Founded 9 years ago in London, the mobile payment company SumUp has expanded globally into fresh markets.
Yet like all companies that start to spread out into new regions, the need grows to maintain that local flavor in each unique market.
And the challenges that emerge can be quite significant in order to provide a personalized feel from your brand.
In the case of SumUp, they faced a fair few shortfalls. These included:
- A lack of centralized processes. Projects that included translation were taken care of internally, within the walls of SumUp’s five offices. Yet that meant that those managing content had to keep up to date with five separate offices to know what was going on. Each team had different manuals and processes that blocked room for scaling and taking full control over content.
- No culture of content documentation. At the time, there was zero documentation on the content production of SumUp. That meant nothing in writing about what type of content already existed, where it is stored, and what content they want to publish.As a response, SumUp’s content management and localization lead, David Pillon, built out a framework from the ground when it comes to rolling out new products as well as expanding into fresh markets.
- Almost non-existent translation content management. Products of SumUp were available in 17 countries and 8 languages. And it has plans to launch in 13 more countries within 3 months. Launching in one country is not so simple. It requires translating the entire website, which counted more than 100,000 words.
These challenges meant reinvesting in their content management system. And it resulted in SumUp plugging in their content to Contentful, the headless CMS. 
Traditional, one-size-fits-all approaches to managing content couldn’t work. In order to launch a product across 20 countries on the continent, they needed something that could deliver a more tailor-made approach that had the flexibility to meet needs of different, unique markets.
″By integrating with Contentful,” said David Pillon, “we could ensure that no matter how complex the page was, with the push of a button, the content was translated and copied/pasted in all the languages without human interaction until it was ready to be published.”
SumUp explained that their reasons for choosing Contentful rested on its API-first capabilities, using it to manage new product content, its blog content, and its website.
It gives SumUp the ability to use agile workflows and reuse content no matter what the original language of the content. And while SumUp does have a broad tech stack, Contentful lies at the core of SumUp’s operations.
And benefits began to roll in soon after its content replatforming. These included enhanced self-service for content editors at SumUp. Before integrating with Contentful, editors had to rely on developers to build new components and new pages, even. Now, content creators have the freedom to make components without much technical knowhow.
In addition, rich text features provide editors the freedom to format text in whatever way they see ideal, and also to create more complex components. 
As David stated, because there was a need to translate hundreds of words into multiple languages, they needed a strong translation management system (TMS) to accompany Contentful.
They decided on integrating Smartling to provide SumUp the automation capabilities they need in order to manage translation workflows. Setting up Smartling means that SumUp can make translation more efficient, provide a clearer view with visual context, and benefit from its rich glossary that stores lists of branded terms and voice.
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.
