Payment providers face more challenges than ever, including fast innovation cycles, commoditization of payments, reduced margins, and market consolidation. Given all these pressures, how can payment providers still innovate?
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are used throughout the web and mobile, and this ‘API-ization’ is now evident in payments. Making source code open and available to developers, who can tap into the technology to build their own features and applications, has proved to be an effective way of balancing the need to innovate with the bottom line of the business.
Modular open architecture gives developers the tools they need to create value-added services around the underlying platform, reducing development bottlenecks, and creating differentiation for specific markets and verticals. Another way of looking at it, is that it is the challenges that are facing payment providers that drive the innovation.
What is PAY.ON doing specifically to address this need to innovate and save costs at the same time?
Everything that we do at PAY.ON is with the goal of putting industry-best technology in the hands of payment providers, and by extension their merchants. This is why we have launched our Open Payment Platform. PAY.ON’s white label modular gateway solutions are tailored to meet the specific needs of every business, and the addition of Open Payment Platform across all of these solutions enables both cost saving and innovation, and reflects our commitment to delivering state-of-the-art payment technology to our partners.
The beauty of our Open Payment Platform is that everything is available through one unified API, including transaction processing, reporting, administration, and open merchant dashboard. This means one single integration point for our clients, so that we offer ultimate simplicity alongside the flexibility that is expected with open APIs.
Simplified integration processes are critical in a consolidating market, where speed is all important. With automated merchant onboarding our partners can onboard more merchants, faster, while the single integration point reduces set-up, certification, and ongoing costs.
The idea behind making our platform ‘open’ was to provide our partners – including PSPs, ISOs and acquirers – with a toolkit to give their merchants the best possible service. Because merchants need to start selling quickly, simple integration and ‘self-service’ options connect them rapidly to our extensive global network of local and international acquirers, as well as the alternative payment methods needed to reach new markets.
What differentiates PAY.ON’s open API model from others that are already on the market, such as Stripe?
Stripe has grown rapidly by building simplicity into the heart of their product, raising the bar of what is expected of today’s payment technology. There are other players who have ‘opened up’ too, reflecting the broader trend towards open APIs. But what sets PAY.ON’s Open Payment Platform apart is the technical connectivity to our extensive global network of acquirers, and all of our supported alternative payment methods. This allows payment providers to effectively serve globally-oriented merchants who require a tailored payment set-up when expanding cross-border.
Ours is also a full white label solution, supported by interactive documentation, which our clients can take and brand as their own. The single unified API at the core of our Open Payment Platform is truly explorable, and with the help of intuitive online tutorials developers can “try it out everywhere”. That means developers can start working on the platform and manage your payments in the least possible time, as they interact with the system, see and modify corresponding code in real-time, and get real responses immediately.
Many payment providers with legacy systems work across multiple platforms, incurring high operating costs as a result. What role can open payment architecture play in effectively “consolidating” payment systems?
The modular and open nature of our Open Payment Platform means that payment providers who are operating across multiple systems can migrate in a stepwise manner and consolidate onto one robust platform. It is possible to maintain local add-on services, and avoids the need to make potentially risky “big bang” switches. On the one hand such a consolidated platform offers simplicity, however the openness of the platform and the fact that developers can create applications and features directly on top of the Open Platform means that it retains the desired flexibility.
Security is a key concern for any businesses involved in payments, and requirements are strict when it comes to payment processing. How does ‘open’ architecture address PCI compliance?
PAY.ON is PCI DSS Level 1 certified. Through us, our partners and their merchants are assured that they are processing in a PCI compliant environment. This extends to PCI DSS 3.0, which raised the compliance bar for merchants, who the PCI Security Standards Council identified as the weakest link in the payment chain. With COPYandPAY, we have created the only confirmed compliant widget-based payment form solution which reduces the scope of SAQ requirements for merchants. Security is of course something that is central to PAY.ON’s solutions, as reflected in our suite of fraud prevention tools and connections to third-party fraud prevention providers.
Statistics show that the number of APIs has grown considerably since 2005, but some payments businesses may be concerned that open API technology will create more work for them, rather than less. What would you say to those with reservations?
In the past some businesses may have seen “open” technology as creating new challenges for them, such as increasing the number and complexity of questions from merchants. However, we have addressed this specifically be creating very clear, intuitive tutorials and documentation to support our API, and by making ease-of-use a top priority. This includes increased ‘self-service’ options for merchants, which paired with automated merchant onboarding process, results in less questions and issues for payment providers to solve for their merchants. Ultimately, this gives PSPs the ability to board and manage more merchants, making their business not only more efficient, but also driving greater revenues.
About Wolfgang Berner
Wolfgang is PAY.ON’s SVP Product, bringing to his role expertise as a developer, project manager, and product development. Most recently, Wolfgang has overseen the development of PAY.ON’s Open Payment Platform.
About the company
PAY.ON delivers white label global payment gateway solutions to payment service providers, ISOs, acquirers, ISVs, and VARs, enabling them to fully outsource payment transaction processing or integrate a gateway-to-gateway solution. PAY.ON enables payment providers to rapidly increase international revenues, reduce costs and risk, and accelerate market expansion.
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