Innovative breakthrough in the field of e-commerce in Azerbaijan

Today, it is one of the most important technologies of our time, which has become even more accessible to entrepreneurs in the country thanks to the Epoint.az platform, created by Global Innovations in cooperation with Visa and the international audit company BDO.

Epoint.az is a digital payment aggregator and e-commerce platform for small and medium-sized Azerbaijani entrepreneurs, who are provided with a system for accepting bank card payments without any additional costs, technical knowledge and supporting technical and operational resources. By choosing Epoint.az, you can be sure of security - the platform provides secure acceptance of payments by cards of local and foreign banks (Full 3D issuer and acquirer).

The official partner of Epoint.az is Visa, the world leader in the digital payments industry, facilitating transactions between consumers, businesses, financial and government organizations in more than 200 countries and territories annually. As part of the Epoint.az partnership with Visa, entrepreneurs are provided with the following conditions and opportunities:

· free connection to the platform;

· free receipt of Visa Business and Visa cards; Platinum Business from any Azerbaijani bank;

· 0% bank commission from all online sales in the first month of connection.

As a reminder, Visa's mission is to connect the world with an innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payment network to promote consumer well-being and business and economic prosperity: “We are convinced that expanding access for all in the economy helps increasing the well-being of people around the world and will be basis for the global movement of money in the future.”

Innovation from Epoint.az

In Azerbaijan, it is Epoint.az that enables web and mobile platforms to split payments between recipients of money for the first time. The founder and CEO of Global Innovations, Zeynal Kerimzade, says that this innovative idea was born in the process of discussing iTicket.AZ payment systems and the Karabakh Revival Foundation.

“We were tasked with making charitable donations possible when buying tickets without forcing the buyer to pay twice. Together with the team, we thought in detail the process of creating such functionality and literally developed it within two weeks. The technology has already been applied on the iTicket.AZ website, and everyone who buys a ticket can donate any amount for the revival of the liberated territories,” Z. Karimzade notes, expressing gratitude to iTicket.AZ and the Karabakh Revival Foundation for their help in implementing the idea and the trust shown to Epoint.az .

After the successful implementation of the above technology, the Epoint.az team began to think about the idea of ​​creating split payments for other businesses as well, starting to analyze in detail the problems of business in the Azerbaijani market.

“We began to focus on the main difficulties and found that the majority of companies providing couriers, taxis, transportation of goods, cleaning services, etc. do not accept card payments. This is due to the complex process of distributing funds between companies and people performing services. Most of the companies work with contractors under a service contract, and they are not their employees, which leads to the fact that contractors do not receive funds from companies for a long time due to the large amount of operational work,” Zeynal Kerimzade continues.

The founder and CEO of Global Innovations notes that, despite the increase in non-cash payments in Azerbaijan, majority have recently faced the problem of ordering a taxi if they pay for the service with a card:  “I myself stayed in the rain several times due to the taxi driver’s refusal to complete the trip at the last moment due to the fact that I was going to make a payment by card. This upsets each of us, especially people working in the field of development of non-cash payments, so we brought the idea to mind and created a universal mechanism for distributing funds during the initial payment.”

When connecting a split payment, the amount of the service is debited from customers, and the recipients of funds can be several Epoint.az participants - when making an operation, the amount is divided in the proportions specified by the recipient, as a result, each party receives its money on a business card.

“This will lead to the fact that the taxi driver will receive his money at the same time immediately on the card and will be able to use it for his needs,” says Z. Kerimzade, expressing the hope that this technology will make life easier for every resident of Azerbaijan, and emphasizing that Epoint.az will continue to look for new ways to be useful to the country.

We emphasize that the function of splitting payments may also be of interest for businesses such as marketplaces, online stores, service aggregators and other systems that involve two or more recipients of funds.

*Epoint.az is the only Azerbaijani project among the winners of the Takeoff international startup competition, held in May 2022 as part of the Teknofest aerospace and technology festival. In the competition, Epoint.az took second place after an American company.

*Global Innovations is the first Azerbaijani FinTech company which receive a “Startup Certificate” from the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Azerbaijan, which exempted it from income tax for the next three years.

You can get all the information you need about the platform at the following contact number: +99470-242-99-66.

Official site - https://epoint.az

E-mail address - [email protected]

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