The emerging Spanish company Socialpay, which offers a payment deposit system for digital purchases, hopes that its recent alliance with Caixabank, which invested one million euros in the company through Comercia Global Payments, will help them to undertake their internationalization plan.
“Our strategy is one of clear internationalization. With Caixabank we are going to accelerate both our business and theirs,” said Francisco Arechaga, a managing partner of Socialpay, the company with clients in Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Chile.
Socialpay is a company that manages payments on deposit or ‘escrow payments’, a technology that allows digital trading platforms to deposit the buyer’s money with a trusted third party until the client has received the product or service, from which time the payment is released to the seller.
“When you pay on a hosting platform or make a donation to a crowdfunding campaign, the money you contribute as a buyer remains on deposit until you enjoy the hosting or the campaign ends and the intermediary does not have it,” Aréchaga said.
In these cases, the emerging Catalan company acts as a depositary of the payment until the sale or the collective financing campaign is closed.
Socialpay provides this service for some thirty platforms, such as the Vibbo second-hand trading portal, the Truecalia train ticketing portal, or the CapitalCell scientific project financing platform, among others.
In March, Caixabank announced its investment in Socialpay through Comercia Global Payments, the joint venture it has with the US multinational Global Payments, which has acquired 20% of the company’s capital and is present on its Board of Directors.
Its entry will allow Socialpay to have “an industrial partner” that will provide payment capacity and means of transfer through the services of Caixabank, while the financial institution will obtain the possibility of offering its ‘payment on escrow’ system as part of its services to companies.
According to Aréchaga, several large trading companies are considering including in their digital sales platforms the so-called ‘marketplaces’ that allow the sale of items by third parties.
“Right now there is a huge explosion of marketplaces, the collaborative economy is just one part of this”, added the managing partner of Socialpay.
The emerging company, which also offers these intermediation services under its own brand through the Lemonpay application, closed 2017 by acting as an intermediary in transactions with an added value of 1 million euros, a figure that they hope to multiply by the end of 2018.
“Right now we are going beyond our business plan, we expect to close 2018 with 20 million euros in transactions”, said Aréchaga.
Meeting their forecasts, and even exceeding those numbers, will depend on several operations that Socialpay is closing with several companies, some on their own and others thanks to going with Caixabank, which provides them with “reaching capacity” when it comes to presenting themselves to large clients.
As an example of this, he explained that after the decision of the American e-commerce giant eBay to stop working with PayPal as a payment method, the Spanish company came to establish contacts with eBay to provide it with service, but they lacked this entity from a large company.
“We came to talk to eBay and there we realized that great opportunities must go hand in hand with a great actor. We have the right technology to have won this client, but this type of contract requires a capacity to reach out and to have the solvency that you have from a partner like Comercia”, concluded the managing partner of Socialpay.
