, SeesanTV was able to navigate through Thailand’s ever-changing legislative landscape to serve the international Thai community. This also led to capturing a wider user base since integration and passing cost savings to their audience due to Tazapay’s lower platform fees on top of offering localised payment methods from wherever they are based.
If you’re interested in finding the right localised checkout, currency conversion, and payout solution for your eCommerce platform, feel free to contact us so that we can understand your online business needs.
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For freelancers to succeed in the digital era, they have to do more than just honing and using the skills they have in exchange for cash. They also need to find and retain clients, manage their time, and also have a way to receive payments for their work.
The latter of these three tasks can become tedious quickly as they take away the time needed for a freelancer to do what they do best, and even more so if their administrative and networking skills aren’t up to snuff.
Hence, Refrens came to be in order to solve these problems for them.
Refrens is an all-in-one platform for freelancers and agencies to manage their bookings, payments, and also to look for other potential clients registered on the platform. While most of their infrastructure has worked well for helping freelancers and agencies based in India to get started, Refrens did have plans to expand beyond domestic borders so that their users can have more opportunities with clients from abroad.
Are you a SaaS platform looking for a frictionless international payment provider to integrate with? Talk to Tazapay and find out how you can enjoy higher profit margins from competitive FX rates!
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This however, came with its own sets of challenges.
Prior to this, Refrens already had a payment solution that worked well for their domestic clients. However, the system’s specialisation towards local payments in India meant that they were not ready for the challenges of handling cross-border payments.
Since international payments tend to be scrutinised due to strict regulations, licensing, and fraud and money laundering prevention, their previous payment providers often flagged false positives for genuine transactions. Due to this system, many payments were held back and/or rejected before they could even be processed.
This took away from the user experience and led to a lot of frustration for international clients. In turn, these clients also never came back to the platform due to this major payment issue.
The freelancer platform then needed to make sure that their next payments provider could handle the rigor of cross-border payments processing.
However, after looking for other platforms to solve this problem, it became quite apparent that most global payment platforms either had high platform fees, unfavourable forex rates, or couldn’t transfer their funds from their country of operations into the Indian market.
It became apparent that there wasn’t a happy medium between an effective payments provider for the domestic Indian market and a global platform that operated with competitive rates, until they came across Tazapay.
By using Tazapay’s payment platform, Refrens was able to solve their expansion plans, especially when entering the USA market.
Because of Tazapay’s knowledge in handling cross-border payments in underserved but growing lanes like USA-India, the payment success rate was high. This, in turn, also helped Refrens retain clients due to the seamless payment process.
“Compared to other platforms, the forex rate was competitive, and more importantly, the success rate in processing payments was high. Tazapay knowledge about cross border payments and the processes in place to detect genuine fraud means that very little of our transactions are flagged as false positives.” - Naman Sarawagi, Founder
Refrens used Tazapay’s direct payment solution, which involved the collection, holding, currency conversion, and disbursement of payments under Refrens’ named virtual account.
Not only did this help the freelancer platform gain the trust of their users, they also were able to reduce the settlement time from Tazapay’s collection and payout capabilities by 1-2 days.
On top of that, Refrens also enjoyed lower competitive Forex rates, where there was a difference of 1% compared to market rates for USD to INR conversions and vice versa. This difference has also helped Refrens to have a higher profit margin when dealing with international clients on top of reducing churn in their international user base.
Through Tazapay, Refrens was able to solve their issue of dealing with international payments and is enjoying increased user retention, reduced administrative and settlement times, and cost savings from better rates and an improved bottom line.
If you’re interested in finding the right collection, currency conversion, and disbursement solution for your SaaS platform, feel free to contact us so that we can understand your business needs and work with you.
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