“Netcetera has a longstanding track record and experience in securing transaction and facilitating user friendly and frictionless flows according to the rules and regulations of schemes worldwide. The payment and banking industry of the SEE region is open and ready to be a player at the forefront of technological development and we can lead them on their way.” Petre Bozhikov, responsible for sales and business development of secure digital payments in SEE at Netcetera

Which countries does your team serve and where do you see the most potential? What is your role, your mission, what do you want to bring to this region, etc.?

My team covers CEE and SEE. To be more precise, I’m covering SEE and part of the Balkan region. I’m seeing a big potential in Romania as a market – because of its size and population. Bulgaria has also a rapidly developing FinTech sector and Greece is also trying to push more digitized services and to promote online commerce in the last years.

My role as a Business Development Executive is to take care of development of new business opportunities. My mission also covers the promotion of Netcetera’s product portfolio and representing Netcetera in various fairs, summits and in the public. I would like to bring cutting-edge products and services with great support and added value to this region. Also, I hope that together with the banking and payment industry and introduction of our products and solutions we can create added value and benefit to their end customers.

In what stage of development is the payment and banking market in the SEE region? Is cash still king? Is e-commerce growing especially fast?

I would say that the market is rapidly passing the development stage and growing towards a more mature stage. This is due to the younger population that is more accepting of the new trends in the payment industry. Cash is still the king for everyday use and probably about half the population still uses mostly cash, but we’re seeing signs for a decrease of those numbers. E-commerce is growing fast, and we see many new online stores, especially in the past year.

What are specific challenges the banks, issuers, merchants in that region are facing? How can they tackle them?

I think that the challenge in this region for the banking and payment sector is the gap in terms of standardization and close cooperation between neighboring countries and its finance and payment sector. A part of neighboring countries are members of EU and some are not. The members of the EU have to follow EU’s finance and monetary regulations and directives, but other countries from the Balkan peninsula are not subjected to those rules. A good solution for this issue will be organizing the payment and banking sector in e-commerce and finance associations. We can see that such associations have been formed in the past years with the purpose of close cooperation between sectors and better regional cooperation.

What can Netcetera do to support them? Where and how can we have the most impact?

Netcetera can support the banking and payment sector in the CEE and SEE in various ways. We’re fully compliant and an early adopter with all the payment and compliance standards. We are one of the first companies that was certified with the latest EMVCo 2.2.0 standard which will be mandatory in the near future. We can support companies with our cutting-edge products and services in the entire payment ecosystem, be it related to acquiring, issuing or digital wallet solutions. We are also working on new topics, such as EMV® SRC (Click to pay) and Merchant Tokenization. For companies from non-EU countries, we can use our experience to offer a combination of consultancy services with our product portfolio to support clients to adjust their systems for the upcoming changes and thus enabling uninterrupted services to their clients.

Netcetera is the right fit and a trustful partner because of our long-standing experience in the payment and banking sector and our rule to be an early adopter of the latest trends in this field. All this combined with our high-quality products and services is reflected in our goal to provide excellent quality and experience to our clients.

Check out our latest successful project in this region for Halkbank.

Note:
EMV® is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries and an unregistered trademark elsewhere. The EMV trademark is owned by EMVCo, LLC.

Petre Bozhikov

Sales Executive Secure Digital Payments (SEE & Balkans)

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