Zuji unravels travel complexity

Pure play e-commerce travel firm Zuji is tackling the complexities of doing business in Asia with an online payment system from VeriSign.

Zuji, which is based in Singapore but through the Internet sells travel services all around Asia, is a joint venture between US-based Travelocity.com and 16 airlines in the Asia-Pacific region, including Qantas. K. K. Wong, chief financial officer of Zuji, said the company saw itself as a “pan-Asia-Pacific regional portal” which competed with the likes of Priceline.com, Travel.com.au and Webjet.

”We have to do things a lot differently from a layman’s expectation of a travel agency, because we sell everything through the Internet. It’s getting very common in the US, and in Australia you are quite advanced, but this is much different from the Flight Centre model of a travel agency,” said Mr Wong.

While the options for choosing the technologies Zuji would operate on were constrained by having to use Travelocity’s own transactional software, Mr Wong said that the choice of a payment gateway was made independently, with Travelocity’s technical staff acting in an “advisory capacity”. Zuji chose the PayFlow application from VeriSign (the local subsidiary of which was recently renamed after being eSign Australia). In fact, the parent company has now adopted VeriSign as its US payment gateway provider.

“Most systems out there have not much difficulty integrating with Travelocity’s systems,” he said. “VeriSign’s system is quite generic, as it was developed from the US, so the integration to our systems was quite simple.”

The integration work between VeriSignÕs application and Travelocity’s internally-developed code took a couple of months, which Mr Wong said was “a lot of time”, with the work only finishing two months ago.

”With that done, going forward it was just a matter of linking with the banks. It was more of a testing process, rather than a technological nightmare. It has not been a difficult task, just time-consuming, rather than a technical challenge,” he said.

BANK CHOICE

The most important issue with payment systems for international merchants - and Zuji is about as international as you can get - is integrating the system with those of banks whom you partner with in each country. Mr Wong said he had a choice as to whether to commit to using one bank across all countries in Asia, which in this case would have been Citibank due to Zuji’s existing relationship with the bank in Singapore, or to pick and choose banks for each country based on the size of their merchant fees. The choice of Citibank would have meant the integration work would be easier, but Mr Wong said after weighing the trade-offs, Zuji had decided to look for the lower-cost option.”An ideal world is where you just deal with Citibank and don’t worry about it. The reality is that one bank is not strong in all countries. Its presence in Australia is limited [for example],” he said.

”We are trying to get lower merchant fees from the various banks. It’s a balance I’m trying to juggle with. You might want to use one bank across all regions for simplicity’s sake, but you always want to make sure your costs are low. You’ve got to balance that.”

In addition to Citibank in Singapore, Zuji has finished integrating Westpac as its Australian partner. Mr Wong said he had just finished testing for the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, where the local bank chosen was also Citibank.

Mr Wong said he would look in future at more sophisticated integrated systems like the one operated for Australian financial institutions by First Data Resources which offers online payment connectivity to multiple competing banks. VeriSign recently signed an agreement to integrate Payflow with FDR’s network.