LONDON--Kalixa has hired the UK's CCgroup to lead its worldwide PR programme, as it aims to disrupt the global payments market.

The payment platform, a former division of gaming company Bwin.Party, selected the agency following a competitive review that featured two other agencies.

CCgroup is charged with overseeing Kalixa's global corporate and B2B brief, in a bid to drive awareness, build its brand and enable sales. The agency will lead the brief, supported in other markets by members of the GlobalCom PR Network.

Kalixa is hoping to shake up the payments market by rolling out a range of products that include prepaid credit cards, mobile payments and online transactions. By cutting out the various middlemen that are typically involved in payments, Kalixa is aiming to reduce cost, complexity and risk for consumers, small businesses and merchants.

More than  €100 million has been invested in building Kalixa's platform which is rolling out across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. The company claims to have already processed transactions worth €2.6 billion for more than 300 merchants.

“We have ambitious plans to be a global payments powerhouse and we needed an agency that only increase the profile of the company and support our commercial objectives,” said Danielle Stroud, head of marketing and communications at Kalixa Group.

Stroud joined the company earlier this year after previously holding a senior customer marketing role at MasterCard.