Interview partner: Florentina Ispas, Commercial Director at EasyPay System.
Easy Engineering: How was 2022 for your company—could you give us a brief summary?
Florentina Ispas: 2022, like the previous years since the company was founded, was a year in which we evolved both in terms of the product and in terms of sales and solution implementations in the market.
EasyPay was launched in 2010, so this year we have already celebrated 13 years of activity on the Romanian market. The launch had a strong impact on the local market because we came with a new product—a self-service product that helps citizens tremendously and makes their lives easier—but which, as we expected, was met with some reluctance precisely because of its use. We put in the work to educate users on how to use self-service terminals, and today we are pleased to see that we are receiving so many requests to implement them across so many fields, which clearly shows a successful outcome.
E.E: What products/services did you launch this year?
F.I: Every year we focus on progress—we launch new products and solutions, but above all we want to keep up with technology, which is evolving extremely fast and impressively. In our segment, we launched the parking solution, a solution that is implemented extremely quickly, is comprehensive, and does not require any employee. Therefore, it comes as a package that includes an access barrier, an LPR reading camera, the payment terminal, and of course the monitoring and management software.
E.E: How has the market changed compared to previous years?
F.I: The market is constantly evolving and, although I do not like to mention the difficult pandemic period, it confirmed that our self-service solutions are accepted by any age group and are suitable for any business, bringing many benefits—the most important being cost reduction. Therefore, from a brief market assessment, we can see that we implement self-service terminals in fields such as banking, automotive, HoReCa, hospitality, gambling, public transport, finance, retail, etc.
E.E: What are the new challenges in your field of activity?
F.I: Every project is a joy and a challenge for us, and of course each client is specific. The trends are to use increasingly large screens, with LED, curved, and the terminal itself to be as complex as possible.
By the end of the year we will launch a new solution for the hospitality sector: a terminal that takes over the receptionist’s role of checking the guest in. The guest identifies themselves at the terminal, retrieves their reservation or selects an available room, pays for it, and the terminal issues an access card, which they also return at the end of their stay.
E.E: How did you overcome these challenges in this more competitive environment?
F.I: The EasyPay team is well-knit, with the shared goal of maintaining our leading position on the local market. This direction is very easy to sustain thanks to the fact that we manufacture the kiosks in-house, in our own factory, which allows us to easily bring any idea of our client to life. We can say there has not been a challenge we could not meet; we shaped each request so that we could produce and implement it to our satisfaction, the client’s satisfaction, and of course the end user’s.
At the same time, we rely on the range of advantages we offer our clients, starting with our position as a local manufacturer, short delivery times and a balanced price-to-quality ratio, product stock, storage in a 2,000 m² warehouse, a dedicated room for software installation and order verification, loading and transport support, and in-house service.
In addition, an important aspect is that our products are registered and ISO and CE certified, and have been awarded for four consecutive years as the payment and betting terminal of the years 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, which helps us maintain quality standards.
E.E: Tell us about product innovation and how it will impact the future, and how it helps clients.
F.I: The technologization of so many businesses is evident, and that is what we do. We offer our clients solutions to reduce costs by using self-service terminals, thus managing to provide service at a far superior quality. More specifically, their attention is no longer directed toward repetitive tasks—tasks taken over by the terminal—but toward the customer’s need to be welcomed in a pleasant environment and to be treated individually and professionally.
E.E: What are the trends in the markets where you are currently active and those for next year?
F.I: According to the Kiosk Market Place report, the self-service kiosk market is continuously growing and developing, and is making its way into increasingly surprising industries such as aerospace, oil, gas, mining, the military, steel mills, and human and veterinary medical practices. This confirms that, at least over the next few years, there will only be growth in this segment, and this type of kiosk will cover the market and become indispensable for so many businesses.
E.E: What are the prospects for the rest of the year?
F.I: Not only for the rest of the year, but continuously, we focus on developing external markets where we are already present. We are talking especially about Europe, America and Africa—markets that are extremely interested in our products and where there is major demand for implementing self-service solutions.
