By 2025 the online ticketing space is predicted to be a $68 billion dollar economy. It's also an area ripe for innovation as new technologies allow businesses to reimagine the ticketing experience, providing additional opportunities to connect with audiences.
New York City-based KYD Labs is a company at the forefront of this movement. The blockchain-enabled event ticketing platform offers promoters, brands, venues, and artists a better way to connect with their audiences through live events, as well as a more profitable, transparent, and consumer-friendly way of ticketing live events. Not only that, but KYD also ensures that buyers get authentic resale tickets.
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For support on its journey, KYD Labs selected Checkout.com as its payments partner. The choice made sense for KYD Labs because Checkout offers a one-stop shop for payments processing tailored to KYD Labs’ needs, says KYD Labs' co-founder and CEO Ahmed Nimale. In addition, Checkout.com has experience working with U.S.-based venture-backed startups.
While advanced Web3 technology is the foundation for KYD Labs' solution, the startup's go-to-market strategy is focused on providing its users with a top-notch, familiar, and trusted experience. That's particularly true when it comes to accepting customer payments and making payouts to venues, promoters, and artists.
To ensure KYD could grow its user base, it was critical to offer payments and payouts in fiat currency using familiar rails, such as ACH and cards. Nimale realized the company that was best placed to enable KYD to do that was Checkout.com."When you're a Web3 guy and you're growing, the last thing you want is to lose credibility as an early player," Nimale says. "With Checkout.com if we run into issues . . . we have on-demand access to somebody to talk to and that person is in the same battle as us. You don't get that anywhere else."
Before turning to Checkout.com, KYD Labs evaluated a US based payment provider. However, KYD Labs soon discovered that the provider didn't meet its needs. It redirected users to a different checkout screen — a clunky, disjointed experience at best.
"From a user perspective, the experience was jarring," Nimale says. "Ticketing is one of those experiences where if [customers] have to go to another dashboard or another interface to check out, you're going to lose that small margin. We want our users to feel as if they're always buying tickets directly from the artists—but that's taken away [if they’re redirected to a different page]."
Since KYD Labs previous payments partner wasn’t meeting its needs, the company was forced to navigate the intricacies of payments on its own.
"The experience is completely different with Checkout.com, where it's a true partnership," says Nimale. "It provided first-class support at every step of the onboarding journey, and today it’s just a phone call away if we have any issues or questions we need answering. Checkout.com is like having a third co-founder."
Moving payment providers was not a decision the KYD Labs team took lightly. But it had to make a choice: stay with its current provider and hope for the best or move onto a new platform that better met its needs. KYD Labs ultimately decided to make the move to a new platform just one month before launching when it realized its original partner wasn't the right fit.
Immediately after getting underwriting approval, KYD contacted Checkout.com. Two days later , the startup was set up on Checkout.com’s platform.
Despite all the horror stories making the rounds on the Internet about switching technology partners at the last minute, KYD Labs' experience with Checkout.com was nothing short of amazing.
"It wasn't complicated at all, and the integration was pretty smooth," Nimale explains. “We had the support we needed.. Checkout.com helped us launch our product in time and achieve our goals with our investors and stakeholders — goals that we had set out months ago."
Nimale says that although KYD Labs has worked with big players and small, the partnership with Checkout.com was on a whole other level.
“The experience with Checkout.com was the best we’ve ever had, even though the payment lifecycle is an extremely complicated process,” Nimale says. "We were able to integrate, launch, and switch off our sandbox environment with our previous payments processor just like that. We didn't have any issues on the payment side even though we had a high volume of ticket sales within two hours."
In addition, Checkout.com enables KYD Labs to monitor its transactions flows with Fraud Detection to reduce fraud and meet regulatory requirements without any additional integration.
"With Fraud Detection we haven't had any issues," Nimale says. "Any fraudulent cards were flagged successfully and it was clear for us to identify those."
Today, with Checkout.com as a partner, KYD Labs is at the forefront of the movement to reimagine the online ticketing experience and capture the opportunity it identified, enabling promoters, brands, venues, and artists to better connect with their audiences.
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