Case StudyExpanding Beyond Borders: How Refrens, a Freelancer Platform, Lands and Retains International Clients with Tazapay’s Payment Gateway
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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