Photo of Christian Zeidler, Robert Bosch GmbH.

Christian Zeidler

Head of Global Treasury

Ingo Schneider

Front Office/Senior Project Manager ePayments

The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. Its operations are divided into four business sectors: mobility solutions, industrial technology, consumer goods, and energy and building technology. As a leading internet of thing (IoT) provider, Bosch offers innovative solutions for smart homes, industry and connected mobility.

Bosch positions for B2B market growth with payments innovation

The challenge

Bosch sought to build a new payments strategy for one of its fastest growing subsidiaries, Azena, among the first companies within the Bosch group to launch a B2B e-commerce marketplace connecting software suppliers to customers all over the world. Bosch had already designed and developed a payment strategy for the Azena marketplace aligned with its own digital payment strategy.

However, given that many of the B2B company’s clients were unwilling to use other payment channels like credit cards and PayPal, Azena needed a solution. In short, Bosch sought to position Azena at the forefront of B2B marketplaces.

*According to independent research the marketplaces business is expected to quadruple from US$1trn in 2020 to US$4trn in 2025. *Source: Finextra.

The solution

Bosch turned to Deutsche Bank to develop a digital payments strategy and meet the needs of Azena’s fast-growing B2B marketplace. The bank built a tailor-made payment platform which allows Azena to automate and integrate its entire payment process end-to-end. The solution enables buyers to purchase software from multiple sellers in one transaction by automatically splitting up the total payment and distributing the correct amount to each seller, while allocating the appropriate commission fee to Azena. Now Bosch continue to work with the bank to help expand the marketplace to other business units and countries in the rest of the world. This will include offering embedded currency conversion and other cross-border payment solutions.

Best practice and innovation

For the payment settlement, customers are able to choose between credit transfers in euros or US dollars with further options to follow. The solution also enables customers to buy from multiple app developers in one transaction, thanks to the ‘internet shopping-like’ check-out process, with a single debit for software licences from multiple sellers. This simplified client experience requires sophisticated back office support.

Behind the scenes, the system identifies the different elements of the transaction and splits the funds between the various merchants involved, while automatically factoring in and deducting charges and marketplace commissions in the pay-out process.

Azena also benefits from automated matching of incoming payments to the respective orders, which eliminates manual reconciliation efforts and provides the basis for further internal process automation.

As part of the solution, the bank takes care of regulatory responsibilities, such as onboarding software developers to the digital marketplace – handling the contracting, risk assessment and KYC elements.

The approach to implementation was also innovative. The solution was first tested in a sandbox simulation followed by testing in a production environment, starting with small payments to verify if reconciliation works as expected across different countries and would cope with high volumes. After a year of close collaboration between Bosch, its bank and Azena, the new payment solution successfully went live.

Key benefits

• Cost savings.
• Process efficiencies.
• Increased system connectivity.
• Future proof solution.
• Exceptional implementation (budget/time).