Flexible credit for online and POS purchases

Twisto, a Prague-based startup, has been offering innovative online payment solutions since 2013. Its products are especially attractive to customers in Central and Eastern Europe. This is a huge market comprising more than 8.5 million people or 38% of the population.

The company’s flagship product, Twisto Pay, comes in two different flavors: Online Payments and Twisto Account. Online Payments lets users make purchases and pay within 14 days with no extra fee; Twisto Account gives them 45 days to make payment with a higher credit limit. Interest is only charged when customers take even longer to pay.

Twisto’s short-term financing options were originally only available for online use in e-shops. In order to expand the sales channel and prevent time-consuming integration for each merchant, Twisto decided to offer customers a card and wearable: It’s a fact that 92% of all sales are still made in physical retail outlets. Twisto wanted to close this gap and unlock the potential of a much larger market by offering an easy-to-use, mobile digital alternative for financing purchases both online and at the POS. In order to address the upper segment of the Twisto user base, Twisto decided to provide customers with apple pay.

Twisto teamed up with Wirecard, whose experts made its “buy now, pay later” products POS-capable by adding a contactless card and wearable. Wirecard APIs that Twisto integrated into their apple and android apps provided this functionality, naturally while implementing the highest possible standards of security with the Fraud Prevention Suite and other features. In combination with Twisto’s own inhouse developed “Nikita” scoring tool, Twisto is able to keep default rates below the industry standard, and are able to adapt credit lines for their customers based on their record of accomplishment. In February 2019 Wirecard added Apple Pay to allow Twisto to address high end users with payments via iPhone and apple watch.

Thanks to Wirecard technology, Twisto has cleared a major hurdle and expanded its market beyond e-commerce to also gain a foothold in physical retail. The figures speak for themselves: Since late 2017, the company has nearly doubled its net profit per user, annual sales of Online Payments and Twisto Account have soared to nearly twice their previous level, and customers using Online Payments have increased their online purchases to triple the national average. And there’s more to come. The latest milestone, in February 2019, was integration of Apple Pay. This enabled Twisto be the first non-bank entity to accept this payment method in the Czech Republic.