Spotlight On Abdullah Abdelkafi, Head of Marketing at Total Processing.
Total Processing is a fast-growing payments fintech company, providing an all-in-one solution to businesses of all sizes and verticals, with a seamless and secure way to take payments from their customers. Headquartered in Manchester, and built by former merchants, their aim is to be the most customer-focused payments company in the world.
Abdullah Abdelkafi, Head of Marketing for Total Processing discusses insights into the innovation behind the companies continued success, and his unique approach to connecting with their b2b audiences as well as highlighting the importance of education-based content to generate more custom.
What does being based in the North West mean for your organisation?
“The North West is our home. We're surrounded by a culture of hard-working people and a community spirit that is strongly embedded within our workplace values.
Manchester has invested in creating an innovative business ecosystem in order to become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech hubs - with six out of the UK’s digital Unicorns based in the region. As a result, we’ve already benefited from programmes such as KPMG’s global growth hub, which has helped us scale internationally into the UAE.”
What has been a recent marketing highlight for you? what do you have your sights set on this year?
“Building brand has been a real focus for us, with our e-commerce podcast a core part of that. It was a real marketing highlight for me and the wider team that we’ve really enjoyed from start to finish. We had the opportunity to speak with leading names behind the likes of Social Chain, MusicMagpie and GymShark, who had provided a wealth of insights for our network.
This years focus will be around account based marketing. Although its been a fairly popular method in the b2b space over the last few years it’s not something we’ve focussed on internally. With the office in the Dubai and our expansion into Ireland we’ll be working closely with our sales teams to really drive this in 2023.”
How has innovation or the use of innovation helped the business to thrive? And how did you successfully market this?
“Alternative payment methods have been at the forefront of pushing innovation in the payments space. The rise in ‘buy now pay later’ methods such as Klarna and one-click checkouts such as Apple Pay and Google Pay being a clear example. Implementing these payment methods into our eco-system and product offering has not only helped us grow as a company but has given our customers the potential to scale their own businesses. They can offer their own shoppers a variety of ways to check out how they want, and when they want.
To help market these solutions successfully, it was important that we educated and informed our customers with carefully curated guides and whitepapers. Secondly, we aimed to demonstrate the benefits of our solutions with simple videos and animated content. Once we’d developed our creative media, we focused on building marketing funnels by driving traffic through to tailored landing pages - targeting tailored audiences through PPC and email campaigns.”
Can you share some examples of innovation in your business that have or will make a difference?
"One of Total Processing’s most innovative products is our recurring billing platform. This solution is enhanced with automated rebilling and optimum billing indicators that ensure maximum revenue is achieved for our merchants. We additionally offer payment fulfilment via outbound and inbound IRV and pay-by-links, all of which are reconciled in one system, with real-time transaction feedback and reporting.”
What have been the challenges in getting new initiatives off the ground and how did you overcome them?
“Launching a podcast was something that our team hadn’t tried before. In terms of logistics, we had to confirm a full line-up of distinct guests with different insights, perspectives – while managing everyone’s schedules. It meant travelling across the country, often at short notice, in order to create the very best podcast we could. At times it was a challenge, but thanks to the initiative of Harry and the backing of the company’s senior leadership, we were able to make it happen and we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved.”
We'd like to thank Abdullah Abdelkafi, Head of Marketing for Total Processing for this interview, which was conducted by Rasha El-Shirbini, Head of Digital & Strategy at Notch Communications and CIM Comms Ambassador.
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