Taking a holiday is great! However, who is going to take care of your beloved furry friend? Petbnb offers a solution to this problem by connecting dog and cat owners with pet sitters who take care of them in domestic settings. To ensure automated, easy, scalable and trusted payments on the platform, Petbnb chose to work with Online Payment Platform (OPP).
Petbnb was founded in 2016 in the Netherlands. The company has since expanded to Germany and Belgium and connects 200,000 pet lovers and processes thousands of payments on a monthly basis. Trust is one of the key values of the company, as people are extremely careful about who they trust with their pet. “You’re not just buying a product like an iPhone, but a personal service to ensure your ‘baby’ is in good hands”, says Nicholas Latham, co-founder at Petbnb. “This means we are very much focused on having a verified user base and a solid payment flow to support a smooth relation between the pet owner and the pet sitter.”
In the first few months, the platform manually took care of payments between the pet owners and the sitters. In a time when PSD2 wasn’t in effect and the platform had a modest user base, this seemed the logical thing to do. However, as the platform grew it soon became too much to handle, not to mention the risk Petbnb was running by holding and managing all the customers' funds themselves. As iDEAL was the primary payment method in the Netherlands, Latham also was looking to expand payment options. So, only a year after its inception, he decided it was time to automate, scale and extend payment options on the platform - including iDEAL and PayPal - and connected with OPP.
"iDEAL would be a game changer for us in terms of making payments easier and making it possible for everyone to pay on our platform. We discovered OPP was the first to receive a license to provide C2C iDEAL payments in the Netherlands. As we connected, we experienced an instant click as they were very aware of the dynamics of our platform”, says Latham.
After an extremely quick implementation phase of only one week, Petbnb started to experience the benefits of working with OPP. “As this kind of service is all about trust, we need to make the whole booking process as smooth as possible and need to reduce any fears people might have of things that might go wrong. Needless to say, payments are an incremental part of this process. From that perspective, the fact that OPP is supporting us with escrow payments is important. The money is held in a third-party account and the sitter is ensured that he or she will get paid if the terms of the ‘transaction’ are met. Having this in place installs trust for both parties. Also, we can now offer the sitters on our platform a lot of transparency with their own personal dashboard where they can keep track of their transactions and how much they’ve earned.”
Two years after the start of the cooperation with OPP, the European Payment Service Providers Directive (PSD2) came into effect. For Petbnb this was no issue as it was already covered by working with OPP for its payments. “Having to think about new legislation can be a huge headache and distracts you from your core business”, says Latham. “The DAC7 regulation and GDPR are prime examples. Working with OPP, we’re sure we’re always up to date. Moreover, there is a lot less personal data we have to store in our database. As OPP’s business is built around reliability and security, we don’t have to worry about that, which is a relief.”
Besides handling payments, OPP also integrated KYC (Know Your Customer) into the user flow at Petbnb and is able to onboard users in the European Economic Area. Latham: “It’s needless to say that having verified users is essential to us. We also benefit from ongoing support on this. For instance, if users change their bank account and haven’t verified this account, OPP automatically will be notified and takes care of this. This is also reassuring from a fraud risk perspective.”
Petbnb and OPP both have come a long way since the start of their cooperation. However, Latham still experiences the can-do attitude and personal approach of a start-up at OPP. “Especially when it involves such a crucial element of your platform, you don’t want to go through lots of layers in an organization, which is typical for bigger corporates. Also, OPP keeps us up to date on interesting pilots and new features or additions to their portfolio that could be useful for us. To me, it’s important to have that kind of partnership.”
Petbnb is continuously focusing on improving its platform and user experience. Also, it’s looking at additional service offerings with third party providers, such as grooming or training. In the last two years, the platform has grown a hundred percent in its current markets. “International expansion is on our radar but as trust is key, launching and building a user base in a new country takes time. It’s encouraging to know though that with OPP setting up payments for a new market can be done in a day.”
“Easy, smooth payments and fast payment confirmation are key to our platform. These things simply need to work. If it doesn’t, it kills the trust our users have in the platform, which affects our brand. At the end of the day, we only make money if people pay. OPP is therefore strategic to our success”, concludes Latham.