Cross-border e-commerce data specialist Hurricane Commerce has teamed up with Swedish fintech Plusius in what the two firms call a “world first” strategic partnership to help customers achieve “seamless cross border e-commerce.”
The combined offering brings together Hurricane’s solutions covering duty and tax calculation and compliance screening with Plusius’s financial services enabling payment facilitation, escrow, currency exchange and verification.
Hurricane Commerce’s AI-driven real-time data solutions cover the critical areas of data enhancement, duty and tax calculation, denied parties screening and prohibited and restricted goods screening. Its customers include Emirates Post, Australia Post, Royal Mail, SEKO, An Post, THG and Evri.
Meanwhile, Plusius is a global payments provider offering a range of financial services including collection, escrowing, split and settlement. Its solutions enable customers to solve complex payment challenges, while ensuring full compliance through enhanced KYC/AML processes.
As a result of the partnership, the two companies are now able to facilitate a duty and tax – Delivered Duty Unpaid (DDP) – solution, bringing together their joint service offering. They have further agreed a roadmap to a complete and unique product offering to benefit businesses involved in cross-border e-commerce.
Partnership benefits
The combination of the Hurricane and Plusius services will enable an end-to-end DDP solution from HS code classification, duty and tax calculation and compliance screening through to full VAT collection and reconciliation.
According to Hurricane, this will be of particular benefit to e-commerce businesses using the EU’s Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) – a VAT registration scheme for businesses to comply with the EU’s new VAT e-commerce rules on sales from GB to the EU.
The offering will also assist in reducing the number of goods returned to merchants due to unpaid taxes by consumers which, in turn, will cut the carbon footprint of online retailers and their delivery partners.
Martyn Noble, CEO of Hurricane Commerce, said: “We are looking forward to working closely with the Plusius team to take to market a joint product offering that will enable customers including retailers, marketplaces, carriers and other financial service providers to achieve seamless cross-border eCommerce.”
Andreas Wickberg, CEO of Plusius, added: “We are delighted to have agreed this world-first strategic partnership with Hurricane bringing together cross-border fintech and data expertise. We are looking forward to onboarding customers immediately and continuing to develop our combined DDP offering, taking it to existing and new customers who will benefit from the transformational impact it can have on their cross-border capabilities and their ability to achieve scale and compliance in global e-commerce.”
