BY BESTENIGAR KARA
The financial technology and services company Multinet Up offers a comprehensive platform to respond to the needs of employers and employees. The fifty-fifty partnership kicked off in 2010, or 14 years ago, with the France-based Up Group, which operates in 23 countries on four continents with 3,122 employees and a 59-year history, brought the firm to the next level. While Up Group was attracted by Turkiye’s young, strong, and dynamic economy, with a population of 85 million in that period, the French company’s primary motivation to choose Multinet was the firm’s innovation capacity. Multinet Up focuses on experience, places a particular emphasis on technology, and has an agile structure. These principles distinguish the company from its rivals apart from its innovative products and services. Since day one, customer focus has been Multinet Up’s core principle while aiming to create value for its customers and stakeholders. “Customer experience, technological competence, and continuous development enable us to comply with the business world’s dynamics and individual needs. We distinguish from our rivals with this approach,” said Multinet Up CEO Ali Emre Sever in an exclusive interview with TR MONITOR.
>> Can you cite Multinet Up’s operations and solutions chapter and verse?
Multinet Up offers efficient expense management services to businesses. It is our core business. We serve over 1.5 million card users, over 37,000 corporate customers, and over 57,000 companies in our member business network.
With our end-to-end digital solutions, we effectively manage company employees’ expenses, such as lunch, fuel, and accommodations, as well as spending related to the implementations they benefitted from within the scope of the employee rewards and promotion systems. We also manage businesses’ expenses regarding operational requirements unrelated to their employees with our group buying and supply chain. On the employee-related expenses side, we offer our meal card solution, MultiNet, corporate gift and social welfare solution, MultiGift, fuel solution, MultiPetrol, accommodation solution, MultiTravel, fleet solution, MultiCar+, and MultiFlex, which is our flexible and digital platform in the corporate gift field.
>> Can you provide details on your mobile application, MultiPay, mobile payment application, MultiPOS, and loyalty program, Tatlipara?
MultiPay, which we released in 2017 as the first mobile wallet application in the meal card sector, has been downloaded nearly 6.5 million times so far. It facilitates our customers’ lives with features such as payment via mobile phone with a QR code, spending points visualization on the map, and utilization of various campaigns and discounts.
Our mobile payment solution MultiPOS, which we developed to update the payment collection tools of businesses in our member business network, including restaurants, cafes, buffets, and supermarkets, with new generation technologies and to enhance service quality offered by them, covers more than 70% of all POS (Point of Sale) transactions carried out at our member businesses and reaches a monthly transaction volume of nearly 2 million. MultiPOS, which can execute all transactions that physical POS devices can do, has no extra expenses such as fees and service, maintenance, and insurance costs.
With our TatliPara loyalty program, which we launched in 2013, our MultiNet meal card users can earn our virtual currency, Tatlipara, when they shop at contracted points. One TatliPara is equal to TRY 1. TatliPara can be earned at 5,000 contracted points in Turkiye and used in a vast MultiNet member business network of over 35,000 restaurants, cafes, buffets, and supermarkets.
>> Do you have any new solutions that you are planning to launch?
MultiTravel, which we suspended for a while during the pandemic but is gaining momentum again, is among the projects we wait excitedly for 2024. With the vision to be the biggest corporate travel platform in Turkiye, we inked a deal with over 1,300 business hotels and tripled our turnover compared to the previous year. We also launched our AI-backed website, kurumsalseyahatcozumu.com, to make MultiTravel more visible. Thus, we aim to reach our customers more efficiently.
MultiFlex, which we released at the beginning of 2023, is preferred because all transactions can easily be executed via mobile application. Small—and large-scale manufacturing, electrical-electronics, and chemical firms account for 60% of the companies that prefer MultiFlex.
MultiCar+, which we developed at the end of 2023, is in the testing phase with 700 contracted car wash points. We plan to announce new solutions and collaborations for this product soon.
>> Why did Multinet Up establish its subsidiary, inventiv?
Multinet Up established inventiv to keep pace with developing technology and changing user habits in 2016. Apart from creating digital wallets, mobile POS, and loyalty programs for corporations, we offer cyber security services with inventiv. We can also produce the technology needed by Multinet Up at inventiv. With a team of 80 people, inventiv ensures that our infrastructures run securely with no problems and can make improvements at global standards. We develop projects specific to the needs of our customers at home and abroad and export our technology infrastructure.
We’ll speed up our technology and R&D investments under the umbrella of inventiv further in the new period. We’ll primarily focus on expanding our engineering team and hiking our innovation capacity in this period.
>> Can you talk about Multinet Up’s performance in figures?
As of May, our employment totaled 550 people, including outsourced employees and employees at our subsidiaries. 54% of our employees are women, 42% of our 48 managers are women, and five out of 11 executive board members are women.
Our net sales growth hit 107% in the financial year, which ended on December 31, 2023, compared to the previous year. The hike was backed by the growth in other products on our platform. For instance, the usage of MultiNet, MultiGift, MultiTravel, and MultiAvantaj soared 126%, 92%, 140%, and 123% in the same period. The growth in the usage of MultiPetrol was 47% in terms of volume and 7.5% in terms of liters.
We have also improved the product infrastructure offered to corporate customers’ employees and released new products throughout the year. These developments were important steps to strengthen our position in the market and increase customer satisfaction. We aim to maintain our sustainable growth curve, which has continued uninterruptedly in recent years, this year.
>> Can you talk about Multinet Up’s domestic and foreign collaborations?
We have a series of domestic and foreign cooperation to support all innovative solutions in our ecosystem and offer more comprehensive services to our customers. We have recently developed strategic partnerships with Shell Turkiye and Mobiliz in vehicle tracking systems and ALD Otomotiv in long-term car rental services. We also collaborate with Shell for electronic toll collection (HGS) services.
As part of our overseas operations, we’ll soon serve Up Romania with our subsidiary inventiv’s Securvent solution. It performs security testing within the scope of information and surveillance to detect security vulnerabilities against attacks on corporations’ information infrastructure.
Multinet Up’s net sales growth hit 107% in the financial year, which ended on December 31, 2023, compared to the previous year. The French-Turkish company will continue to broaden the scope of its services and solutions by further developing its current B2B2E and B2B services, payment systems, and fleet solutions.
>> Do you plan to penetrate the new business lines?
In recent years, we have significantly diversified and widened the scope of our platform and services. We aim to respond to customers’ changing needs by developing innovative solutions. We’ll continue making new investments and penetrating new service areas.
We’ll continue to broaden the scope of our services and solutions each day by further developing our current B2B2E and B2B services, payment systems, and fleet solutions.
Another primary agenda is to continue the investments we made last year in integrating innovative technologies into our business. We kicked off our data warehouse (DWH) project in July 2023 to accelerate our data work. We determined our project teams and started to work on the product and architecture we will use. With our DWH project, we’ll strengthen reporting and decision support systems for our stakeholders and enable executives and decision-makers to make more effective decisions by providing real-time information to them. Infrastructure works of our data centers in different locations in Istanbul and Ankara are in full flood. In the first phase of this long-term investment process, which will last about five years, we plan to analyze big datasets to gain insight into understanding trends, relations, and our stakeholders’ performance.
>> What is the project you are working on that excites you the most? What purpose does this project serve for Multinet Up?
We aim to transform Multinet Up into a B2BE platform. We work in a structure that serves institutions, but the end users of our products are the employees of those institutions, which are our customers. We want our platform to be inclusive enough to offer solutions for all the needs of these employees in their business lives. Our investments in data are the keystone of this transformation. Our brand purpose is to facilitate firms’ work, provide them with savings opportunities, and accelerate their growth. We tell SMEs and micro businesses to focus on their growth and that we’ll take care of the rest. To practice our strategy of being a data-driven company makes me happy. We make all decisions based on data by making the data value-added. We conduct market studies to understand customer needs and shape our solutions according to these needs. All of our new services are based on data and results of our different surveys.
