PayCargo has a plan to be the largest payment system by opening new offices globally. It is a multimodal platform with 50,000 users, a number which should increase substantially this year.
Speaking to journalists at the IATA WCS in London on Wednesday 28 September, Mike White said the company will grow faster than ever before, tripling in size over the next few months.
North America has been its main market but now PayCargo is going global; offices have been established in London, Madrid, Dubai and Hong Kong.
The money has come from investors including Blackstone, and it is partnering with other companies to establish offices in these markets quicker. Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and Japan are the next markets.
Changing its product model will drive PayCargo forward, handling all the air waybill charges, which is something carriers have been asking for.
White said, “We are in the works with several carriers to begin payments of the export charges on the air waybill themselves. This is a change to the current way business is being done, dynamic pricing requires dynamic billing. Others in the market don’t have the capability that PayCargo does.”
He says this will increase efficiency as airlines will get their money much more quickly, making accounting easier, as PayCargo takes over the functionality.
This is going to be a game changer, said White, who can see PayCargo growing four to five times through this.
“We think the airlines are ready for it, we think it will save them a lot of effort because now customers will have one platform to pay globally regardless of what mode they’re using. We have large forwarders that use our system and now we can give them one view of their whole accounting platform,” said White.
Comparing PayCargo to PayPal, it is one view to a company’s accounting solution, making it much simpler for companies to settle bills.
White said, “We are moving people into the electronic world; during the Covid period, people did not want to touch paper, payments are the same thing, they have been tied to paper.”
Take up of e-AWB and e-freight was slow, but now payments and invoicing are electronic, air waybills can be electronic, said White.
“We have seen an increase, particularly during the Covid period, of people moving towards payments, and that’s going to continue to drive going towards a truly paperless environment,” he explained.
Since the pandemic, dollar transactions have increased threefold, and in the last three years, the company has tripled year-on-year, and is in line to do the same thing again.
The pandemic was a major driver and staff shortages have hit accounting departments, meaning companies need to look at different ways to pay.
An air cargo veteran, White was President of Cargo Network Services, partnering with PayCargo because CNS did not collect storage fees, meaning cheques were going back and forth to airports, or vouchers.
Truckers were bringing cheques and if the cheque was not for the right amount, the cargo was not released. CNS and PayCargo had a marketing agreement to fill the void by using PayCargo.
White left CNS at the end of 2020 to become an advisor and member of the board at PayCargo. He said, “It is exciting to see something that is really changing what we have been doing for decades. Having worked with airlines for so long and knowing there is so much more that we can do, when PayCargo asked me to join as an advisor, so I did.”
Blackstone, the major investor has significant interest in the maritime sector, being one of the largest owners of ocean warehousing at major ports, and they own companies that operate ports, so investing in PayCargo fits in with its business. The air sector fits perfectly because Blackstone sees it as complementary, said White.
Looking long term, White sees PayCargo taking 60-70% of the market for payment platforms in five years.
“Growing PayCargo is not just us moving into new markets, it’s the users themselves liking the flexibility and the capabilities of the system. It’s word-of-mouth from different companies and as people adapt more, the base of payers will grow but the number of vendors will grow more because they have such a large base,” said White.
This article was published in the October issue of Air Logistics International, click here to read the digital edition and click here to subscribe.