Wolfgang Berner, VP of Product & Integration, PAY.ON: "COPYandPAY is part of a bigger initiative we call new merchant experience"

Recently, your company has introduced the new COPYandPAY service. Could you briefly summarize the target user/market and customer demand it has been designed to satisfy?

COPYandPAY addresses PSPs/ISOs in such a way as to drastically simplify the payment integration for their merchants, providing a ready-to-use fully integrated payment page in the merchants’ own design. As a core part of COPYandPAY, we provide a one page interactive tutorial with integration samples in all common programming languages, as opposed to providing hundred-pages long manuals merchants need to work through.

Merchants use widgets to present their payment form into their checkout, retaining full control of the checkout experience and its conversion, as opposed to integrating hosted payment pages through iFrames, which hit merchants’ limits in terms of customisation and hence shopper conversion. Besides, merchants profit from having all relevant payment methods without any compromise in terms of security and compliance standards.
Accordingly, PSPs/ISOs reduce their operational costs especially by reducing technical support time and getting merchants LIVE faster, allowing them also to expand their business to new customer segments – especially in the SME space.

What are the advantages merchants have while using COPYandPAY and how is integration achieved?

The name and its message are simple and communicated easily. You can demo the product in 5 minutes, making the message stick due to its interactivity and clarity. The simplicity – integration within minutes – still allows great flexibility in customisation at the same time. This may sound like a contradiction, but it is not.

The payment form - created utilising widgets by adding only a few lines of HTML code into the page - is actually truly embedded into the merchant checkout page, which is the main difference to traditionally hosted payment pages. Then again the form containing the sensitive card data is posted from the shopper browser directly into the secure and PCI DSS level 1 certified server environments of PAY.ON, not getting in touch with the merchant server at any point of the process.

How does this service differ from the ones already available on the market and how does it relate to/integrate with the company`s overall value proposition for online payments?

The main differences to services following a similar idea to make the merchant’s life easier are that COPYandPAY delivers alternative payment methods next to traditional card payments. As COPYandPAY is an integrated module of PaySourcing, merchants can choose their best fitting payment mix out of the wide range of connections to payment schemes and acquirers we offer globally. This new module is perfectly integrated in our multi-channel PaySourcing platform, relying on our state-of-the-art risk management, business intelligence and merchant reporting capabilities.

Furthermore, we see COPYandPAY as a part of a bigger initiative we call “new merchant experience” that addresses various aspects by taking a step towards the merchants and getting them to start processing and earning money faster. We are also currently piloting a merchant on-boarding tool and have rolled out merchant on-boarding APIs that speed up the merchant signup phase through automating the technical merchant setup in the merchant gateway as well as the scheme/acquirer setup, where possible. We are also integrating automated processes with various acquirers to create a merchant application turnaround unique on the market.

What payment methods does COPYandPAY support? Do they include both credit cards and alternative payment methods?

COPYandPAY offers complete freedom when it comes to selecting payment methods: over 100 payment methods such as Visa, MasterCard, Amex, SOFORT Überweisung, PayPal and more than 250 connections to financial service providers are available. With our method of integration, 3D Secure (Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode) is also immediately available. All payment methods can be used without any restriction. COPYandPAY thus makes connecting and adapting the payment process, as well as integrating all required payment methods and 3D Secure,easy as never before. Furthermore, because it is based on HTML 5, COPYandPAY is working perfectly with mobile devices, smartphones and tablets.

 How does this solution address the security and compliance aspects?

The sensitive card and other respective data never touch the merchant servers since they are directly posted from the shopper browser to the secure PCI DSS level 1 certified data centres of PAY.ON using a secure HTTPS channel. That of course minimises the merchant’s PCI compliance requirements. Authentication and payment status information are only exchanged between the merchant server and the PAY.ON gateway on secure channels, making sure there is no chance to manipulate the data.

In many European countries, credit cards are the most popular online payment method. But Germany is the global leader in alternative payments adoption, with 66% of its EUR 45 billion e-commerce market paid for by alternative payments (according to WorldPays 2012 Alternative Payments report). In your opinion, does this never-ending battle between credit cards and alternative payments has any impact on a European/global PSP in terms of business model etc.?

In my opinion the payment world will stay fragmented, despite of initiatives like SEPA and the mobile revolution. Local payment schemes also in the alternative payments area will remain on the market– some brands will vanish, others will fill the gap. There is a lot of innovation going on, especially in the mobile payments world that is driven by small or new players creating niches or local solutions. What determines a country’s relevant payment mix is the consumer behaviour – for instance, you simply can’t sell online in the Netherlands without providing iDeal or in Germany without ELV and invoice next to card payments.

As a European/global PSP you have to acknowledge that fact and provide the relevant payment mix for the respective countries. COPYandPAY helps in this respect by providing that mix out of the box.