After Croatia introduced the amended Payment Services Directive (PSD2) of the European Parliament from 2015 into the Payment Transactions Act in mid-July 2018, CorvusPay was the first Croatian fintech company to receive the necessary license from the Croatian National Bank in April 2019 to initiate online payment services directly from account to account.
Namely, PSD2 was adopted in the EU to harmonize the European payment market, include new participants in the provision of payment services, and improve user protection. EU countries gradually incorporated this regulation into their laws over several years, and after obtaining a license for third-party service providers (TTP), CorvusPay began providing this service at the end of 2019.
The company’s director Damir Gužvinec states that they offer various payment options for business and private users through different channels, such as online stores, mobile app owners, and physical sales points, as well as end customers. He emphasizes that they have more than three thousand business entities and that there is no activity with which they do not cooperate: from telecommunications to transport service providers, utility services, companies selling tickets, food, clothing, providing personal services to public services, pharmacies, gambling, and many others.
Increasingly new solutions
The financial technology market is clearly expanding rapidly in Croatia, and cashless online payments are becoming more widely applied. However, in 2010, when Corvus Info was launched, this market was in its infancy. The Internet Payment Gateway system, which securely connects the online sales point with the bank and transmits the customer’s card data from the online store to the bank, was developed by the company that year. The first merchant they began to cooperate with was eKupi. Eight years later, the company was named after the service CorvusPay and continues to grow, innovate, introduce new services, and expand into new markets.
– Monitoring and introducing innovations is our constant job. We continuously work on solutions that will enhance the user experience and facilitate payments without compromising security, and we focus on payments with widely accepted payment instruments, namely cards and IBAN (current account) – said Gužvinec.
Half a year ago, the CorvusPay brand was refreshed, and Gužvinec believes that the changes have been well received as the number of followers on social media has doubled in just a few months. Without investing in a marketing campaign, users, partners, and employees recognized the new approach to the brand, which is also an indicator that the rebranding was successful. This was certainly contributed to by the raven Edgar.
– Our main partners are banks, more than twenty-five in the EU, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. Their number is constantly growing. There are also card companies, terminal suppliers, companies that develop online stores, and many other companies that support us in various parts of our business. We plan to enter some neighboring markets, such as Albania and Montenegro; and in some EU countries, we plan to strengthen activities. We are currently working on new payment solutions for both online and physical stores, and since we are present in various markets, in EU countries and beyond, where trends, expectations, and regulations are not always the same, we adapt our business to those markets as much as possible – says Gužvinec.
What new solutions they have developed and what further plans CorvusPay has can be read in the article published in the new printed and digital edition of Lider.
