ELEVEN kicks off payment orchestration with Gr4vy

Discover why ELEVEN selected Gr4vy as its payments orchestration platform for its global OTT offering, ElevenSports.com, as it scales into new markets

The ELEVEN Group has a shared mission to build a service that delivers live sport and entertainment for fans everywhere, across multiple channels. ELEVEN needed a payments partner with a global footprint and expertise that could support its fast growth as it entered new markets.
From live coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events, to local sport for under-served communities of fans, ELEVEN offers users around the world access to online streaming. The 24/7 service generates tens of millions of views per month from users drawn from over 200 countries and territories, through a range of packages from free to periodic subscriptions.

“It takes a lot of development effort to get a new payment method live, and we needed a provider that had full coverage as we continue to grow internationally. Having flexibility with a cloud-based provider that can also help with data residency and localization was important. With Gr4vy, we’re able to move quickly and test different payment methods in each market in just a few clicks, without a huge commitment.”

— Mats ten Bohmer, Software Engineering Manager

The Challenge

Due to the nature of its business, ELEVEN is growing into new markets rapidly and needs to quickly implement local preferred payment methods to allow users across the world to access subscriptions. Implementing and managing multiple payment methods across multiple markets would require significant and ongoing time and cost investment from the group. It needed a payments orchestration platform that gave it access to a number of payment providers with little to no code. Following a successful proof of concept, ELEVEN selected Gr4vy as its payments orchestration platform (POP) for its global OTT offering, ElevenSports.com.

Streaming stats

Sports streaming is continuing to grow in popularity:

• Streaming captured 35% of total TV time in August 2022
  
• 89% of soccer fans regularly watched sports on any streaming or online channel last year
  
• It’s estimated that the live sports streaming segment itself will be worth $87.3m by 2028
  
• Almost 30 percent of sports fans aged 18 to 34 subscribed to three or more sports streaming services
  
• This year’s Super Bowl has been reported as the third most-watched program of all time, representing one of the biggest audiences in the past six years with 113 million viewers
  
• Spending on sports rights by subscription video streaming services worldwide amounted to $5.2 billion in 2022, marking an increase from the previous years. A forecast suggested that the spending would continue to grow
  
• The time spent on live videos is 8 times more than spent watching on-demand videos
  
• More than one-third of US sports fans want to watch live sports via online streaming services

The Solution

Through Gr4vy’s cloud-native payments orchestration platform, ELEVEN can quickly access multiple payment methods and providers with no additional coding required, and the ability to deploy across the globe to ensure its customers always have the payment solutions and options they need, regardless of location.

ELEVEN and Gr4vy kicked off a proof of concept, and Gr4vy’s payments team in the cloud was able to consult on the payment method and features required to help ELEVEN to scale by adopting PayPal as a payment platform. Through PayPal, ELEVEN is able to have recurring merchant-initiated transactions without the need to involve the consumer. This allowed them to achieve new user acquisition and global country coverage, aligning with its business model requirements, without ELEVEN having to hire or reassign software developers.

Gr4vy product features

• Cloud-native infrastructure – Move payments to our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform and eliminate risk of a single point of failure, with bespoke resilience and regional cloud instances.
  
• Maximize conversion – Our no-code workflow engine optimizes approval rates and lets you customize payment flows, with automated failover rules for personalized checkout experiences.
  
• Single integration – Access unlimited payment providers, 100+ payment methods, and global anti-fraud providers through one low-code integration, with options for embedded checkout, hosted secure fields, API, or e-commerce platform plugins.
  
• PSP agnostic – Avoid vendor lock-in by working with multiple payment providers through our agnostic vault, with centralized PCI DSS Level 1 certification for secure data collection, storage, and transaction tokenization across multiple PSPs.
  
• Reduce risk – Manage fraud, trigger risk services, and decline high-risk transactions to avoid unnecessary costs, with options to use anti-fraud providers, control 3DS, and set custom rules throughout the transaction lifecycle.

Discover how we can help you today