2022 has been an eventful year. Against a background of sweeping global affairs (including, no less, a war, a public markets crash, and Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter), 2022 has been a year of evolution and momentum for Revio. It has been extraordinary to see the continued growth in digital payment adoption in emerging markets, and with that, the growing complexity that businesses face when trying to collect revenue. 

Today, consumers have more choice than ever when it comes to ways to pay. While that choice benefits businesses in theory, companies face immense technical, operational, and commercial complexity when setting up payment and collection methods. Particularly when operating in multiple markets, the search costs to identify the most locally relevant, reliable payment methods are high, coupled with time consuming, costly technical integrations and commercial negotiations, with ongoing operational effort required to deal with chargebacks and payment failures. 

And failures abound. Our research suggests that on average, 30% of payments fail in Africa, ranging as high as 50% in some markets, especially for first payment collections. These failures can be: 

• Technical (gateway downtime, acquiring bank issues, connectivity failures)
• Operational (false positive fraud checks, outdated customer payment details, card withdrawal limits exceeded)
• Financial (insufficient funds) 
  

These payment failures represent significant revenue leakage for businesses of all sizes – some reports suggest that the cost to e-commerce businesses alone is $430 billion. While payment gateways and aggregators have made enormous strides in enabling more ways to pay, few help businesses to deal with payment failures. At Revio, our mission is to ensure that businesses never miss a payment – through routing to locally optimised payment methods and empowering businesses with tools to deal with payment failures. 

A lot can happen in a year

‍This year, we expanded our product offering beyond multi-method payments and subscription billing to include payment failure reduction through intelligent routing, failovers, and retries, and omnichannel customer interactions. This enables our clients to increase their collections success rates and reduce customer churn, leveraging proprietary data models and behavioural science. In 2023, we will be enhancing this feature set with more proactive recovery tactics, including churn prediction and targeted retention offers.  

In furthering our mission to help businesses collect more revenue, we have built new partnerships, while continuing to deepen our existing relationships with partners such as Paystack, Flutterwave, Pay@, Ozow, and Stitch. Our coverage now includes 30+ payment methods with settlement options in 40+ markets. We recently went live with our first clients in Nigeria, with locally relevant payment methods and collections, including USSD payments. Our client community now includes businesses in 4 markets, collecting revenue from 6+ countries.

We also grew our team to accelerate new product build and bolster the support we are able to offer to clients. We rewrote all our technical documentation and redesigned our company website, to better reflect our expanded offering. We look forward to building on this momentum with our new investors, who have an expansive footprint in Africa and other emerging markets.

‍The best is yet to come 

Going into 2023, we will be capitalising on the tailwinds of increasing digital payments adoption and supporting businesses through what looks to be a challenging macroeconomic climate. With customer acquisition set to slow, customer retention becomes materially more important – with many businesses facing a cash flow crunch from both sides. Our promise to businesses remains the same: we help you collect more revenue. In 2023, our roadmap includes:

• Expanding our payment methods to ensure our clients never miss a payment method because a consumer’s preferred payment method isn’t available
• Enhancing our routing rules to streamline payments processing, to reduce costs and technical failures
• Improving our dashboard with richer analytics to support client decision-making and collections strategies 
• Maturing our Revenue Recovery capabilities to cover additional use cases, including proactive customer engagement, churn prediction, and targeted retention offers
  

Thank you to our clients, partners, and investors for your continued support and inspiration, and to our growing team for your commitment to our mission. We look forward to seeing you in 2023!

Nicole Dunn, Chief Operating Officer at Revio