TrustPay – Helping Businesses during COVID-19

How TrustPay’s CEO David Rintel and his team are focused on providing innovative payment services for online businesses with a cross-border reach.

First of all, how are you and your company doing in these COVID-19 times? 

David Rintel: Thank you for asking. It has been a really tough time for the whole world and many businesses. We are lucky as a company to be part of the online payments sector that is not affected by the pandemic, but on the contrary, it has strengthened at this time as many businesses needed to move to the online world. Of course, our thoughts are with all healthcare workers and other people who are beating this in the front lines for us as well as businesses that were forced to close their doors due to the pandemic.

Personally, the biggest change has been the inability to travel. My pre-COVID life involved many trips to conferences, expos, or just plain business trips, which all came to a grinding halt last year. While you can achieve a lot through video calls, they cannot fully replace personal meetings, so I am looking forward to business travel to return.

Tell us about you, your career, how you joined TrustPay.

David Rintel: My professional story is fairly simple. TrustPay is a family-owned enterprise, and we started working on the licensing documents for TrustPay as I was finishing my master’s degree in London. I joined full-time the day I submitted my thesis, and I have been with TrustPay ever since.

How does TrustPay innovate? 

David Rintel: TrustPay belongs to the first financial institution within the region that is providing secure e-commerce payments across the EEA area. Since our establishment, we have focused on providing innovative payment services for online businesses with cross-border reach offering a variety of payment solutions, as well as ATM and POS payment processing.

Payments are a rapidly developing field, with new payment methods continuing to challenge the hegemony of card-based payments, making the payment landscape more fragmented and complicated for merchants to navigate. Therefore, it is paramount for a payment provider to have advanced in-house tech capabilities to continuously address various pain points of its merchants. These include support of various payment methods, currencies, risk management as well as proper financial reconciliation, which is often underestimated.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business?

David Rintel: As I mentioned, we are very lucky to be part of an industry that has not been as affected by a pandemic as the other industries. In fact, we faced an increase in business, and we needed to get bigger as a company.

Of course, we needed to move all daily agenda to the online world; however, this was made easier by the fact the TrustPay has already been largely fully digital, and due to its international customer base, we were used to online communication with our customers.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

David Rintel: Fortunately, we did not have to lay off our employees, on the contrary, we hired many new ones, so the only thing that we needed to change was the “working from home problem”, but we did it quite well, and we managed to keep good team spirit even in the times when the only contact with your co-worker is via camera during the online meetings or teambuilding activities.

The biggest HR takeaway from the pandemic concerns long-term remote work. While many companies herald a new era of fully remote work, we recognize that even people working in the digital economy benefit from personal contact with their colleagues. From our experience, this applies almost to everybody, to various degrees depending on their personalities and job description. Thus, going forward, we believe in a hybrid workplace, with people working remotely as well as in the office. 

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

David Rintel: We are very sorry that we do not currently have the opportunity to meet our clients at conferences and exhibitions, but we believe that it will return to normal very soon. We will be again able to travel with our team and be part of many interesting events and meet new prospective clients to introduce our services to.

So far, we are in daily contact with clients and partners via email or video calls. We have also moved all the activities necessary for our business to the online environment, for example, we now have our own modern application for the online identity verification of our clients, so they do not have to visit our office in person.

Your final thoughts?

David Rintel: We are very happy that even in these difficult times, TrustPay has always been able to successfully cover the big pallet of online payments for its clients and help them with challenges they need to face.

Your website?

https://www.trustpay.eu/