Daniela Mcchrystal

About 99designs

99designs makes it easy to get high-quality designs at an affordable price. As the world’s largest graphic design marketplace, the 99designs’ website connects startups, small businesses, agencies, non-profit organizations, etc. that need something designed (such as a logo or website) with talented designers around the world. For over 5 years the company has been connecting passionate designers with customers who need quality, affordable design services.

The challenge

In order to deliver a good user experience, 99designs needs to be able to accept customers’ funds and guarantee rapid and secure payouts to designers in real-time. Being able to facilitate seamless payments between customers and designers through multiple payment options and in multiple currencies is the company’s competitive advantage. This needs to be done 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Daniela McChrystal, Manager, Payment and Risk Management at 99designs: “The designers on 99designs’ platform who benefit from a variety of payment options are located across the world. Some of the largest areas are South East Asia, emerging markets in Latin America, Eastern and Central Europe, including Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. In many of these countries other payment options are not as effective as Payoneer… or not available there at all.”

The solution

99designs uses Payoneer’s payment platform to provide designers with a variety of payment options to choose from, such as ACH, Global Bank Transfers, and Prepaid Debit MasterCard® – which is a great solution for designers who do not have a bank account. Through these diverse payment solutions, designers can receive their funds within minutes, in their local currency, in over 200 countries across the globe.

Furthermore, Payoneer’s customer support, with 24/7 multilingual customer support for their designers, is really important to 99designs. “It is a major benefit compared to other payment options”, said Daniela, “it’s a win-win for our designers and for us.”
An additional problem faced by 99designs concerning payments was disbursing payments to Brazil, Eastern and Central Europe which can be very expensive and challenging due to various cross-border currency restrictions. “Now by leveraging Payoneer, we can process payouts to these countries via Prepaid MasterCard® as well as ensure a fast turnaround time. Leveraging Payoneer helps us attract skilled designers in emerging regions as well as streamline our international and local payment processes.”

The Result

“More than 4,000 designers have chosen to be paid out through Payoneer and this number is growing exponentially,” said Daniela. “We are now paying out over half a million dollars per month. More and more of our designers are switching over to Payoneer as their preferred payout option and we expect this trend to grow rapidly through 2015.”

Furthermore, Payoneer has significantly reduced their costs compared to other payment providers, which 99designs realized were taking tens of thousands of dollars in fees each month.