Developer behind world’s largest online social network for kids turns to Worldpay
for international expansion
London, August 24th, 2015 – WildWorks, the developer behind Animal Jam, has selected Worldpay as its primary payment partner to strengthen its position in the US and help support its growth globally. Animal Jam developed and owned by WildWorks and associated with the licensed marks of National Geographic, is currently the largest online social network for children in the world. WildWorks has turned to Worldpay to help build on this international success.
This marks the first time WildWorks has worked with a global payments acquirer after having previously entrusted its payment processing to a number of smaller gateways. With a user base that has reached over 35 million people globally and continues to grow[1], and ambitious plans for further expansion, the developer needed a more sustainable and proven approach to processing payments and managing fraud for players of all ages, in all markets.
WildWorks chose Worldpay to consolidate its acquiring operations as it was the only global provider offering the full range of online payments and risk management services the company needed. Working with Worldpay, WildWorks has been able to streamline its operations and is now able to manage fraud, domestic payments, multi-currency international payments, and alternative payments through a single connection. Additionally WildWorks is using Worldpay’s global presence to lower its cost of processing international payments and increase transaction success rates.
Worldpay has also provided WildWorks with greater visibility and control over its payments acceptance to support its continued growth by processing payments separately for its European and North American customers. This has lowered the cost of processing international transactions and helped the company to improve payment acceptance rates in both regions.
Michael Lopez, Chief Financial Officer at WildWorks said: “The past five years have been an unqualified success for us in North America and now that we’ve matured as a company we want to make it even easier for kids around the world to enjoy the Animal Jam experience. Worldpay has been an invaluable partner in helping us achieve this, as much for the payment technologies they provide as for their expertise in how to tailor our services to players in global markets.”
Worldpay has also helped WildWorks to better manage fraud, reducing the incidence of denied transactions without compromising the developer’s risk exposure. Worldpay’s RiskGuardian tool has been developed specifically to address the needs of gaming developers, and in this case has been tuned specifically to WildWorks’ target audience and their preferred payment methods.
Karl McGregor, VP of Digital Content, Global eCommerce at Worldpay, said: “Protecting yourself from fraud without turning away legitimate customers is a constant challenge for any online business. WildWorks needed to strike the right balance in order to avoid exposing themselves to significant risk or denying many young players the ability to fully enjoy the Animal Jam universe. Our risk and fraud management approach has, on average, helped companies achieve a 40% reduction in denied payments, and since starting to work with WildWorks we’ve seen them make significant strides towards a similar improvement.”
ENDS
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The Worldpay eCommerce Press Office
About Worldpay
Worldpay is a leading global provider of payment and risk services, processing millions of transactions every day. We provide an end-to-end service including card acquiring, treasury, gateway, alternative payments and risk management, all of which can be provided with a single integration to Worldpay. We make global payments simple for many of the world’s leading organisations.
About WildWorks (formerly Smart Bomb Interactive)
In August 2014, Smart Bomb Interactive changed its name to WildWorks, reflecting its continuing focus on entertainment for kids that fuels curiosity about science and the natural world. WildWorks is a leading developer of online worlds and free-to-play games, with an audience of over 35 million kids from more than 200 different countries. Founded by game industry veterans in 2003 with funding from Signal Peak Ventures, the privately held company has assembled a development team that includes internationally acclaimed artists, engineers, designers, educators, online safety experts, and media professionals from many different disciplines. Together they create cutting-edge interactive entertainment for families, from web-based playgrounds to immersive 3D titles for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.