Maersk, a global logistics company has entered into a partnership with Stripe, an online financial services company, to simplify payment processes for its customers worldwide.
The partnership, according to Maersk, enables it to tap into new technology to make it easy to ship cargo around the world.
Prior to partnering with Stripe, Maersk’s payments operations were fragmented across multiple providers including tokenisation, another for payments processing, and a third for managing security authentication.
Then, it was discovered that juggling several solutions which were not always interoperable introduced needless friction into an already complicated setting.
But using Stripe enabled Maersk customers to combine these disparate systems into a single, agile payments portal such that they are now able to pay seamlessly through an intuitive dashboard that supports payment methods that Maersk previously could not accept, like credit cards.
The portal also adapts to regional banking requirements and provides international customers with localised point-of-sale experiences.
“We started on this journey a few years back because we knew it was the future, and we wanted to modernise and serve our customers better. We had to make it simple for people to ship and track their orders from one end of the world to the other with a click of a button,” said Navneet Kapoor, chief technology and information officer at Maersk.
According to Kapoor, Maersk needed to find the right partner for a critical element of its operations which is international payments as part of its modernisation strategy.
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Findings show that Maersk’s business is intrinsically complex, with banking requirements, currencies, and preferred payment methods all varying from region to region, but a one-size-fits-all approach was not going to work, which was why Maersk turned to Stripe.
“We knew that customers wanted to work with us, when they wanted, and where they wanted. Creating a payments system that allowed this flexibility was an essential piece of the puzzle. We found that Stripe had the right modern infrastructure, and was the right global partner, to help us get there,” Kapoor added.
While noting that local prioritisation is essential to meeting the shipping giant’s customers’ needs, Kapoor said Stripe has supported the company to ensure its infrastructure works seamlessly across multiple markets.
“This approach will only become more important as we continue to expand and cement our position as a global leader in logistics,” he said.
Maersk was founded in Svendborg, Denmark in 1905 by sea captain Peter Mærsk Møller, and over the course of the 20th century grew to become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. Today, its vast logistics network spans 130 countries and moves tens of billions of dollars worth of goods around the world each year.
Maersk has remained successful because it has figured out how to change. At a time when many players still work on paper, communicate via fax, and transact in cash, Maersk has modernised its economic infrastructure, in part with help from Stripe.
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