PagoNxt uses Salesforce to globalise its tailored customer experience

 

PagoNxt was created at the end of 2020 as part of the Santander Group, with the goal of bringing together all the group’s payment solutions in one innovative fintech platform.

The company’s operations are structured around three customer divisions: Merchants, which are serviced via the Getnet platform; Trade, via One Trade (for businesses and SMEs); and consumers, via Superdigital. PagoNxt is present in Europe and Latin America, and is currently pursuing international expansion in a market worth $500 billion.

“Our challenge is to provide businesses and customers with immediate added value, with agile solutions that don’t need major investment and allow us to evolve over time,” explained Juan Antonio Alcaraz, Head of Customer Engagement at PagoNxt. With these requirements in mind, the company developed an architecture based on Salesforce.

Innovation and streamlining costs: disrupting banking’s traditional approach to IT

As a fintech company, the team behind PagoNxt knew from the outset that they needed to do things differently. “We had to be effective and find a new way to use technology that broke away from the traditional approach in the banking sector,” explained Alcaraz.

From this starting point, after analysing both current and future priorities, the company decided to put Salesforce at the heart of its technology strategy as its main interface with customers, both internally and externally.

PagoNxt used Sales CloudMarketing CloudService Cloud, and Experience Cloud to design its solution, modelling and connecting each of the components and launching them by country and business type. “For me, Salesforce is a crucial partner in our strategy and the way we provide customer service,” explained Jesús Arias, Head of Customer Experience, Merchants, who also highlighted Salesforce’s “reputation in the market, its impact, its global presence and the flexibility of its tools.”
 
 
“Salesforce is at the heart of our technology strategy, as our main customer interface.”
Juan Antonio Alcaraz
Head of Customer Engagement, PagoNxt
 
 
 

Adoption over adaptation

The guiding principle behind the design of PagoNxt’s payment processing platform has been to avoid having a patchwork of solutions across the three divisions. “Instead, we chose to pursue the creation of a reference point to minimise the cost of the different implementations, reflecting the commonalities in providing services to customers in Europe and Latin America,” explained Alcaraz.

This has allowed PagoNxt to avoid customised developments, prioritising the adoption of solutions over adaptation. The wide range of features provided by Salesforce has been key to this approach. “This doesn’t mean we don’t have access to customised applications,” said Alcaraz, “but it’s now part of implementation, not development.”

The Merchants business has exhaustively prioritised the ‘one portal’ approach: when products are cloned across regions, they only need fine-tuning before they are ready for use.

“The time needed to create payment platforms for Merchants can now be measured in months, not years. This is a huge break from how things used to be done in the banking sector,” added Alcaraz, pointing out that 80% of development takes place at the global level, with just 20% for specific locations.

 
“For me, Salesforce is a crucial partner in our strategy and the way we provide customer service.”
Jesús Arias
Head of Customer Experience, Merchants, PagoNxt
 
 

The same functionality across the world

For the Merchants division, the project began in Latin America, in Mexico. Arias explained how the company then shifted its focus to Europe. “For me, one of the biggest advantages of working with Salesforce is having access to the same tools, wherever you are in the world,” he noted, highlighting the benefits of customers in Europe and Latin America having access to the same functionality.

“In six to ten months, we’ve been able to launch a minimum viable product for our portals, Getnet, which is used by both executives and customers,” said Arias. Based on Experience Cloud, the portals provide customers with access to functionality like managing their activity and viewing transactions lists.

Similarly, feedback from internal operations has been positive. “The integration of all the different clouds, aligning Sales Cloud with Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, creates an ecosystem that closes the loop in all conversations and communications involving businesses,” explained Arias.

Automated customisation

Arias’ vision is clear. “We want the Getnet portal to be at the heart of customer service.” This means a strong ecommerce strategy that treats customers as digital natives from the moment they are onboarded. It’s a customer-centric approach in which customisation plays a fundamental role.
 
“The time needed to create payment platforms for Merchants can now be measured in months, not years, which is a huge break from the way things used to be done in the banking sector.”
Juan Antonio Alcaraz
Head of Customer Engagement, PagoNxt 
 
 

“All the communications for our own businesses, as well as the ones they will use, are based on Salesforce automation tools,” explained Arias. PagoNxt has created hierarchical structures with global, regional, and local scopes. This allows the company to undertake sales campaigns and activities at all levels, then reuse and share them, in line with the ‘one portal’ approach.

Alcaraz also highlighted another aspect of customisation. “Salesforce has paved the way for alternative channels as part of an omnichannel strategy. As we gain a 360-degree view of our customers, we know what they’re looking for in terms of communications, timings, and channels, all of which boost loyalty.”

Streamlined integration and orchestration

In addition to cutting the time to market of the company’s solutions, Alcaraz also values the ease of connectivity provided by the Salesforce ecosystem across the different clouds and even with legacy environments. “It used to be costly to achieve this sort of integration and orchestration, but with Salesforce it’s all cloud native. Integration for Merchants is so seamless that we’ve not even needed MuleSoft, which is used for Trade.

“Salesforce gives us an architecture with connectivity via API layers, making it almost as easy as plug and play. This further reduces time to market when transferring solutions between regions and businesses,” he said, adding that these results would be almost impossible without Salesforce.

 
“All the communications for our own businesses, as well as the ones they will use, are based on the Salesforce automation tools.”
Jesús Arias
Head of Customer Experience, Merchants, PagoNxt
 
 

“All the communications for our own businesses, as well as the ones they will use, are based on Salesforce automation tools,” explained Arias. PagoNxt has created hierarchical structures with global, regional, and local scopes. This allows the company to undertake sales campaigns and activities at all levels, then reuse and share them, in line with the ‘one portal’ approach.

Alcaraz also highlighted another aspect of customisation. “Salesforce has paved the way for alternative channels as part of an omnichannel strategy. As we gain a 360-degree view of our customers, we know what they’re looking for in terms of communications, timings, and channels, all of which boost loyalty.”

 
“It used to be costly to achieve this sort of integration and orchestration, but with Salesforce it’s all cloud native.”
Juan Antonio Alcaraz
PagoNxt Head of Customer Engagement, PagoNxt
 
 

“The interconnection of everything related to our customers gives us an extremely powerful vision across the board,” explained Alcaraz. “We can see activities and campaigns, how they use our products, and much more.” Everything is displayed on a dashboard with access to full customer metrics and in-depth knowledge.

Compliance guaranteed

PagoNxt operates in the highly regulated finance industry, but Alcaraz knows Salesforce takes all this into account. “Unlike storing data on an unaudited, unregulated third-party cloud, it’s on the list of tested solutions for all regulators.”

All PagoNxt’s data is encrypted on the cloud and can only be accessed by users with the right privileges granted by their roles and profiles. Security is guaranteed. The incorporation of Salesforce Shield provides extra peace of mind, further boosting the levels of trust, transparency, compliance, and governance offered by the platform.
“Shield strengthens the supervision of the use of applications and data, providing a real-time tool for automating security policies,” explained Alcaraz. “It’s a layer that allows auditing for regulatory compliance.”

Rapid innovation

PagoNxt’s plans for the short and medium term include consolidating regions, products, and customer segments. Alcaraz draws attention to the prospects for growth. “The Salesforce platform is robust enough that we can scale up without losing control and avoid any interruptions to production.”

In the specific case of the Merchants division, Arias noted, “Our engagement strategy is now based on minimum viable products. We need to be able to offer even more value, further automating onboarding, with specific processes for specific sales channels, as well as other improvements, all while ensuring convergence and that the development and maintenance of platforms in Europe is mirrored in Latin America.”

Alcaraz values the support provided by Salesforce throughout this journey, noting that it has consistently shown its ability to combine vision and technology. He points out Salesforce’s capacity for innovation, citing the pilot programmes in which PagoNxt has participated. “The speed at which Salesforce innovates is incredible. They’re constantly updating us on their product lines and we explore things that might be useful to us together. Sometimes we even manage to solve certain problems in one go.”

 
 
 
 

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