Venture accelerator Z2C Limited is scaling back its universal checkout solution, bSecure.
Launched in 2020 in partnership with Adam Dawood, the former head of Yayvo, bSecure is a one-click checkout solution for instantly selling products across the globe.
“Your closure journey is much faster,” said Raihan Ali Merchant, chairman of Z2C Limited, in a podcast interview, alluding to the vast abandoned cart rates created when shoppers have to re-enter their data to place an order.” Someone buying headphones on a smaller site would be apprehensive about data leakage, but in seeing bSecure at the checkout, they would know their data is safe, and they don’t have to re-enter the data. It also helps SME merchants signal credibility because bSecure conducts extension quality of service checks.”
The business has scaled back within a year of appointing Khushhali Microfinance Bank’s Arshad Ali as the CEO. Shifting to a premium pricing model, the business will now work with a limited set of merchants that meet higher standards of customer service excellence.
At the same time, most of the team has been reallocated across various new experimental business divisions of Z2C Limited.
In a notable move, bSecure chief business officer Mehwish Aslam has been moved to oversee the OTT team at Merchant Holdings Limited (MHL) as the chief digital officer.
“In our organization, we live our values,” said Fatima Hyder, chief strategy officer of Z2C Limited. “As such, we’re always curious and questioning our work and whether there is room for optimization. If there is, we have the integrity to make the hard decisions for the whole group’s betterment. As such, we saw an opportunity to consolidate several areas when we looked at the various projects we were investing in as a group. One of these was e-commerce.”
She said that as the communications and video vertical of the group took off, a decision was made to allocate resources towards them. This also meant pivoting bSecure’s business from outward-facing to inward to help support the commerce function within each.
“As such, it would appear that we are scaling back bSecure as an entity,” she said. “However, the ground reality is that the technology is critical to the success of our video and communications projects, and as such, it will be refocused into those spaces instead.”
Representing a pure data play, anticipating the Google cookie ban, the investment into bSecure targeted transactions, and the insights behind them. With media agency Brainchild housing front-end data that generates demand and transaction data qualifying the activity, the bSecure investment represented an attempt to understand the buyer decision journey.
With the single-sign-on model, the platform can track purchase history across various product categories and better understand customer journeys and preferences, including the value chain or industry profit pool.
