Media Seller Pond5 Cuts Through Payments Noise with Adyen Tech

After a March acquisition, Pond5, an online marketplace for stock media, found its operations in more than two dozen countries with different payment methods in each. To restructure the checkout process and consolidate payment methods, Pond5 chose to work with Adyen.

“Pond5 represents the perfect type of customer, looking to go global in scope…and maximize monetization in those other countries,” says Peter Caparso, president of Adyen North America. “A bunch of our customers that started out really small have blossomed into multinational customers.”

When New York-based Pond5 acquired Pixmac, another stock media marketplace, it immediately started doing business with customers in 17 different languages in a large number of countries, including Spain, Russia, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan and Slovenia.

“We were getting bank statements from half a dozen different banks, most often times in different languages,” says Tom Bennett, CEO of Pond5. “We’d have to sort through all of that and then get it into the accounting system.”

Now everything is organized in one place. “With Adyen, we were able to consolidate all those into one system,” Bennett says.

Pond5 selected Adyen for both domestic and international payments. Before deciding on Adyen, Pond5 reviewed other providers, including Braintree and Chase Paymentech.

“The range of payment methods and currencies they offered was the main reason for going with Adyen,” Bennett says.

Pond5 is running a hosted Web page from Adyen. At checkout, location-specific payment methods are presented to the customer depending on the country of origin.

Adyen's customizable fraud controls allow Pond5 to mix Adyen’s triggers for determining the likelihood of fraud while leveraging the marketplace’s data to create a “blended fraud score that allows us to get much better about predicting whether something is fraud or not,” says Bennett.

Companies like Adyen, focusing on ecommerce and payments gateways, could see success in the increasingly globalized marketplace.

Adyen began offering a portable card reader that accepts both mag-stripe and EMV chip-cards in December. The system, Shuttle, echoes other companies' approach to appeal to small merchants with a mobile card reader. In January, the company announced it had processed $10 billion in payments in 2012, a new record which it says puts it on par with Square’s processing volume.

Adyen's clients include Groupon, Getty Images, A&E/Lifetime Networks and Indiegogo.