A couple of years ago, PV brought you the story of ProstoPay, Ukraine’s Leading Provider of Telemetry and Cashless Payment Services. Today, we bring you up to date with an exclusive interview with Rahul Kak, International Business Development at ProstoPay .
For Rahul, the past two years have consisted of a seemingly endless round of trade shows. So that’s been a lot of selling, right?
Rahul laughs: ‘Those trade shows were never about selling’ he says. ‘They were basically about trying to meet operators, manufacturers and distributors to try to understand how vending works in Europe. Trying to make friends, not just contacts, that was the main thing.
‘In 2024, we participated in VendItalia for the first time. We followed that up with Vendtra in 2024 to discover what the German market is really like. Then came Evex in Croatia. That was a different experience, a sort of networking event within the market. We have plans to participate at Vendtra again in Augsburg at stand G08 16-17th September, and we’ll be at Vendex, stand 46, in Amsterdam on 30th September.
‘And in between all this, we visited different shows without exhibiting. So, I visited France, Switzerland; Germany, Romania; Bulgaria and Italy, intent on talking to people. The most important thing I learned on this odyssey was that the EU is not one market.
‘It may look like one box, but basically, each market has its own consumer preferences; each has different business models. The trends are different, the cultural attitudes toward vending differ in each country. We concluded that there is no single solution to meet this variety of requirements. You have to listen, understand the context and adapt accordingly.
‘Consequently, ProstoPay has numerous tests underway in Germany, Bulgaria; Romania and Greece. We have a good pipeline in Germany especially, and on the strength of that, we’ve hired a couple of young dynamic sales executives to further our ambitions there.’
Rahul acknowledges that customers have a wide choice between cashless sales providers and that has prompted ProstoPay to find a way to stand out from the rest of the field.
‘Basically, they all do the same thing’, Rahul says. ‘So our strategy is to instil a different attitude to payment, so that it’s not only ‘tap and go’, but also a chance to engage with the consumer. They pay with a phone in hand, and that alone is a window of opportunity for the more astute service provider.’
Rahul describes the ProstoPay USP as ‘the gamification of the process’, designed to engage consumers and provide them with an experience that goes beyond simply getting a coffee. ‘Naturally, the payment process has to be as smooth as possible but we’ve found that we can add value to these transactions without compromising their efficiency.’
‘Take loyalty programmes as an example. Everybody offers them these days, but by and large, they’re pretty mundane. At the end of the day, they all boil down to earning somebody a discount. At ProstoPay we try to get to this point in a different way. We try to gamify. Every time a consumer pays, their screen shows how many coffee cups they have amassed. If the goal is that the fifth cup is a freebie, with every purchase they get closer so that in the end, the award of the free cup, is seen as a prize, for successfully playing a game.
‘We try to bring an ‘emotional’ touch of contact with our customer and I think that’s a major part in trying to get people to get back to that machine to use it again and again and that’s the important thing.’
Rahul has discovered in his travels that there is no panacea, no ‘one size fits all’ solution that will tick the right boxes right across EU states. Engagement is the destination, but the route to it changes, depending upon where you begin the journey…
‘Earning a discount for loyalty is one thing, but if the award of the discount comes with some kind of experience, if it’s wrapped up like a gift or something, complete with ‘bells and whistles’, it’s far more likely that it will be remembered and ultimately, having a pleasant experience to remember is the solid foundation upon which ‘loyalty’ can be built.’
And now, Rahul’s journey continues. Next stop, Augsberg, then at the end of the month, Amsterdam. You can contact him by email here
To register for Vendex Amsterdam click here
To register for Vendtra, click here
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