The online marketplace is expanding at breakneck speed with mushrooming online merchants and payment gateways. Sellers and buyers alike have been brushing away national borders while conducting business. While the prospects sound promising, not all ventures end successfully. Often, unscrupulous elements flood the markets masquerading as serious buyers to swindle merchants. It is difficult to ensure that a payment service provider to be made accountable especially if they hail from another country. There have been instances where payment services have vanished without trace, sinking merchants worldwide.

Malaysian AWEpay was formed in 2012, to fill this very gap in the online payments space, bringing in the much sought-after reliability and accountability. “AWEpay’s years of experience and partnerships in the payments space ensures that any solution provided has gone through vigorous due diligence and KYB (Know Your Business) processes, so that we are able to provide a safe, stable, and reliable solution to merchants around the world. AWEpay has had a sterling record in the past six years because we provide full accountability to our merchant partners, and they always get paid as long as settlement is completed by the bank,” informs Casey Seow, Managing Director of AWEpay.

It is necessary for online merchants to be flexible with the number of payment gateways they offer, be it Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, JCB, Unionpay, WeChat, Alipay, FPX, or eNets. However, each gateway comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. The most popular options like Visa and Mastercard charge anything between 2-7 percent as fees. Channels like FPX charge a flat fee. Merchants will now be able to choose the popular forms of payment channels with AWEpay solutions as it provides them with the freedom of providing flexibility with an assurance of safety.

AWEpay also eases the painpoints of merchants while expanding their products and businesses overseas. AWEpay says that it takes the time to understand client needs, their target geographies, their market segment to tailor a complete packaged solution, to easily accept payments. “The most important part of any business is the transaction of receiving payment. With online commerce, getting paid seamlessly is the most crucial process of any online shopping experience. AWEpay positions itself as the merchant’s payment partner, where they can continue being Awesome and AWEpay ensures they always receive payments wherever they may be,” says Seow.

The founders of the company, Casey Seow and the late Harpal Singh named their company behind the very USP of the their offerings, as Accountable Wordwide Epayments (AWEpay). Seow spent 15 years in the payment business, and has been working on building trust with their clients. While the company is unable to disclose the names and numbers of their clients, due to confidentiality reasons, it covers a wide gamut of merchants and industries that sell goods and services online. FOREX, eGaming, healthcare companies, herbal product sellers, nutrition sector, and legitimate multi-level marketing are some of the many merchants who use their services. Some Asian banks might consider certain number of industries as high risk, while a few EU banks are flexible with the choice of industries they operate in. AWEpay serves all industries with their safe and reliable solutions, allowing many merchants to serve their customers.

AWEpay leverages automation and API integration to design its solutions, to ensure that businesses run without much intervention. At the same time, the automated systems are constantly re-engineered to keep up with the latest changes in the latest trends in the payments industry. The company strives to ensure that it maintains highest levels of security to adhere to policies, regulations and compliances of the industry, and the interests of the merchants. AWEpay’s payment processing is PCI-DSS compliant. Along with the certification, there are quarterly server penetration tests done as well as DDOS prevention to protect servers.

Regulatory compliance is a yet another feature of AWEpay. Since the company caters to a large number of banks across countries, it brings forth varied requirements in terms of regulations and policies. AWEpay reacted to this challenge by creating extremely stringent processes of its own to make sure that they meet all the international conditions. In addition, AWEpay works continuously to remain compliant with the requirements of every financial institution they work with.

Since AWEpay works in a heavily regulated industry involving banks and financial institutions, they are restricted with less legroom for experimentation. Yet, the company innovates products and customizes solutions as per the needs of their clients. Their latest offering is a prepaid debit card to manage payouts and commissions. “With the banks becoming more and more stringent with the transfer of funds, AWEpay is able to provide a compliant and easy way to send and receive money with almost the same flexibility as cash and the security of a credit card,” said Seow.

One of AWEpay’s clients is The Greenlife Company in Dubai and Morocco providing beauty and herbal care products.

It could easily pay residuals and commissions to its MLM members easily within the region. However, when the members expanded to Asia, Europe, and CIS countries, payments became a challenge. AWEpay eased this issue with its prepaid Mastercard product with fully integrated processes. Members can upload their own KYC (Know Your Customer) norms and receive their payments in the form of a debit card. The card has access to over a million ATMs and 35.9 million merchants Worldwide!

AWEpay is also working to launch yet another revolutionary product, called the AWEwallet (Accountable Worldwide E-wallet). It is a versatile, multi-currency, crypto, and precious metals wallet that enables its users to pay and get paid for goods and services. Explaining the need for this product in the online marketplace, Seow believes the online marketplace will evolve based on their ability to interact via social media. First came the trend of attracting users to merchant websites using adwords and banner ads. Then came the trend of merchants selling their products on e-malls, which required them to be extremely cost-competitive with thin margins. Currently, the trend is to market products via social media. Products that are shared and advertised through Facebook and Instagram get eyeballs and enhance brand value.

“We started to see a trend emerge in peer-to-peer buying and selling, via social media. However, two key elements were missing which are ease of payments and a viral way to market a product or a service. Hence, we started to develop an e-wallet that will incorporate all the payment options in Asia (including Crypto currencies), allowing peer-to-peer transfers for goods and services within the e-wallet to keep transaction fees as low as possible,” he said. The product will be launched with hardware HSM tokenization. This will ensure faster payments with heavily encrypted sensitive information only accessible via authorised tokens.

"AWEpay positions itself as the merchant’s payment partner and ensures they always receive payments wherever they may be,” says Seow"

AWEpay will also couple this e-wallet with its social media marketing program called Clicstagram, which will drive traffic through Facebook and Instagram. Users with accounts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Youtube can participate in the campaign, get paid for clicks, shares and purchases. These payments will be made directly into users’ e-wallets. But they can also be withdrawn into their own debit cards, branded by Visa, Mastercard, and Unionpay. The company plans to soft-launch AWEwallet by end of July 2017, following by Clicstagram by end of the third quarter 2017. AWEpay is incorporated in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK, Republic of Georgia, and soon will be in Philippines.

AWEpay’s deep understanding of online marketplace and its needs led to combine social media marketing with payments. It intends to cover an enormous section of population by popularizing its wallet along with its merchants, to make sure that they thrive in the process.