Meet the unique domain registration company making a name for itself

bNamed is a domain registration company with a difference, well quite a few of them actually. Founded by Bart Mortelmans in 1999 from his bedroom, the Belgian company offers domains in all of the 2,500 extensions available worldwide. Bart is also well known for his colourful dress sense, rarely seen without his trademark pork pie hat and two different shoes.

We spoke with marketing coordinator Lieve De Kinder, who says: ‘‘Offering every conceivable extension already is quite extraordinary, but there’s so much more to bNamed. We’re a reasonably small team but we consider this to be one of our greatest strengths. Everyone of us knows the market inside out.’’

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‘’People are very chauvinistic about their domain names. British people expect .co.uk, Belgians type .be, Germans want a .de, French people surf to .fr, and so on. We offer all of them, so our clients can reach their potential audience anywhere in the world.

The human factor

In the occasionally complex and constantly evolving world of domain names, bNamed has grown a reputation for first class customer support. ‘‘The unique selling point always was and still is to combine advanced automation with exceptional hands-on support,’’ De Kinder says.

‘’We’re really proud of the level of support we’re offering and consider this to be one of our greatest assets. We bring the human factor by combining technical expertise with a passion for relieving our customer's frets and worries.

‘’Our entire backend system is developed in-house. Which means we have full control and all the knowledge. We make sure everything that can be automated, is automated. We avoid using a middle-man and talk to the central registry directly as much as possible. This ensures we get requests handled quickly and correctly.

‘’We’ve noticed that our clients appreciate our approach. Web hosting companies, marketing agencies, website builders, trademark lawyers, developers, small businesses, they’re all happy with how we handle their domain name registrations.

‘‘People are also becoming more and more aware of how important it is to have their domain name registered with a trustworthy partner and hosted in extra reliable nameservers,’’ De Kinder adds.

Global network

Such has been the success of its offering that the company has built up a worldwide client base and network of global partners. ‘’We’re often required to make payments in foreign currencies to those partners,” explains De Kinder.

“CurrencyFair helps us to do so in an accurate and smooth way. We can easily make payments in lots of different currencies to all of our partners at a fraction of the cost which we would normally have paid to our standard bank.

‘’When we, as a Belgian company, make a payment in USD to a bank account located in the USA, for example, the banking fees we pay are considerably lower than making the payment through our regular bank, approximately 85% less.

‘‘If we need assistance, we can quickly reach the support team via email or phone and they’re always happy to help us out,’’ she enthuses.

Pandemic boom

In terms of the impact of the pandemic, bNamed has been relatively fortunate, with more businesses aware about the importance of a good functioning website, webshop and email facility.

‘’We consider ourselves very lucky to not have been heavily affected by the pandemic,” says De Kinder. “All our co-workers are safe and sound at the moment. If anything, business is booming, partially due to the pandemic. More and more small businesses started a webshop to make sure their clients could still reach them and they all needed a domain name.

‘’Everything happens online nowadays so you need to make sure you can be found online. This all starts with your website and your domain name. So we’ll continue to help people by finding the perfect name for their website,” she adds.

Taking pride

Speaking about what makes her and her colleagues proud, De Kinder points to the satisfaction that comes from helping to make the ‘impossible, possible’.

‘’We get clients on the phone who clearly have already spoken to lots of other companies who couldn’t help. Usually, for us the request is business as usual and we’re just a few clicks away from a solution.

In highly competitive industry bNamed have carved out their own niche by standing out and standing up for what they believe in; a differentiated offering, technical excellence and good old fashioned service. That’s one way to make a name for yourself!

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bNamed had not received any gratuity in respect of this article