Thanks to the popularity of smart phones and online payment, after the rapid development of mobile payment in recent years, the penetration rate of online scene has reached as high as 85%, and maintains a “20-80” competition situation. In this context, wechat, Alipay, cloud flash payment and other players in the payment market have led the “war” to the offline scene with a penetration rate of only 15%. As more and more players enter the game, the competition in the offline scene becomes increasingly fierce.
When talking about the offline scene of mobile payment, in addition to the smart terminal just picked the crown of large amount of Lakala, we have to mention the most focused on the line of the old receipt institutions – pay. Since its establishment in July 2011, Entourage has been deeply engaged in the offline scene with small and micro businesses as the core. After years of efforts, its overall transaction volume has reached more than one trillion RMB per month, and it has successfully entered the forefront of the payment industry.
Mobile payment offline scene competition upgrade, entourage pay by what to break through?
According to the “China third-party Payment Industry Special Research 2018” released by Analyview, entourage payment ranks first in the number of small and micro offline merchants and second in the overall strength of offline scenes. Then, in the mobile payment market where the offline scene competition continues to heat up, how does entourage pay successfully break through?
Come, licence plate kind is much, business layout is complete. At present, Entourage has five licenses: bank card receipt, Internet payment, mobile phone payment, cross-border RMB settlement and Internet small loan. Based on these licenses involving both ends of BC, online and offline, it connects both ends of B and C online and offline through different payment methods, equipment, technology and other media. The business model of entourage payment not only greatly enhances its business expansion ability, but also brings huge development space for its future value-added services such as consumer finance and tourism finance. It also highlights the compliance ability of entourage payment business and provides security guarantee for users.
Second, the channel sinking ability is strong. As one of the old offline receipt institutions, the offline sinking capacity of accompanying payment has been far ahead in the industry. Relevant data show that entourage payment has 2,000 prefecture-level service providers, 500,000 offline employees, and its business covers more than 300 prefecture-level cities and above, reaching remote areas at the county level.
It is not difficult to see that the business scope of entourage payment is not limited to supermarkets, e-commerce and other large merchants, but has penetrated into the service scope of small and micro enterprises in third – and fourth-tier cities and even more remote areas by injecting a large amount of manpower, time and other costs. It is the powerful channel sinking ability of entourage payment that not only gets through the scattered offline payment scene, but also wins it a place in the fierce competition. According to relevant data, as of October this year, entourage payment has built more than 50 vegetable market business districts and convenience store business districts, and enabled more than 6,000 merchants to accept UnionPay mobile payment.
Third, rely on the strong fintech capabilities, continue to enrich payment finance and other related services. With the further development of the business model, the interaction within the system will become more and more complex. If the data analysis and function iteration cannot be completed quickly, the service experience of merchants will be affected and the competitiveness of enterprises will be reduced. Since its establishment, Entourage payment has been increasing its output efforts in the construction of technology enabling payment business. Among them, the establishment of a private cloud platform in 2014, the establishment of the “fintech ecological platform” in 2015, the micro-service of receiving orders in 2016, the implementation of AI and blockchain, etc. It can be seen that another focus of accompanying payment is to continuously provide customers with more refined and high-quality services through technology empowerment, and thus the enterprise has been recognized by the market.
In general, the reason why entourage can become one of the leading offline orders is not only due to its accurate market judgment and self-recognition, but also due to its good use of license advantages, diversified layout and attention to timely iteration of technology, so that it can stand out in the fight for offline scenes. But the market has brought a lot of frustrations as well as joy.
Expand the “offline scene” hurt, “pay” mode dilemma
After avoiding the competition of online scene, the following payment focusing on offline scene did win a lot of market share, but also brought a lot of “pain” to the enterprise. As far as the current situation is concerned, the following problems will be encountered in the expansion of the “offline scene” of accompanying payment.
First of all, offline customer group distribution is partial, scattered, difficult to develop. Occupy most of the market share of small businesses is obviously many payment mechanism for the main customers of offline scenarios, but these small micro merchants distribution not only scattered and hidden, some in three or four lines of the county, township, some even in remote backward areas, it even more difficult for accompanying pay expand offline scenarios coefficient.
Subject to this limitation, the main “offline” entourage pay also suffered a lot. On the one hand, offline business expansion requires rigid output such as office space rent and employment cost, resulting in great cost pressure. Take the staff as an example, the accompanying payment of offline business personnel alone has reached 500,000, and the cost pressure they bear can be imagined. On the other hand, the distribution of small and micro merchants in different industries and regions not only increases the difficulty of developing merchants with accompanying payment, but also elongates the cycle of acquiring customers.
Secondly, different scenarios have different payment demands, and the accompanying payment bears great strain pressure. At present, Entourage has been deployed in retail, catering, daily necessities, clothing, shoes and hats, tourism, education, home furnishing and other scenes of industry segments. Although there are more and more types of scenes laid out, the problems that need to be solved are more and more diverse, and the difficulty coefficient is getting bigger and bigger.
After all, for merchants in different industries, they need different scenario-based order collection services. Such highly differentiated service demands require that the accompanying payment must have diversified design research and development teams and capabilities to provide better customized services for merchants. In addition, there are more and more players in the offline scene, and there will be more and more products on the market. In addition to “scene is king”, service quality is also a magic weapon for enterprises to win. It can be seen that in terms of competition and service, entourage payment is facing greater pressure.
Finally, mobile payment has low advantages offline and has little space for expansion. In order to complete a mobile payment operation, it needs to involve users, banks, payment tools and merchants, so it can be said that third-party payment is a huge system engineering. Such operation mode also means that entourage payment will not only be restrained by various parties, but also has limited operational scope, which also places many obstacles in its road to expand offline scenes.
In the case that it is difficult to unify the standards of various industrial chains, the scalability of the main offline payment is naturally not too great. “Money burning” drainage can attract some customers in a short time, but the cost is too large and difficult to last, which is obviously not a feasible strategy for the offline expansion of payment. In addition, the mainstream offline payment has been dominated by POS payment for many years, and it is not easy to further expand the market share by encroaching on the market share of POS payment.
In any case, after years of exploration and efforts, entourage has successfully survived in this stormy third-party mobile payment market, and won a share of the “offline” order receiving market. However, due to the inherent limitations of the offline scene and its own shortcomings and other factors, accompanying payment will inevitably encounter thorns in the process of development. Therefore, if they want to hold or divide a bigger “cake”, they need to strengthen their own immunity.
With so many roadblocks, how can an entourage break the game?
As far as the current situation is concerned, although entourage payment has certain advantages in offline scene, it is far from enough to survive and develop in the offline scene market which is still a blue sea only by relying on these advantages. Therefore, the entourage also needs to be prepared to deal with challenges in advance, sharp weapons as soon as possible, and constantly improve combat ability.
On the one hand, it can accelerate the penetration of the converged payment market with its strong channel sinking ability. According to the incomplete statistics of wechat and Alipay, the proportion of inter-linked orders received by banks is 20%-30%, and the proportion of inter-linked orders received by regional banks is 10%, that is to say, regional banks only occupy 2%-3% of the whole converged payment receiving market. In short, the aggregator payment market is still a big blue ocean market.
As a leader in the market for receiving orders, accompanying payment has the innate advantages of experience, team, reputation and so on to develop this blue ocean, which can be divided into a large possibility of market share. Therefore, entourage should seize this opportunity for development, make full use of the existing influence and its own promotion team of more than 500,000, accelerate the layout of the converged payment market, and deeply penetrate the converged payment market. In addition, in terms of service, it can provide customized services for merchants by launching collection reconciliation service, technology docking and other services. In order to reduce the cost of merchants, improve the operation efficiency of merchants’ payment and settlement system, and collect value-added income payment service.
On the other hand, increase the output of blockchain technology, break down the barriers of logistics and finance, and find the “capillaries” of small and micro businesses. Small and micro enterprises are easy to be ignored due to their remote distribution, difficult information acquisition and difficult development, etc. Therefore, the penetration of offline scenes is still relatively difficult. With the emergence of blockchain, capital flow, logistics and information flow can be truly and reliably recorded and transmitted, providing more real and accurate information about small and micro enterprises for the mobile payment industry, simplifying the process of expanding offline scenes.
Therefore, on the basis of the established blockchain receivables platform, the following payment should continue to increase the output of blockchain in logistics finance, and understand the distribution locations and service demands of small and micro enterprises from the logistics supply chain chain by promoting the construction of logistics finance. In this way, the following payment can not only reduce the difficulty and cost of developing customers, but also provide customers with more efficient and accurate service.
In general, as more and more players enter the game, the competition for offline scenes will be comprehensively upgraded and the competition will become more and more fierce. At that time, the accompanying payment should continue to adhere to the “mainly to receive orders offline” or change, presumably it has already had the answer. No matter what choice we make, we believe that we will unswervingly go all out for every choice. But there is one thing that will never change. If you want to go further in the mobile payment market, in addition to the “thorns” on your body, you must constantly reinforce the base and improve your self-defense ability. Only in this way can entourage get more long-term development.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110, this article first leek finance