The Benefits of Orchestration For Banks and Financial Institutions

The shift to e-commerce and a multitude of new and innovative payment types means that consumers now have an unprecedented range of options at checkout.

This payment fragmentation for merchants requires financial institutions to up their game for new and existing business banking customers. The market is becoming more competitive and diverse, with higher expectations for consumers. Merchants need to provide their customers with a seamless user experience to reduce the risk of losing sales to competitors. 

Financial institutions should take the opportunity to integrate an orchestration solution to keep up with the changing landscape of the payments market and the needs for merchants. Orchestration simplifies the entire payments experience for merchants by enabling them to connect multiple payment providers and third party tools through a simple, uniformed platform, bringing all the benefits of new financial technology together into one solution. 

Adoption of orchestration services will enable financial institutions to meet the always changing needs of their merchant customers by offering them access to a growing number of new payment types through a bespoke service which will lead to higher conversions and revenues.

Additionally, the connecting and growing fintech ecosystem means that orchestration services can integrate APIs across broader payment operations and allow financial institutions to manage and have visibility of the entire payments lifecycle – all from a single dashboard. 

Win New Merchant Customers

One of the most compelling reasons for partnering with an orchestration platform is the ability to not only retain existing at-risk customers but to win new previously out-of-reach business. 

Over the last few years, a myriad of  payment options have emerged, including Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) and alternative payment methods powered by digital wallets (such as Paypal and Google Pay).

Increased e-commerce activity during the pandemic led to consumers becoming comfortable with these new payment types, and they now expect a full range of options upon checkout.

Integrating an orchestration solution will allow financial institutions to provide a range of payment methods that merchants can add with just a few clicks.

Doing so will enable them to stand out from the competition and meet the needs of a demanding customer base.

Increase Retention 

Partnering with an orchestration platform will also help strengthen the relationships banks and financial institutions have with their existing merchant customers.

Doing so means they can rest safely in the knowledge that they are working with a leading fintech provider that connects with the entire ecosystem and other banking services.

Financial institutions have the flexibility to build a bespoke payments stack that can cover startups through to enterprise-level customers. Merchants are taken care of at every stop of their journey. 

Additionally, leading orchestration platforms have the functionality to white-label their offerings. This will result in merchants associating financial institutions with the enhanced level of functionality offered by orchestration services. The holistic nature of orchestration, incorporating services that go far beyond payments, means that merchants don’t have to look elsewhere to solve their problems.

Future Proofing  

Orchestration platforms future-proof the needs of financial institutions by constantly adding new payment and ecosystem integrations – no matter how fragmented the market becomes.

This gives confidence and certainty. Financial institutions can invest in orchestration solutions safe in the knowledge that they will have the agility to introduce the latest payment services, whatever comes next.

Unlike traditional payment partners, this will eliminate new costs and those associated with switching to new providers or adding additional ones.

Increase Revenues 

Orchestration enables financial institutions to increase their revenues by providing value-added services to clients that go beyond more commonly used payment solutions.

Alongside payment methods, this can cover gateways, fraud services, and accounting software – all accessible through plug-and-play API integrations and a single dashboard.

These valuable partnerships create the ability to incorporate integrations that go beyond the capabilities of payments competitors.

Deploying an orchestration solution also allows banks to receive a fee on all merchant transactions, even those processed outside of the bank’s services, while still lowering costs for those merchants. 

Unparalleled Access To Merchant Payment Insights

Orchestration services enable financial institutions to access granular payments data, regardless of the payment service being used by their business banking customers.

This provides them with insights into how customers are using their data, which can then be used to optimise services to better meet the needs of specific merchants. 

These insights can also be used as an opportunity to go to market with off the shelf technology stacks to attract new customers. For example, this could be inclusive of nascent but fast growing payment types. 

Seize The Opportunity To Scale And Grow Profits

These are just a few of the compelling benefits of why financial institutions should implement orchestration services. 

Paydock is an experienced orchestration provider offering an orchestration-as-a-service solution to financial institutions looking to gain an edge in the fast moving e-commerce market. Paydock can be deployed in a private cloud or hosted/consumed on our platform. It’s easy to manage and can be seamlessly integrated into a bank’s current platform with a full white-label solution. 

Whether it is in how to manage merchants or quickly bringing the latest and greatest payments technology to market, find out how a partnership with Paydock helps banks and financial institutions stay on the cutting edge of payments by getting in touch with us today.

Start transforming payments today.

Get in touch with us today to find out how to supercharge and simplify your payments stack.

For Banks
/0 Comments/by

Paydock powers new e-commerce solution from Australian banking giant CBA

Orchestration provider partners with Top 50 global bank to launch one-stop platform for payments, integrations and checkout

 

PAYDOCK, the payments orchestration platform, has partnered with major Australian banking group The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) to launch PowerBoard, a uniquely simple solution for a merchant’s technology integrations, payments, and fraud prevention needs.

Delivering a first in Australian banking, PowerBoard will make enabling and scaling online businesses much easier by streamlining connectivity to payment services via a single platform. PowerBoard will offer traditional card payments, domestic payment methods, as well as other alternative payment methods, and services such as fraud and security features will be pre-integrated.

PowerBoard adds a single, simple to use layer that allows merchants to ‘plug in’ once, immediately reaching a range of payment methods wrapped in these further enhancements. Online merchants are now discovering orchestration-first payment strategies, yet they also want access to further innovation such as enhanced security tools, insights, and fraud-fighting services: features that require more technological sophistication to add than they typically have at their disposal. CBA PowerBoard merchants can leapfrog competitors as their needs change and more services are added to PowerBoard. Existing merchant back-end processes are spared significant disruption and the solution removes the need for data to be passed between a multitude of third parties, creating a safer risk environment.

CBA is white labelling the Paydock solution and has exclusive rights to distribute the product in Australia. Globally, Paydock is presently pursuing further significant partnership opportunities in the banking sector, notably in the UK, US, Canada, GCC, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. The company processes millions of monthly payments through its platform for businesses across all industry sectors, including leading retailers, travel accommodation, insure-tech and not-for-profit. Paydock’s platform has generated substantial ROI gains for customers, dramatically shrinking the total cost of payments ownership, including back-office administration, processing, technical, compliance and opportunity costs.

Commenting on the PowerBoard launch, Rob Lincolne, CEO of Paydock, said:

 “Merchants today need more support than ever. As fintech gathers pace across the globe, we are delighted to partner with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as our exclusive distributor for enabling deployment of new payment, security, and insights services to support valued merchants looking for an edge online. Untethering payments from legacy solutions and enabling choice and flexibility alongside essential fraud and security features will lift the bottom line for many merchants and ensure they can remain focused on their own businesses, while meeting the needs of their customers in a secure, flexible way.”

Mike Vacy-Lyle, Group Executive, Business Banking at CBA, added:

“PowerBoard is a significant step for CBA as we look beyond traditional banking products and services to solve pain points for our customers and provide better, integrated solutions. This is about helping our business customers create better experiences for their own customers. We are incredibly excited to be the first bank to offer such a service, and are looking forward to building out the offering in the coming months.”

PowerBoard is presently available to select business customers of CBA and a wider roll-out is scheduled for mid-2023.

About Paydock

Paydock (www.paydock.com) is an innovative enterprise-grade payments orchestration platform. Paydock assists merchants and payment service providers resolve systemic inefficiencies and risks associated with the industry’s growth, such as ever-increasing complexity, lost profit and material risk.

Clients include, financial institutions, major retailers, not-for-profits, global travel platforms, insurtech leaders.

Paydock’s ambition is to return billions in lost profit to its target markets while introducing best-in-class payments infrastructure to some of the most loved brands in the world.

CONTACT:

For media enquiries related to Paydock, please contact:

MINERVA PR

Malika Shermatova

+44 (0)7979 852604

[email protected]

/0 Comments/by

Payment Outages: Reducing the risk with Routing

By Rob Simmonds, Enterprise Architect at Paydock
Payments Availability

As consumers, we tend to think that the structures and processes that enable us to buy anything at any time with any payment method are verging on infallible; that is until they do fail, and it lays bare our reliance on just a few key players in the market to ensure that we can buy our goods and services, either in person or online.

System outages can affect millions of consumers and thousands of businesses who become  unable to make or receive payments for several hours while service is restored. While this kind of outage can be frustrating as a consumer, as a merchant, you might never get back the customers who tried to spend their money with you during your payments outage. And if you rely on this service as a consumer, you may face personal frustration if it is the only solution available.

 

According to research, online merchants lose 62% of customers who experience a failed online transaction.

Payment outages come in all sorts of sizes and flavours; In Australia, a recent outage by Osko was caused by a technical glitch in the New Payments Platform (NPP) at the Reserve Bank of Australia, and impacted all 85 of Australia’s banks. 

Similarly earlier this year, an outage caused by a “scheduled software update” caused Mastercard transactions to be declined across the UK for several hours.  And back in 2012, the Royal Bank of Scotland had a severe failure in upgrading its mainframe batch software, which caused weeks of payments delays for upwards of 6 million of its customers. 

It’s not just wide-scale outages that can cause pain – there are many steps between your customer opting to buy something from your website, and the funds arriving in your account. If your particular payments provider, or one of the myriad of other components in the payments chain has an outage, what do you do? 

Mitigating the risk with Payments Orchestration

This is where payments orchestration with Paydock comes in. Paydock’s unique and dynamic routing engine technology can be configured to intelligently route payments via alternative gateways based upon gateway availability, allowing your business to weather the storm of a payment gateway or network outage and result in higher payment success rates and reducing cart abandonment. 

By supporting multiple payment methods directly in the shopping cart, Paydock helps facilitate a failover process offering alternative routes to payment, meaning that a payments outage doesn’t mean you have a business outage.

Whilst outages and downtime may be inevitable, Paydock and payment orchestrators like us allow routing by service, card type, currency, payment type and gateway availability, providing you with the capability to offer your customers alternative payment options to ensure they can still buy what they want, when they want; and most importantly, from you – even if (we mean when) things go wrong.

Learn more about Paydock’s Routing Engine in our demo video below!

Routing your payments with our Rules Feature

Want to find out how Paydock can reduce the risk to your business? Get in touch today with one of our payments experts at [email protected] 

 

/0 Comments/by

API security: how resilient is your business to data leaks?

By Alex Omelchenko, Chief Security Officer at Paydock

In a world of increasing numbers of systems that need to work well together, APIs form an important piece of the puzzle.

APIs are necessary. They allow online systems and products to ‘talk to each other’ in near real time and (in theory) secure ways. They speed up business, reduce costs and provide better experiences for consumers. However this interoperability of systems can also lead to risks as the front door can be unlocked, as one would expect, by API ‘keys’. However with great power comes great responsibility, and APIs are about the most powerful things on the internet today. The invisible piping behind the scenes holding it all together.

Unlike what our web browsers tell us, the biggest risks are often not related to how many magic characters are in your less-than-90-days-old-password, but are via these other computer-language digital passwords. Any developer, knowing the URL to access can usually often figure out to use these keys to go for a roam inside the house. API keys really are the keys to the kingdom.

For sure, an open, or unsecure API endpoint (such as the one that Optus had) is a deep programmatic sin, however in this world of endless integrations, de-integrations and re-integrations, it’s possible to be sympathetic to how this took place.

To eradicate the risk of this happening to your organisation we have compiled four key principles that you can review (and hopefully apply) as you consider your security posture as an organisation. We hope these lessons from our experience and knowledge will be valuable to you.

Handy Security Checklist

The following checklist forms a component of our broader internal security best-practice posture as it relates to API access, and might be most valuable to merchants who may be currently reviewing their own security posture in response to this week’s news.

 1. Authenticate Access

Endpoint authentication must be employed by default. This is the first, mandatory step. Inevitably, you will end up having some endpoints which will need to be public (though this does not mean unauthenticated). In this case, take a step further and carefully curate and maintain an allowlist of public endpoints and require authentication for all the other endpoints.

 2.  Limit Access – Time-and-Scope Limited Tokens

API Access should only be granted to a limited scope of endpoints, with limited scope of methods (read, write or update). For example, we enable merchants to create unique access tokens (similar to API keys) to our services while also defining an expiry date. Access tokens can be generated with fine-grained permissions for specific actions on particular resources while also defining white or black lists of IP addresses to be used from. These methods of restricting resource access dramatically narrows the potential attack surface.

One benefit here is that even if a developer forgets to remove a token following integration (as can happen), access will expire in the background closing out the risk. Master tokens or keys can be managed by the central security function. Many payment systems do not have this ability to manage fine-grain permissions and introduce appropriate access expiry, and so our orchestration overlay increases the robustness of any end-to-end modern payment solution.

While universal API ‘master keys’ are still around, there are better ways to structure access and rotate limited-permission tokens now.

 3.  Layered Security – 2FA and Password Recycling w. SSO/SAML

Access to systems that can be used to create access tokens should bemanaged under 2FA, password recycling and SSO/SAML regimes. A single password is not enough anymore. Utilising multiple factors of authentication is necessary. 

4.   External Penetration Testing Must Be Ongoing

It may be obvious, but the PCI-DSS certification that Paydock adheres to ensures regular external penetration tests. Whether you are required to be PCI compliant or not, we recommend ensuring external penetration tests are regularly conducted along with endpoint scanning. This will flush out any exposure not removed using the above steps.

This is not a one time exercise, as hackers are always finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities, even as your developers may accidentally open back doors in their day to day work.

There is of course much more that could be done, but these four easy steps could materially reduce any attack surface and help you sleep at night, so you can be confident that the unfortunate experience faced by Optus will not happen to you.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with payments orchestration?

Handling sensitive or secure data correctly is the cornerstone of consumer trust and individual privacy. In the payments sector, we are aware of the same risks and orchestration provides some comfort to merchants.

The risk area we solve daily is where merchants and corporations need to ‘stitch’ these vital systems together with resources from their internal teams or third party IT contractors. The problem is when these resources head on to their next contract or assignment, they can, through human error, sometimes leave API keys hardcoded in code or possibly leave an endpoint open (possibly used for testing). It can happen. API keys can also be copy-pasted into third party messaging, email or text services, not easily picked up in a data loss or scanning systems, even if split into multiple parts. 

Prior to Paydock’s inception, we saw many merchants working with 3, 4 or more payment systems each handling secure payments data but not always protected to the extent required. Juggling PCI-DSS requirements and handling the back-end-forth shuffle of sensitive payments information across these platforms via numerous API keys for each system, under their own different security regimes is a significant load for any CIO and the complexity gets exponential as more and more services come into the modern payment mix. As the number of payment, authentication and authorisation systems increases, so do the risks and chances of a breach.

Payments orchestration provides a highly secure remedy for this inherent risk in the industry. Ensuring the entire end-to-end flow is wrapped in hardened API protocols, regularly tested by external penetration tests and can be underpinned by narrow time and scope limited access tokens, organisations can be comfortable their systems are secure. Remember, hackers will follow the path of least resistance, so a hardent posture is a significant deterrent in itself.

Payments orchestration with Paydock minimises data breach exposure exponentially, in the same way as not using a security focused overlay solution to defend third party API endpoints expands it. We’re proud to be helping merchants significantly harden their end to end payments security stance and if we can help in any way please connect.

/0 Comments/by

Stand with Ukraine and help us to help those in need

Two team-led fundraising initiatives to help those affected by war in Ukraine. Read on to find out more and how you too can show your support. 

According to the UN refugee agency, over 5 million people had to flee their homes in Ukraine and leave their loved ones behind, not to mention 6.5 million who were displaced internally and tens of thousands of those who lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict.

Business communities across the globe have shown an incredible sense of unity and an immense desire to do what they can, each in their own way, to help those in need. We have seen countless businesses cease operations in Russia and stand with Ukraine, while others have stepped into Ukraine to volunteer and play their part in whatever way they can. Some of the greatest examples of small businesses playing their part include the Mail Force Ukraine initiative urging UK’s small businesses to join forces, whilst other initiatives include young entrepreneurs, deservingly praised in a Financial Times article for their passion, resilience, and strength. 

The sense of unity, humanity and most importantly the moral duty and obligation to help, act and make a difference is certainly overwhelming and really trickles down to a personal level. It is hard to find someone who has not been impacted by this conflict on a personal level in some way or another. Whilst many of us are in disbelief that atrocities of such scale can and are still happening in the 21st century, the reality is that the world is an unpredictable place today and every one of us could well be in the same situation as many Ukrainians find themselves right now. 

We are extremely proud to have a culture at Paydock built on values, inclusivity, and morality. And it is this very culture that has been the key driver behind our team effort to create an act of good, no matter how small or big, but one that would hopefully make a tangible difference. As a team we are deeply saddened by the ongoing devastation and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and while stopping these atrocities may be out of our hands, every one of us can still play a role in helping those affected in so many other ways, and united together we can build something that could truly make a difference.

How to get involved with ‘Stand with Ukraine’

With this in mind, and in response to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, we have worked together as a team volunteering time, effort and ideas to source, plan and build something that we believe would help us, as a team, raise awareness of the ongoing issue, promote peace but most importantly raise funds that are critical to the survival of those affected by this conflict. Today we are proud to launch two team-driven fundraising initiatives such as:

Stand with Ukraine, which includes a range of T-shirts and tote bags designed in-house, by us, in a hope to promote peace and awareness of the sufferings of Ukrainian people. Your purchase means that you too can Stand with Ukraine and help to provide much-needed aid to those affected. 100% of all profits will go to a selection of charities chosen by our team members. 

The selected charities include: 

  • United 24 – An initiative launched by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.
  • Come Back Alive – A not-for-profit organisation that supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine through financing purely defence initiatives.
  • Sirius Shelter– The largest animal shelter in Ukraine providing shelter and veterinary services to animals from various parts of Ukraine including liberated territories.

All products are made of 100% organic cotton using renewable energy and designed to be part of the circular economy, never contributing to landfill. 

Show your support and Stand with Ukraine too by purchasing merchandise designed by our design team today.

Train4Ukraine, an initiative revolving around wellness, where we as a team, consisting of marathon runners, mountain bikers and even an Ironman, collectively will be travelling 2500km – the distance equivalent from our main office in the heart of London to our office in Kharkiv, to raise awareness of the ongoing war in Ukraine and raise money to help those in need. 

The initiative will run until 24th August 2022 – Ukraine’s Independence Day, which undoubtedly is more significant to each Ukrainian this year than ever before. The date also marks the six months’ anniversary since the start of the war. By donating today you too can take the step with us towards a great cause and help us to help the Ukrainian people celebrate their independence and freedom. 

All proceeds from this challenge will go to the selected charities chosen by our team members (United24, Come Back Alive, Sirius Shelter) 

If you would like to follow our team’s updates and show your support you can donate directly on our Train4Ukraine Umbali page.

Virtual Zoom/Google Meet Backgrounds

In addition to our fundraising initiatives, our design team have also created a range of various Zoom/Google Meet virtual backgrounds with artwork in support of Ukraine. To  download these for your use, Save the images below and add them to your video conferencing software. 

From all of us at Paydock, thank you for your support and glory to Ukraine!

/0 Comments/by

Paydock partners with The Paypers for Who’s Who in Payments Report 2022

Are you a B2B and/or B2C business? Ever wondered who the key payment providers in the B2B and B2C commerce payment ecosystem were? 

We have partnered with The Paypers to bring you the most up to date market overview and analysis of payment providers in this year’s edition of Who is Who in Payments Report. 

Download your free copy here today to see analysis of the most recent trends, M&A activity and investments, startups to watch, as well as expert views on what payments strategies stakeholders should look into, key learnings from partnerships signed over the last year, along with detailed accounts of all the relevant capabilities and distinguishing portfolios of players activating in this space.

To see how Paydock aligns with your payment needs, flick to page 154 of the report to see our full company profile and innovative capabilities, that will optimise payment strategies of your business on a global scale and deliver ultimate flexibility and control.

/0 Comments/by

System Maintenance: Paydock Dashboard Connection [April 28, 2022]

Dear Merchants,

Please be informed that the scheduled Production release will take place on Thursday, April 28, 2022, at 4 PM EEST | 1 PM UTC. During this time period, there may be intermittent access to your Paydock dashboard.

Maintenance window: 2 hours; Expected downtime: up to 2 hours.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience that you may face.

We will do our best to minimise the downtime.

Kind regards,

Paydock Support Team

/0 Comments/by

Values vs Value: The Future of Ethical Payments

By Toby Aikins, Merchant Experience Lead at Paydock

 

My latest online purchase was a water filter jug fuelled by sustainable and renewable pellets (Phox Water –  in case you’re interested). I felt that surge of serotonin knowing that I will be sending less plastic to landfill, but it also occurred to me that I didn’t even consider the payment provider processing that payment, let alone whether they were an ethical payment provider.

As a consumer, I often feel remorse about how disconnected I am from the issues I care most about. So I wrote a few words to explain why ethics and morality matter in payments.

 

74% of consumers will always consider a brand’s values before purchasing from them

 

If everything else is equal – cost and ease of access – I think most people would prefer to use a provider with a strong commitment to equality and equanimity. According to a recent study by Feefo, 74% of consumers will always consider a brand’s values before purchasing from them. So what does this mean to Paydock and what is the role of ethics in payments? Where do we stand in 2022 when it comes to long term suppliers and business partners? Do we genuinely care about how they treat their employees and their suppliers? And why do we prioritise values over money?

In my view, this is the best time ever to scrutinise every part of our supply chain and reflect on what really matters in a post-pandemic world. Can we truly consider ourselves an ethical payment orchestration platform if we are profiting from misery or turning a blind eye to things we don’t agree with? 

Values-Based Ethical Payments

Paydock is committed to equality and human rights. We are a values-based organisation, inclusive and fair in every sense. As a company, we focus our efforts and work with businesses that genuinely contribute value to the world. We do not support pornography. We do not support gambling. We do not support human misery and are proud to leave money on the table to live our values. We invest in our people by paying fair wages and creating exciting careers. But we want to do more.

Paydock offers a democratic approach to payments.

We don’t proselytise or pontificate. We make it easy for every business to offer their customers genuine choice. Our mission is to deliver a best-in-class payments software so merchants can align their ethical decisions to every part of their business, from order to fulfilment. We are committed to the communities we support and will always invest in the great humans we work with and for. And we want to work with businesses that will appreciate this.

Why should ethical payments matter? Aren’t we ‘just’ building software? Actually, it’s not just software and nothing is in isolation in 2022. With a global team of more than 70 employees  spread throughout the world, we are a company where aspirational developers, managers, product owners and executives can exercise their skills whilst living our values and empowering local communities. We know that everything we do and every decision we make has an impact. We are committed to making decisions that are not just good for business but are also good for our collective conscience.

The Future for Paydock

In 2022, Paydock will be giving even more back. We already support many of the world’s largest charities, but this year our staff will be volunteering in the communities we operate in, while also continuing to work towards B Corp certification. In an industry which to date, has often been known for opportunism, over-hype and blind eyes, we think it’s the least we can do to create products and businesses that reflect the important values we believe in. I am extremely proud to be part of a team that genuinely wants to leave the world in better shape than before we started this journey.

Payments orchestration platforms change the game for merchants by empowering them to now, for the first time, rapidly align with companies within the payments ecosystem that reflect their own values as well as those of their valued consumer bases.

If you work or partner with Paydock, you can have every confidence that ethics come with the partnership too – we will always be ethical in our approach and we will always be optimistic about humankind and committed to transparently serving our customers, team and communities. Yes, we make payments at scale easy, but this is just part of the story. We also want our partners, friends, employees and merchants to feel positive about the future and to be confident that we feel the same way. It’s the least we can do, and we look forward to sharing some of our positive contributions as we continue to grow in 2022.

Get in touch today

If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions about how we can continue to aspire, please get in touch via [email protected]

/0 Comments/by

Official Statement Letter

Official Statement Letter

 

Paydock has observed with increasing sadness and anger the unjustified aggression exercised by Russia towards the sovereign state of Ukraine. Paydock condemns, in the strongest terms possible, the directives of the Kremlin and the actions of the Russian military, and supports the leaders and people of the sovereign state of Ukraine. 

These horrific events have hit close to home. Since its inception, Paydock has employed software engineers in Ukraine with world class technical skills, work ethic, resilience and professionalism. Some of these developers have been with us since our very first days. We honour their commitment to Paydock and are deeply grateful for the important role they have played in bringing success to Paydock, its stakeholders and its customer base globally. 

We grieve the senseless loss of life, displacement of individuals and families, and the destruction of property perpetrated by the Russian forces. A large proportion of the Paydock family are stationed in Kharkiv, Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. We are maintaining 24/7 contact with the team and providing them with financial, logistical and emotional support and will continue to do so for as long as required.

We are eager to support not only our Ukrainian staff but also the broader Ukrainian community with both current levels of assistance and support charitable organisations providing humanitarian aid on the ground in Ukraine.

We thank our clients around the globe for the generous support they have provided us as we in turn support our Ukrainian team. We are most grateful for your understanding and your thoughts and prayers. Our mutual concern for these tragic events has undoubtedly brought us closer and we believe that we will emerge from this crisis with an even stronger working relationship.

Paydock hopes that peace will once more return to Ukraine. In the meantime, our thoughts, prayers, financial and logistical support will remain with the people of Ukraine.

We entreat you to join us as we stand with our brothers and sisters, the peaceful people of the sovereign state of Ukraine.

/0 Comments/by

The End of the Single Vendor Era

It’s no secret that the payments industry has undergone an exponential rate of change within the last year. With an explosive growth in alternative payment methods (such as digital wallets), the rise of buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platforms and aggressive commoditisation in the processing market, this now means that merchants are rapidly drowning as they seek to remain agile yet capitalise across an increasingly fragmented and brittle payments market. This proliferation of vendors has resulted in a significant commoditisation in the payments market, thus creating a substantial bottom line problem for merchants worldwide as per a market research indicating that many major brands typically leave 3-4% of profit on the table. 

 

Many major brands typically leave 3-4% of profit on the table

 

Lots of businesses are known to stick with a single vendor strategy only for them to realise that something was missed. Whether it be compliance, cost or strategic reasons…We all know that in the fintech world, just because a vendor may have multiple offerings, it is rare that only one does everything ever required both now and in the future.

Single vendor strategies are no longer defensible

Rapid innovations in the payments industry are driving a steep change in how consumers are paying and merchants are needing to stay agile and ensure they are capitalising on the best the market has to offer.  Connecting to newer and evolving vendors such as AfterPay and ApplePay are key to retaining customers in today’s landscape, but at what cost? Businesses are constantly exhausting their resource, whereby they are changing their vendors on a regular basis or left with very little option to work with the limitations that the single vendor has. This has the potential to leave a lot of profit on the table, or using “wasted money” on technical resource such as maintaining an in-house development team that will ‘patch’ over the problems. 

Given the complexities of the payments market today and expeditious pace of change in customer demand, it’s no longer feasible for merchants to commit to a single-vendor strategy. Instead, they must adopt a multi-vendor approach that enables them to regain control of their money whilst future proofing all aspects of the business. 

How to fix the Single Vendor problem

The solution to this is an exciting yet relatively recent market segment, payments orchestration. Payments orchestration enables merchants to rapidly consume and absorb all that the market has to offer without compromising their pockets and coming up short. 

By defaulting to an orchestration-first payments strategy with Paydock, merchants are able to plug in multiple vendors through a simple, uniformed platform whilst satisfying mandatory technical, compliance, security and other functional requirements and above all else, it  eliminates both the complexity and traditional costs. 

Why Orchestration is the definitive solution

Paydock diffuses the pain points that are typically present within a single vendor strategy and harmonises merchants payments strategies with the following benefits:

  1. Unlimited Connections: With Paydock, merchants can offer greater flexibility to their customers and are able to route payments to unlimited gateways regardless of any variables holding them back, such as currency, payment method, card scheme etc. 
  2. Data Visibility: Orchestration gives merchants a unique lens on payments across all channels on a single dashboard. They are also able to gain fresh clarity on all consumer activity across these channels and provide payment preferences based on behaviour through data collected within Paydock. 
  3. No Maintenance: Paydock removes the headache for Merchants with the upkeep and maintenance of the gateways and takes full control of all the technical configuration, leaving merchants to focus free on the core business. 
  4. Future-proofed: Paydock’s sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to future-proof customers by capitalising (rather than suffering) from the increasing rate of fragmentation and giving them the confidence to move freely with new entrants and trends within the changing landscape. 

The single vendor era is officially outdated and no longer working, orchestration is the definitive solution redefining payments experiences and a no brainer for all parties involved whether that be for merchants, customers or vendors. 

By adopting an orchestration approach with Paydock, this will not ‘rock the boat’ with your current relationships with partners and vendors but instead will seamlessly integrate into your payments solution whilst being completely agnostic. 

Find out more

If you’re looking to set yourself free from the single vendor approach or you want to find out more about orchestration-first strategy with Paydock, get in touch with one of our experts at [email protected] 

/0 Comments/by

Security Bulletin: Paydock’s response to Apache Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228)

As you may know, a critical software vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) was reported on December 9, 2021, that enabled systems running Apache Log4j version 2.14.1 or below to be compromised and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. 

None of the Paydock environments employ the Apache Log4j utility.  

We are sympathetic to the highly justified concern associated with the recent exposure of the vulnerability, however are pleased to advise Paydock has no such exposure.

For more information about the Log4j vulnerability please see this link. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

/0 Comments/by

What did Black Friday cost you this time?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become the ultimate annual events for both consumers, as well as retailers, who plan for these well ahead of time to ensure it all runs smoothly. 

Grown in popularity over the years, and even more so since the pandemic, bank reports suggested that this year Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day. NatWest and Nationwide both reported over 4m transactions by lunchtime on Black Friday, while Barclaycard also recorded 21.4% more purchases compared to 2020.

 

Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day

 

Given the significance of these events particularly for the retailers who are trying to recoup post pandemic, there is a distinct pressure for those retailers that will be inundated with soaring eCommerce volumes and the slightest idea of a technical glitch is any retailer’s nightmare. The robustness of your payments gateway and your website/mobile app checkout to accommodate a sheer volume of traffic are probably the most crucial functions when running a  smooth and successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The truth is that outages and downtime can still happen however well-prepared you may be and however advanced you think the technology you are using is. 

We all remember what occurred with Macy’s a few years ago, when they encountered nationwide problems processing payments during the busiest shopping day of the year. Not only did the retailer lose out on thousands in sales but also left a lot of its customers, (including loyal customers) frustrated and unimpressed, which was somewhat damaging and embarrassing for the brand. No business, particularly eCommerce platforms and merchants, that are heavily reliant on online transactions like to think about the implications of a payment gateway outage can have on them and hope that it won’t happen to them, but it is this kind of mindset that can be costly to your business.

Merchants aside, even digital platforms have issues. This year, we saw Revolut battling major Black Friday problems as customers were unable to use their accounts on their mobiles to sign in or make card payments, with at least six of its services being affected by the outage. 

So what do merchants do if this was happening with their primary payments gateway? It’s tough when you rely on payments but can’t take one.

Paydock’s fail-proof feature is a great example of how merchants can overcome this issue. Our technology is built in with a feature that mitigates downtime risk by enabling merchants to fail-over to an alternative gateway when their primary gateway is down. By ensuring their customer’s sensitive payment data is securely stored in our vault, merchants can operate with peace of mind that their business is open for business even when their service providers experience downtime. 

For subscription-based businesses, the impact of a payment gateway outage extends beyond just Black Friday and Cyber Monday as it has multiple, negative implications on their ability to renew subscriptions and sign up new subscribers, affecting their bottom line even more significantly. So how can subscription businesses protect from these outages? Should they be thinking beyond just ensuring that their tech, website and mobile apps are intact? The tricky part is that every business interprets “robust payments infrastructure” in a different way. But the trick is to seek for an infrastructure that is more holistic and maximises your chances of succeeding with minimum effort or cost.

Subscription businesses can benefit from Paydock’s sophisticated recurring engine, this provides autonomous recurring payments across your Paydock-managed payment gateway infrastructure. Among a myriad of innovative features, our engine offers a configurable retry capability, which means that you are in total control of “what happens and how” when a payment fails, how many times you retry, how long between retries, and what happens then.

The more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups.

In other words, the more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups. Look for an infrastructure that can effortlessly orchestrate all of your payments requirements and processes.

Our clients have been able to plug in hundreds of instances of gateways globally and remain in total control, expand effortlessly into new geographies, currencies, and regions. With easy access to your favourite payment gateways and acceptance services already connected, you can use the gateways that best suit your business needs depending on the phase of business you’re in. Best-of-breed always trumps single-vendor, and we’re here to have your back.

Without a highly scalable, resilient payments infrastructure in place, there is no guarantee your business will survive the pressure of soaring volumes on Black Friday or any other day of the year for that matter. Payments orchestration with Paydock lifts that burden for you and ensures that you won’t be left in the dark for your customers. 

Be prepared for next time.

Want to be prepared for the next big retail event? Get in touch with one of our friendly experts today at [email protected] 

/0 Comments/by

How can you secure your payments with Payments Orchestration?

As we expect to see a rise in eCommerce even further and the number of people shopping online worldwide is expected to reach almost 30% of the world population in the next couple of years, it is no surprise that cybercriminals will be taking full advantage of this and the risk of fraud will run parallel to the surge of online transactions. 

 

42% of consumers being a victim of fraudulent transactions in 2020 (Marqueta, 2020).

 

This last year has seen a significant rise in fraud, with over 42% of consumers being a victim of fraudulent transactions in 2020 (Marqueta, 2020). Continual data breaches at high profile brands have brought even greater emphasis on strict data security and governance processes into frame for executives worldwide, with no simple solution immediately available.

With an impressive number of third party fraud detection and prevention services available in the market today, the one challenge merchants face is actually consuming these services and coherently absorbing them into their payments roadmap. Stitching together all these services can create opportunities for fraudsters and therefore retailers should consider not only taking care of their payments processing from fraud but orchestrate their entire payments infrastructure from A-Z. 

We highlight some of the key defences that should be deployed by merchants when it comes to securing payments with an orchestration-first strategy … 

Tokenization with Orchestration

Tokenization has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses to adopt in order to reduce potential data breaches and risk of compromise to any customer sensitive data. The process of tokenization is simple. It replaces sensitive card data such as credit card numbers with a unique and decipherable identifier known as a token whilst storing the original data in a secure cloud data vault.

Paydock’s vault is at the heart of our promise to merchants and is really the next generation of safety. By securely storing credit card details and returning a special paydock vault token. This is your alias for the card you have stored and you are now able to effectively route, update and charge these vaulted cards without exposing sensitive data. All sensitive information, such as cardholder data is managed in the Paydock Vault, using multiple encryption keys with split knowledge and dual control, which prevents a data thief from being able to make use of information stolen from a database without also having the key.

This data store cannot be connected to via the internet. Furthermore, it is fail proof too. The Paydock Vault mitigates your downtime risk by enabling you to fail-over to an alternative gateway when your primary gateway is down. This ensures that customer’s sensitive payment data is securely stored in our vault, and you are still open for business even when service providers experience downtime. We offer secure data migration services to the Paydock Vault from other service providers, so you don’t have to lift a finger. 

PCI Compliance

Any merchant working with payment providers will have an awareness of PCI Compliance – required by credit card companies to make online transactions safe and secure. Simply put it is a set of regulations drawn up by major payments players such as Amex, Visa, and MasterCard, requiring businesses and organisations to comply with 12 general data security requirements to be followed by every merchant.

Merchants who want to process, store, or transmit credit card data are required to be PCI compliant, however, getting compliance on your own can be a complex and lengthy process, not to mention expensive, and this is where using a payments solutions provider can save you the bother, add value and elevate your business. Paydock’s payments orchestration platform enables you to plug in hundreds of instances of gateways globally and remain in total control. Transactions can be tagged, routed, analysed and filtered by any connected payment source. Expand effortlessly to new geographies, currencies and regions knowing you are in control. By safely storing each payment source in our PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant vault, our customers regain lost power and freedom in managing their payment ecosystem. 

Risk Profiles 

Many merchants default to using expensive anti-chargeback ‘insurers’, underperforming in-house tools or simply wear the cost because it’s become so hard to efficiently assess, test and deploy third party fraud vendors into a mid-flight payments strategy. Paydock diffuses these pain points and enables merchants to activate, mix and match, assess efficacy and interoperate fraud vendors based on their particular risk profile and technical stack.  This manner of digital continuous improvement with low/no cost is of substantial importance to the future of a safe digital payments market. 

Merchants using Paydocks can assign specific risk profiles with different sets of risk rules whereby they can separate low-risk transactions from the high risk ones and dynamically block or hold for review. Combining these risk profiles with native service integrations with anti-fraud vendors such as Accertify provides next-level payments resilience security! 

Securing your payments has never been easier

With many fraud prevention and security measures to absorb in your roadmap, orchestration introduces all the critical capabilities you need for your payments strategy all in one simple platform. Payments Orchestration with Paydock is quickly becoming a go-to tool to resolve the many security challenges and broad risks merchants face. Paydock’s technology provides the ability for merchants to simplify their back-office, collapse material risks and focus on core business again. 

To find out more you can 10x your payment strategy with maximum security, please get in touch with one of our friendly experts at [email protected].

/0 Comments/by

5 Top reasons why Merchants should include Payments Orchestration in their strategy

Payments orchestration as a concept may not be new but its role within the global payments ecosystem is becoming increasingly crucial as merchants try to keep up with an ocean of payments options. Powered by rapidly changing consumer demands, the rise of ecommerce and a race to the bottom in transaction fees, orchestration is about to hit prime time. 

While giving options to customers may be the way forward for merchants looking to increase sales and make the most of ecommerce, the downside is that it essentially creates a headache from logistical, integration, efficiency, and cost point of view. 

We outline the top reasons why merchants should seriously consider payments orchestration in order to stay in the game while making the most of the ecommerce opportunities.

1. Scale faster and serve a global audience

Digitisation and ecommerce are globalising many businesses, however, optimising a payments strategy globally on a single payment gateway is almost impossible. 

Through payments orchestration, merchants can up their game on a global scale by being able to integrate various payment providers and orchestrate the entire transaction process from end to end, starting from checkout to processing, acceptance, reconciliation, recording and reporting. 

From a cross-border point of view in particular, it means that merchants can be smart with routing and integrate the right mix of regional and global payment providers to optimise acceptance rates and save costs. 

Paydock’s payments orchestration platform enables merchants to plug in unlimited gateways globally and yet remain in total control.

Adding a new payments service through Paydock’s platform takes seconds, merchants can engage a broader consumer base and effortlessly expand to new geographies and markets – all the while knowing that they are in charge of the whole process. Paydock’s payment orchestration service can support hundreds of processors around the world through a single API.

2. Fail proof and highly resilient payments ecosystems – where things always go your way

Payments orchestration can also facilitate a better failover process for transactions by enabling the system to automatically and intelligently reroute to the next best alternative payment method in the event of failed transaction and thus secure a better chance of transaction success rate. 

 

Since adopting an orchestration-first approach, Paydock has recorded reductions in administration and technical costs by as much as 70% when using our platform.

 

Not only does this reduce cost per payment that a merchant has to bear, it also ensures that no sale is lost and customers remain satisfied, making payments orchestration a very appealing ROI proposition for merchants. 

For example, Paydock’s real-time routing engine enables merchants to build a suite of configurable routes in an “if-this-then-that” arrangement, removing the need for an IT project full of anxiety and additional cost. So not only does it make sense to merchants thinking ahead, it also has a real and instant bottom-line impact. 

Add to this the ability of a merchant to mitigate risks associated with payment processor downtimes – something that can easily happen in the complex payments world!

3. Fraud protection

Just as merchants are looking to capitalise on the rise of ecommerce, fraudsters are hard at work too. According to Finder, in the first half of 2020, there was a reported loss of almost £30m attributed to online shopping and auction fraud. With this number expected to continue to grow and businesses constantly coming under attack, risk is increasing and fraud protection has become a priority focus for merchants who seek to harden their security posture. 

 

“In the first half of 2020, there was a reported loss of almost £30m attributed to online shopping and auction fraud”

 

Without payments orchestration, the transactional data is spread over multiple gateways and payment providers, therefore it is naturally hard to have insight into or indeed analyse data, making fraud even harder to detect.  Well, guess what? Risk is one of the areas where payments orchestration has a tremendous value and could particularly be effective against fraudsters too, but aggregating and processing all data in one place, giving you real-time visibility and analytics at your fingertips. 

And while on the subject of visibility, check out Paydock’s Audit Tool which gives auditable visibility of all activity in real time across the Paydock ecosystem. This allows merchants to monitor all gateways, users and updates all within the Paydock network. This is available in Paydock’s multi-user engine, so merchants can track actions of their staff, external developers and third party integrations. 

4. Futureproof

An increasing need and therefore demand for payments orchestration, already being used across numerous industries, is indeed an indication that it is here to stay, so merchants need to think long term. While there are a myriad of initiatives that offer a temporary fix and lift in revenues and profitability, payments orchestration is really all about the bigger picture – it is about enabling businesses to future proof themselves by allowing them to plan, prepare and adapt to the rapidly changing payments landscape and whatever it may bring next. 

Payments orchestration is a scalable, robust and cost-effective solution to end-to-end payment processing, with easy access to continuously growing payment methods and alternatives, which will be a commercially significant aspect for merchants and therefore crucial for their success.

5. Improve customer journey and conversion rates

This is probably the most critical benefit of payments orchestration as by simplifying the entire process it removes many obstacles to successful completion of a transaction, while flexibility and a choice of payment methods help merchants meet customer preferences and expectations leading to improved conversion rates. According to 451 Research, 78% of consumers say that if their preferred payment method isn’t accepted, they are less likely to shop with that business in the future.

 

“78% of consumers say that if their preferred payment method isn’t accepted, they are less likely to shop with that business in the future.”

 

The checkout experience is probably the most debated area for many merchants with many thousands of pounds and hours spent on designing, re-designing, and testing. The real beauty and advantage of payments orchestration is that it completely removes these complexities and enables merchants to offer a smoother journey to their customers by giving them the payment methods and options regardless of where they are. 

Payments orchestration is truly a no-brainer for merchants to adopt worldwide.

By introducing an orchestration-first strategy as a default, merchants are able to rapidly consume and capitalise on all the market has to offer without any of the traditional costs. With the ability to future-proof, scale faster whilst reducing compliance creep, payments orchestration is truly a no-brainer for merchants to adopt worldwide.

To find out how Paydock can help pocket more for your business, speak to one of our friendly team today by dropping us a line to [email protected] 

 

/0 Comments/by

Buy Now Pay Later – Controlling the frenzy

Merchants today are expected to offer not just one, but multiple Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options at checkout or miss out on sales. Yet with continual shifts in popularity, price and convenience – understanding which BNPL to select and then solving the complex technical, reconciliation and compliance linkages behind the scenes has become an industry-wide headache.

Buy Now Pay Later options at online checkouts have accelerated rapidly within the last few years, with 10 million customers now having used a BNPL product to purchase goods online in 2020 (Capital Economics, 2021). These payment options, initially popular amongst the millennial and Gen Z consumers, have now become one of the fastest growing payment methods set to take over the traditional forms of credit. 

 

“9.5 million consumers in the UK actively avoid buying from retailers that don’t offer BNPL”

 

Given that 9.5 million consumers in the UK actively avoid buying from retailers that don’t offer BNPL (Paypers, 2021), it is pivotal merchants offer BNPL methods at checkout in order to engage their markets. By incorporating BNPL solutions into their payment strategies, merchants can tailor their offer to the needs of their consumers whilst attracting customers, maintaining or increasing repeat customers and enabling higher conversion rates. 

The rise of ecommerce and the phenomenon of alternative payment methods in 2020 has fuelled the success of Buy Now Pay Later. BNPL provider AfterPay, saw a 97% revenue growth within the last year (Afterpay, 2020) and with an increasing number of providers following suit, the competition within the Buy Now Pay Later space is intensifying. 

While great for the consumer, this has increased the challenges for a merchant seeking to interoperate and keep costs low. Merchants are becoming increasingly frustrated with the laundry-list of expected options, expenditure of integration and maintenance costs as they pivot from single to a genuinely flexible multi-vendor payment strategy. 

Payments Orchestration is the only known method to ease this frustration.

Payments orchestration is the only known method to ease this frustration, consolidating multiple BNPL services into one unified, low or no-code service eliminating complexity and chaos and allowing merchants to focus back on core business, but now with more customers.

No-Code Payments Orchestration Solution.

Paydock provides a no-code payments orchestration solution through which merchants can seamlessly integrate and connect with multiple BNPL products such as Paypal’s Pay in 4, Afterpay and zipMoney effectively resolving this challenge. Merchants can accommodate consumer needs, support multiple BNPL vendors at once, and stay agile as the market moves along.

The specific costs that merchants seek to remove include hidden and variable vendor fees, complexity and costs associated with integration, maintenance and administration. Orchestration with Paydock sits at the forefront of supporting both merchants and the BNPL industry with the following benefits: 

  1. Low cost of adoption – Plugging in an unlimited number of any payment services via one API results in a substantial reduction of software development overheads. Through Paydock’s single integration capability, merchants are able to eradicate the cost and time wasted on integrating gateways individually and access a multitude of payment gateways seamlessly. Providing a focused and dynamic payment experience irrespective of payment type and method.
  2. Lower cost of maintenance – When maintaining a payments strategy with multiple vendors, it’s crucial that costs are kept to a minimum. Merchants can make a significant reduction in costs associated with payments administration simply by being able to control, manage and audit all transactions via one dashboard. Paydock’s reporting API ensures that a merchant has a complete transactional and event history across its payment ecosystem, keeping them in control of their payments. 
  3. Flexibility to move with the market – The payments sector is rapidly changing and can often limit those to feel trapped in their strategies. As the Buy Now Pay Later space increasingly becomes a primary source of payments, merchants want to feel confident that they have the flexibility to move with the changing landscape. With Paydock’s orchestration, there is no loss of grip on the customer, merchants can future proof their strategies knowing that with Paydock, they can enjoy any future payment service they see fit for their purposes. 

Customer’s needs may be rapidly changing but Buy Now Pay Later is here to stay.

As this space continues to grow and competition continues to intensify, merchants want to provide their customers in the most efficient way whilst ensuring their strategies are one step ahead.  Payments orchestration with Paydock resolves merchant’s needs for simplicity and flexibility within their payments infrastructure and is leading the way in resolving numerous costly issues faced by merchants seeking to navigate disparate, fast-moving and fragmented BNPL (and many more!) service providers.

To find out more about how you can win by integrating and offering multiple payment service providers to consumers in a single service, please drop us a line at [email protected].

 

/0 Comments/by

Digital Wallets – What’s in It for Merchants and What to Look out For?

Ecommerce has been instrumental to the survival of many businesses throughout the past 12 months. As a cashless society looms and consumer behaviour shifts, the increasing demand for easy, frictionless and digital payments is pivotal in order for merchants to stay on top. 

Today, digital wallets play a significant role globally in facilitating seamless, efficient and secure payments and essentially are the catalyst that accelerated Ecommerce to its highest growth rate in 5 years. 

So… why are they essential for merchants?

Digital wallets have become the ‘new norm’ in payments and by 2024, digital wallets will account for 84.5% of e-commerce spend (Global Payments Report, 2021). This increasing reliance on technology has highlighted greater emphasis not only on speed and convenience but the need for security in online transactions. 55% of consumers say security is the most important factor in their digital experience (Experian, 2021) and they are utilising digital wallets as their default payment source as they incorporate advanced security solutions such as biometric authentication or tokenisation to reduce the risk of fraud.

By rapidly revolutionising the checkout process and becoming a primary source for payments, digital wallets enable merchants who adopt them the ability to offer a myriad of options such as biometric authenticated payments (ApplePay), Buy-now-pay-later schemes, QR codes, and along with this the ability to exceed their customer expectations whilst catering to their security needs.

Notably and perhaps most importantly, digital wallets also offer around 99.6% lower chargeback volume than card transactions, according to a research by Worldpay making it a no brainer for a merchant to embrace it. This has incentivised merchants to offer wallet-based checkout as a preferred method of payment.

But what really happens at a back end? What does it mean for the merchant? One of the challenges involves a capability to accept the right wallets in each market. For example, AliPay or WeChat Pay in China and APAC region, Paytm in India or Rappi in Latin America. This could also mean that merchants may need to manage multiple payment integrations, which can and will prove time consuming, complex and costly. This is when being able to control your chaos becomes crucial, leading to another inevitable outcome of modern payments technology – Payments Orchestration. 

By deploying low-code, unified checkout workflows while remaining free to onboard new or optimise existing payment services, a payments orchestration platform provides merchants a secure range of integration options to ensure that your PCI scope is managed without compromising your consumer experience, or limiting the checkout options available to the merchant. Merchants need to be free to consider and respond to cost, consumer adoption, security and data implications of their vendors and interoperate where necessary. 

Payments Orchestration is now the door through which merchants coordinate this strategy.

Eliminating the need to run numerous dashboards, manhandle logins across a wide array of services and juggle endless tech problems, Paydock’s unified dashboard brings together payment services, customers and transactional information into a single, manageable experience. Our Dashboard also enables you to plug in new services and manage (and audit) your organisation’s users ensuring that you can track all activity within your payments ecosystem.

As Payments Orchestration becomes the new default by which merchants access fintech, we are excited for the benefits to merchants. Both consumers and merchants will benefit from increasing security, decreasing costs and more rewarding experiences.

For more information and how we can pocket more for your business, drop us a line on [email protected] and book a demo.

/0 Comments/by

Top Payments Trends Merchants Should Make the Most of in 2021

It’s no question that 2020 brought a year of challenges. However, in the midst of these unprecedented times, the impact of the pandemic also resulted in many opportunities for many businesses.

With the rapid rise of online transactions and heavy reliance on technology, fintech continues to play a key role in transforming industries now more than ever before and has become instrumental to consumers as well as businesses that flourished by embracing technological advancements. 

Ecommerce grew by 46% in 2020 – its strongest growth for more than a decade, according to recent ONS data. The boom has also fueled online competition and with a myriad of alternative payment methods available to suit any customer preferrence how do businesses and merchants keep up?

We take a “merchants’” perspective at some of the top trends in 2021…

1. Digital Wallets and Frictionless Payments 

A significant shift in consumer behaviour has revolutionised how we make payments and terms such as digital wallets and frictionless payments are becoming mainstream. But what does it actually mean for merchants? 

Frictionless payments break down the barriers commonly found in a checkout process, aimed to drive growth for businesses and build smother and efficient customer experiences. 

In the past year alone methods such as digital wallets, in-app purchases, auto-renewal subscriptions, contactless payments and one click payments have grown tremendously in popularity, and so much more is yet to come in a form of wearable technology and QR code payments, which are predicted to represent 27% of all digital commerce transactions in 2024, according to 2021 Commerce and Payments Report.

With the hygiene issue of handling cash, contactless payments and digital wallets are now accepted as the ‘new normal’ of paying. Contactless payments accounted for 41% of all card transactions last year. According to Juniper Research, the usage is set to increase with half of the world’s population expected to use digital wallets by 2024.

Businesses will need to recognise this ‘new normal’ of payments and consider investing in a cost effective solution that enables them to accommodate a multitude of options to match the ever changing consumer expectations.  

At Paydock we have mastered this via our unlimited connections capability. Merchants that are already using our platform can simply plug into any of our growing number of connected online payment services and supercharge their payment experience by using our specialised, PCI-DSS compliant SDK widget, which enables to deploy multiple versions depending on merchants’ payment product needs and provide a focused and dynamic payment experience irrespective of the payment type. You will be pleased to know that we have dozens of your favourite payment gateway and acceptance services already connected and are adding more constantly. Click here to see our current list.

 

2. Advances in AI and Machine Learning Technologies

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have proven as powerful analytics tools. As competition grows resulting in price compression, gaining as much advantage over the competition as possible is crucial, and these technologies play a critical role in enabling businesses to retain revenue and stay afloat. 

Businesses that embraced these technologies demonstrate a measurable competitive edge by improving overall customer experience and satisfaction. 

While ML can play a part in critical areas such as fraud detection, AI could be significant in terms of helping businesses optimise conversion rates by enabling merchants to analyse, understand and impact touch points that capture consumers’ attention from beginning of process to the end. 

The role of AI from payments experience point of view for both consumers and merchants is equally important. Starting from ensuring good connection to avoid declined transactions will most certainly provide a better payments experience for consumers leading to guaranteed revenue conversion through the most cost efficient path for merchants. For example, Paydock’s routing engine enables merchants to build a suite of configurable rules in an ‘if-this-then-that’ arrangement. This enables a truly ‘hands off’ experience for merchants as multiple payment gateways are managed via the Paydock dashboard rather than through heavy integrations and or code base changes. To find out more about our real time routing engine click here.

 

3. The rise of subscription models

Subscription modelled businesses such as Netflix, Mindful Chef, Hello Fresh and Freddie’s Flowers have boomed as a result of the pandemic. This, combined with the general outlook of the younger generation who increasingly lean more towards experiences and less towards owning things has led merchants and brands like Fabletics and Adidas to follow suit. 

While it is most certain that merchants will continue to drive and capitalise on this trend as they navigate through the pandemic and growing digital and experience-driven demand, it is worth considering implications from a payments point of view. For example, in order to continue enjoying the benefits of fees collected through recurring subscription payments, merchants will need to consider removing frictions that could prevent these recurring payments. Merchants with a strong digital strategy will certainly have the edge in an increasingly competitive environment. 

Paydock’s recurring engine provides autonomous recurring payments across your Paydock-managed payment gateway infrastructure. From infinitely flexible interval and frequency options to configurable retry engine, merchants that use our platform have total control over their recurring payments collection. You can find out more here.

 

4. Greater focus on cybersecurity

Cybercrime and risk of fraud have grown tremendously in the past year in particular. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and keeping up with the pace too. With a 33% increase over lockdown, the rise in fraud is starting to affect the ecommerce industry, with consumers feeling reluctant to buy from online merchants. 

In order to eliminate these risks and ensure trust in online payments, businesses must be equipped with the right tools that can help them detect and prevent such threats and fraudulent activities. While there are multiple solutions available, merchants could strat by focusing on installing a multi-layered solution into their payments strategies, consisting of different mechanisms such as machine learning/artificial intelligence, profiling and smart use of a third party intelligence via an orchestration engine.

With an impressive number of third party specialised fraud prevention services available in the market, a challenge the merchants face is consuming their services and coherently absorbing these into their payments solution. 

A key tool we see today is tokenisation, which converts sensitive cardholder information into a unique digital identifier in the form of a token for the merchant. Utilising tokenisation is an important way for merchants to regain lost power and stay in control without any limitations. 

At Paydock, our PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant vault enables merchants to stay agile and secure by storing sensitive credit card information and in return providing a special vault token. This vault token allows our merchants to route, update and charge without exposing sensitive data. To find out more about our vault please click here. 

To find out more about Paydock, speak to one of our friendly experts today at [email protected]

/0 Comments/by

Paydock Master Merchant Platform: Total control for vendors, partners and clients

 

 

Manage payments for partners, vendors and customers.

  • Create and manage sub-merchant accounts
  • Monitor activity from all connected merchants via one centralised dashboard (irrespective of payment channel)
  • Prevent fraud and increase security by assigning smart Risk Profiles to your Sub Merchants
  • Increase your brand value by offering Paydock Master Merchant via our fully branded white-label experience for you and your subsidiaries, with access to all Paydock features

From social distancing to remote working practices, businesses today have to adapt and accelerate digitally more than ever before, meaning that focus on efficiency and advanced technologies that can deliver this seamlessly is now more imperative than ever. 

As part of our commitment to merchants and our customers to make the management of payments as easy as possible we work tirelessly to continue to drive innovation and bring products and features that add value to our customers bottom lines.

The Master Merchant Platform is the latest addition to the rich features and benefits we already offer. 

So… how will Paydock Master Merchant benefit your organisation? Here are some of the top reasons:

Stay in control with Risk Profiles 

In a year where cybersecurity has been one of the major concerns and security breaches have been at their highest, the transparency aspect of the Master Merchant platform is of particular importance. The Risk Profile feature, allows Master Merchants to assign risk profiles with different sets of risk rules enabling you to separate the low-risk transactions from the high risk ones and dynamically block or hold for review! You can rest assured you have the maximum security possible. 

Pro tip: Combine Paydock Risk Profiles with our native service integrations with anti-fraud vendors such as Accertify for next-level payments resilience and security.

Audit Tool and Transactions 

We know in any business, detailed reporting is fundamental for decision-making and putting you on the path to success. We’ve further simplified the reporting and reconciliation process with our in-house audit tool. Access group-wide processing data and review Sub Merchant transactions and track API and dashboard activities and actions across your entire payments network (“Audit” page).

Efficient Merchant Support

Focus on core business through our nifty ‘Login-as..’ feature. We’ve made it easy for all Master Merchants to gain access to Sub-Merchants accounts with the ‘Login As’ feature. In just one click from the dashboard, privileged Master Merchant users can gain access to and see data and settings from the Sub-Merchant’s accounts, radically compressing support time and effort. 

Merchant support has never been easier.

Shared Resources and Vault Group 

For a global merchant, creating highly secure yet seamless checkout experiences is critical to a bottom line. For too long this has meant customers have had to re-enter payment details if your network involved more than a single processor.

Paydock has solved this problem through our Shared Vault Service (SVS). SVS enables innovative and PCI DSS compliant payment experiences to be created in minutes that work across any and all payment processors supported by Paydock.

Last but not least…

 

Apply your own branding with a fully configurable white label experience.

Whitelabel  for total brand control

Build value into your brand and provide a sense of security to your stakeholders through the Paydock white-label capabilities. Master Merchants can apply their own branding directly from the Paydock dashboard and modify brand name, buttons, links, colours, logos, background images and references to their web resources. Changes are instantly reflected across your entire network of the Sub-Merchants ensuring the brand experience is coherent, consistent and aligned with your organisation.

 

To find out more about our new Master Merchant platform please click here or speak to one of our experts at [email protected] 

You can also watch an explainer video here

 

/0 Comments/by

Press

a:7:{s:8:”location”;a:1:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”param”;s:13:”page_template”;s:8:”operator”;s:2:”==”;s:5:”value”;s:14:”page-press.php”;}}}s:8:”position”;s:6:”normal”;s:5:”style”;s:7:”default”;s:15:”label_placement”;s:3:”top”;s:21:”instruction_placement”;s:5:”label”;s:14:”hide_on_screen”;a:2:{i:0;s:11:”the_content”;i:1;s:7:”excerpt”;}s:11:”description”;s:0:””;}

/by

The Inevitability of Payments Orchestration

The payments industry has arrived at a point where, for merchants defining payments strategy, it is difficult to justify a starting point other than orchestration. Payments orchestration, for those who are new is, the act of using a compliant, managed platform to simplify acceptance across a disparate and changing set of providers (while maintaining a strong link with the customer). Orchestration makes sure agility is kept high and risk and cost low. An, ‘AWS for payments’, orchestration takes the pain away and recognises key industry trends.

Over the last few years at PayDock, along with the broader payments industry, we have gathered sufficient data to confidently demonstrate that any choice – other than the choice to orchestrate – is approaching a ‘facts be damned’ decision to walk away from stability, strategy and profit and leave the door open for fast moving competitors.

But why is payments orchestration now the emergent ‘go-to’ for payments strategy?

Four main drivers

Over the past 4 years we have observed four drivers in the payments landscape, each one a lever, accelerating the other and combining to a perfect storm.

  1. The acceleration of commoditization (many vendors are now offering the same thing)
  2. The rise of B2C payment fintechs (buy-now-pay-later, alternative payment methods, and payment related loyalty schemes now have strong consumer adoption)
  3. The value in third party niche apps (fraud, identity, loyalty and authentication services have appeared with the promise of increasing acceptance and reducing risk – and merchants wish to capitalise)
  4. Changes in broader regulation and compliance regimes (merchants are finding it harder to keep track of regulations and so are looking to reduce costs while remain compliant and agile)

These four forces have tipped the market’s hand toward a single solution.

Why orchestration = the default

A recent article entitled Why Merchants Should Look For Payments Orchestration, observed that “…organizations that invest in the ability to have payments orchestration receive a huge return.” …and “If companies receive a one-sized-fits-all approach, they might not be able to stand out in the ways that they wish to do so in retail.”

Primer, a new entrant similarly observed that “it becomes increasingly complex for merchants to scale payments as they grapple with an ever growing number of ‘interdependent’ technical integrations across payments services.”

Similarly, our team here at PayDock has identified that when transitioning from legacy single-service approaches (or internally orchestrated solutions) to cloud-based orchestration our platform increases merchant profit by approximately 3-4% virtually overnight. And this is before any longer term strategic benefits are realised. A recent client’s business case identified an 850% ROI! To wave a wand and materially increase enterprise profit; this is the power of payments orchestration.

Payments orchestration is the equivalent of swapping a Lada for a Ferrari.

The burning question: “how to orchestrate?”

Build vs Buy

Merchants aware of the four main drivers (above) and transitioning to orchestration have to face the age old decision: whether to build or buy.

 

 

Our experience is that merchants tend to be somewhere on the “single-service (simple) → single-service (sophisticated) → orchestration” continuum. (We will explore this journey in a subsequent article). Often we see the middle phase skipped as a sensible transition from simple single-service to orchestration is executed.

It is our expectation that as with infrastructure decisions in general, the trend will accelerate toward orchestration-as-service.

Navigating fragmentation, commoditization and regulation introduces exponential cost and risk to any merchant. Bringing these challenges in-house is strategic suicide. We have recently spoken with merchants following a £2-3m+ investment (payments is harder than you think!) in an attempt to build orchestration only to realise that

  1. It’s not core business,
  2. The pace of the market is increasing (shock!) and;
  3. There are simpler, more agile ways to avoid the problem.

As a payments manager, ops manager, head of digital, etc. it is possible to make decisions for a simple processing solution (consider the first two phases of the payments maturity journey). It is however one thing to make decisions re single-services, but a completely different set of skills and experiences required to deploy an effective, secure and highly robust services solution into multiple markets, countries and services. Skills aside, it’s rarely the core business of the organisation.

 

Ops, digital and management roles do not typically possess sufficient operational domain knowledge to properly address the risks and opportunities – nor should they be required to.

 

It is naive to expect such roles to know everything about every market, i.e. preferred consumer payment methods consumers, the correct partners to work with, typical caveats not easily obvious, different pricing approaches, licensing and legal requirements, etc. Everyone understands the specialist role of a lawyer in law; why should the specialist role of a payments expert be any different? PayDock and other payment orchestration platforms provide the merchant the agility required to capitalise on acquired knowledge and limit downside should more information come to light or strategy change, as it invariably does.

 

Leveraging platforms with a specialist focus provides better value than building infrastructure from scratch.

 

Where payments orchestration is adopted, power shifts back to the critical finance and operations functions of the business (rather than the technical and development functions). This allows critical developer resources to be freed up to focus on core business activities.

Infrastructure-as-service is a well-accepted principle. 

We are comfortable to use AWS to provide hosting services rather than maintaining our own collection of servers in the basement. The rule of thumb is generally, “If it’s infrastructure, where can we capitalise?” rather than “If it’s infrastructure, let’s build from scratch!”

The latter appears foolish, yet is often surprisingly the attitude taken toward payments.

Another final factor which, while material, is difficult to represent in a spreadsheet is speed. In today’s markets speed translates to competitive advantage and lack of it translates to opportunity cost. When architecting orchestration from scratch it is unlikely that the solution, culture and resources available will be positioned to keep pace with dedicated fintech platforms focused on this single specialised service. When undertaking non core business projects, resources will inevitably be pulled in different directions, execution will be slow and cumbersome, and corporate knowledge will be scattered.

As aptly observed in a recent article, “If, say, large enterprises want to incorporate a new payment method, type, service provider or processor, that task can take millions of dollars and the better part of a year to accomplish.” – PYMNTS.com

An orchestration-as-service platform offers the merchant the best of both worlds: the speed of a fintech with the needs of a large brand, without the internal cost or disruption.

Any merchant relying on a from-scratch orchestration strategy will inevitably be outpaced by competitors who have chosen to capitalise on the head-start provided by as-service orchestration infrastructure providers.

Multiple Beneficiaries

Merchants are not the only beneficiaries. One infrequently discussed, yet essential benefit is the ‘enablement’ orchestration platforms offer the general industry including adjacent verticals. This represents a shift away from disruption and toward collaboration.

Large consumer brands (Amazon, Apple, Facebook) seek to disintermediate incumbents and alternative new service providers. These innovative brands sit alongside traditional providers and seek to leverage their consumer base to consume the payments layer as well. At any time they are poised to introduce irrelevance to high-street providers as they execute their payment strategies with strength and speed.

Legacy payments providers like acquirers and schemes may not be equipped and experienced at engaging and managing merchants directly – something they have not invested in for some time – yet are now seeing the need to rapidly forestall competitive disintermediation.

With orchestration partners, acquirers and schemes can have the ability to lift capabilities to the market surface and offer processing technologies that cannot be developed fast enough internally. Partnering with (and promoting) orchestration ensures that the core propositions of trust, stability and cost offered by legacy providers are visible and consumable by merchants.

 

Orchestration removes the chaos and noise of payment fragmentation allowing service providers to double down on what they’re good at: core business.

 

Orchestration benefits extend not only to established providers but also to any new kid on the block I once overheard the phrase, “There is only one PayPal.” Indeed. As consumer brands, alternative payment methods, buy-now-pay-later platforms latest-wallet-5000 jostle for mind-share, it is becoming increasingly apparent that only orchestration equips the merchant to dynamically engage new brands along with the value of long standing high-street brands.

Global merchants need to be light on their feet and embrace their local consumers and methods. In order to be increasingly global, merchants must look to become increasingly local. A payments orchestration platform fills the gap between old and new, global and local, consumer and merchant.

One Big Happy Family

Orchestration is to payments what oil is to an engine. It helps it all ‘just work’ (and the friction without causes a headache)! The payments world needs this now more than ever. It’s an incredible time of exciting progress. Let’s enable that progress and while we’re celebrating so many innovative new payment options in the market, not forget the merchant who has to ‘make it all work’ at the end of the day.

Remember iTunes? The outcries about the damage it would do to the music industry, the loss of the CD, the erosion of value etc. With the exception of cover-art, iTunes became an important lesson in consumption enablement. Make it easy for value to be consumed and it will be.

At PayDock we’ve noticed that if you make it easy for a merchant to capitalise on the value of a fintech or high-street processor, they will! Removing cost and risk and letting the business drive the solution (rather than the other way around) – we see our merchant customers increasing the payment methods they offer their consumers, increasing revenue, reducing costs and increasing consumption. The iTunes paradigm lives on.

Payments orchestration is the iTunes (or in today’s world, the Amazon), of the payments market. Make it seamless, remove the risk, and all parties thrive.

About PayDock

At PayDock we have been working in the orchestration space and solving merchant pain since 2015. We observed the early signs of a fragmenting market and were determined to assist as the problem grew worse. Today we offer full-service merchant orchestration capabilities as well as full white label orchestration stacks in partnership with large service providers and technology vendors.

Engineered for ‘five-9’s’ reliability PayDock has been a PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider for 5 years running and offers merchants a sophisticated orchestration engine that embraces payments, fraud, reporting, actionable data insights and downstream integration capabilities. We return material profit to our customers and readily produce business cases to demonstrate the immediate benefits across organisations of orchestration-as-service.

We encourage you to talk to us about your payments strategy to identify how for your business, orchestration lifts profits and brings the future closer, faster.

Welcome to the future of payments.

—–

Pre-Orchestration @ https://unsplash.com/photos/wP3pX6J39dE
Orchestration @ https://unsplash.com/photos/SPbcqTVoYqE

/0 Comments/by

Blog

a:7:{s:8:”location”;a:1:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”param”;s:13:”page_template”;s:8:”operator”;s:2:”==”;s:5:”value”;s:13:”page-blog.php”;}}}s:8:”position”;s:15:”acf_after_title”;s:5:”style”;s:7:”default”;s:15:”label_placement”;s:3:”top”;s:21:”instruction_placement”;s:5:”label”;s:14:”hide_on_screen”;a:7:{i:0;s:11:”the_content”;i:1;s:7:”excerpt”;i:2;s:10:”discussion”;i:3;s:8:”comments”;i:4;s:10:”categories”;i:5;s:4:”tags”;i:6;s:15:”send-trackbacks”;}s:11:”description”;s:0:””;}

/by

Features single

a:7:{s:8:”location”;a:1:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”param”;s:9:”post_type”;s:8:”operator”;s:2:”==”;s:5:”value”;s:7:”feature”;}}}s:8:”position”;s:15:”acf_after_title”;s:5:”style”;s:7:”default”;s:15:”label_placement”;s:3:”top”;s:21:”instruction_placement”;s:5:”label”;s:14:”hide_on_screen”;a:7:{i:0;s:7:”excerpt”;i:1;s:10:”discussion”;i:2;s:8:”comments”;i:3;s:6:”format”;i:4;s:10:”categories”;i:5;s:4:”tags”;i:6;s:15:”send-trackbacks”;}s:11:”description”;s:0:””;}

/by

In a time of crisis – efficiency matters

The wonderfully relaxing dictionary definition of being efficient is, ‘achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense’. [1]

While I would argue we are all more or less aware of a desire to become efficient within our organisations, the specific steps required to move toward that end state are often vague and ominously serviced by men in suits who manage to consume the target benefit through their own set of processes and fees. And so we continue to pay homage to the idea without also carrying a confidence we could take intentional, unambiguous and satisfying steps in that direction. Mostly, we hope that someone won’t notice.

But efficiency matters. At PayDock I’ve spent significant time analysing one of the primary areas of inefficiency in many organisations – payments management. Our research has indicated that for not-for-profits, often between $0.10 and $0.15 of every dollar raised is consumed in activities and costs both hard and soft directly related to payments administration.

The recent bushfire crisis in Australia highlighted this. The Australian Red Cross (ARC) when asked admitted they may need to spend ‘as much as $11 million’ or ‘10% of monies raised’ on processing the payments received [2]. What is of interest to me is that this number doesn’t necessarily shrink as soon as the bushfire crisis is over.

This is not abnormal for the sector and ARC’s numbers are largely symptomatic. Let’s be clear, it’s not like Australian Red Cross (or any other large NFP) takes satisfaction in this overhead, it’s just that until recently there hasn’t been a way to do any better.

 

A crisis merely reveals the inefficiencies.

 

Typically the overs-and-unders of business mask costs created through inefficient systems and the public eye isn’t so closely turned to ensuring hard-earned money reaches the target destination. However, in an unsurprising reaction to the awareness of inefficiency I noticed a number of fundraising appeals and conversations appeared related to directly passing the money to needy recipients rather than routing it through the traditional large aid organisations. The rise of these fintech solutions to achieve this with greater efficacy and transparency has created a disintermediation factor further demanding that at the big end of town we take this matter seriously. The public does not necessarily feel the efficiency gap is justified by the additional value of the brand. So, efficiency matters significantly both in terms of impact and brand.

To put this in a broader context, the charitable individual giving market is approximately ~$500bn p/a USD in the English speaking world [3]. If we (conservatively) assume that say 3% (not even the full amount discussed above) is lost in the management of the systems and data used to collect and manage these funds, this presents a solvable $15bn USD global aid hole EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

 

Moving the efficiency needle by 20% within this recognised inefficiency would release $3bn USD per-annum back to the field – which we can do. This is more than the Australian Government’s total global foreign aid budget [4].

 

In the case of the Australian Red Cross, a modest fix as described above would have released an additional $2.2m AUD of donated money to farmers and families suffering from this summer’s devastation.

If one wanted to make a difference in the world, solving this issue might be one way to do it.

But is increasing the efficiency of an increasingly digital payments landscape easy? No, and yes.

Firstly, it’s not. The increasing amount of fragmentation in the payments landscape, the growing demand for donor choice of payment method, the increasing burden of compliance and the general lack of interoperability in the payments market have all combined to create the issue that the Australian Red Cross (and others like them) are now facing and struggle to avoid. The change must come at an infrastructure level if it’s to come at all.

Secondly it is. When we started the PayDock journey, our core mission was to solve this problem at that very infrastructure layer – and to do it without forcing a decision to change banks, relationship management systems, website or other services (rather to support and enable each). We call this new generation of service a, ‘payments orchestration platform’, or ‘PoP’.

The data we’ve now received from our customers has demonstrated that it is in fact possible to improve the digital giving bottom line by as much as 15% by harmonising and coordinating payments in this manner. This overnight removes the inefficiencies mentioned above and addresses other profit-draining habits effectively.

So while on any given Sunday we might not care about inefficient systems, we’re especially aware of it when things go wrong and money needs to move into the right hands fast.

If you are a large not for profit and want to get in touch about how we can rapidly increase the efficiency in your payments solutions and release a greater percentage of donor giving directly into your distribution pool (as we have for others) I’m personally happy to invest some of my time seeing where we might be able to help you.

Contact me on my LinkedIn or I am happy to be reached directly on +44 7828 948 683

Rob

[1] Digital card-not-present fraud to hit $130B by 2023 – https://www.retaildive.com/news/digital-card-not-present-fraud-to-hit-130-billion-by-2023/545171/

References

[1] New Oxford American Dictionary

[2] Bushfire aid: Red Cross admits to $11 million ‘administration cost’ to help fire victims

[3] Numerous readily available reports detail global volumes of individual giving including Charity Navigator, Charities Aid Foundation and others

[4] 2019-20 Australian aid budget at a glance

/0 Comments/by

Pricing

a:7:{s:8:”location”;a:1:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”param”;s:13:”page_template”;s:8:”operator”;s:2:”==”;s:5:”value”;s:16:”page-pricing.php”;}}}s:8:”position”;s:15:”acf_after_title”;s:5:”style”;s:7:”default”;s:15:”label_placement”;s:3:”top”;s:21:”instruction_placement”;s:5:”label”;s:14:”hide_on_screen”;a:4:{i:0;s:11:”the_content”;i:1;s:7:”excerpt”;i:2;s:10:”discussion”;i:3;s:8:”comments”;}s:11:”description”;s:0:””;}

/by

Features

a:7:{s:8:”location”;a:1:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”param”;s:13:”page_template”;s:8:”operator”;s:2:”==”;s:5:”value”;s:17:”page-features.php”;}}}s:8:”position”;s:15:”acf_after_title”;s:5:”style”;s:7:”default”;s:15:”label_placement”;s:3:”top”;s:21:”instruction_placement”;s:5:”label”;s:14:”hide_on_screen”;a:7:{i:0;s:11:”the_content”;i:1;s:7:”excerpt”;i:2;s:10:”discussion”;i:3;s:8:”comments”;i:4;s:10:”categories”;i:5;s:4:”tags”;i:6;s:15:”send-trackbacks”;}s:11:”description”;s:0:””;}

/by

Why high-street needs fintech now more than ever

In the world’s fastest moving industry it’s easy to get left behind. As challenger brands, consumer platforms and other fintechs continue their appropriation of customers, [1] established service providers are seeking new ways to retain market share.  The risks present to incumbent providers are outlined in Accenture’s 2019 Global Payments Survey, which reveals that the majority of banks expect to lose $88 billion in revenue in the next three years, principally as a consequence of being displaced by emerging, competing financial service organisations.

No avoiding the facts

In the UK alone, “…total profits for the Challengers increased by £194m against a drop of £5.6bn for the Big Five” [2] according to KPMG’s Challenger Banking Report. The credit card schemes should not remain complacent since “over half of all online transactions will be made using alternative payment methods by 2021” [3]. While established schemes have certainly demonstrated an ability to be flexible and to capitalise on their infrastructure, legacy payment service providers and banks appear to lack necessary dexterity, as evident by their declining market share.

What about outpacing?

Outpacing, or directly competing with, the exploding cohort of Fintech businesses doesn’t seem to be working either. While fintechs enjoy ever larger investment (capital investment in fintech up 120% in 2018 to 39.57bn USD [4]) and customer numbers, large traditional incumbents are regularly criticized for the sluggishness with which they respond to shifting market conditions, consumer expectations and unique value offerings presented by fintechs [5].

Moreover, large consumer brands have begun to exploit the tantalising opportunities to ‘cut out’ the once critical services banks used to provide. Dharmesh Mistry, from Fintech Futures, accurately queries whether “banks truly understand the threat of Amazon and others like Uber when it comes to banking?” [6] Today’s launch of Uber Money as “the bank account for Uber drivers” should come as no surprise. Uber was always going to capitalise on its network and its foray into banking territory should raise no eyebrows [7]. It is possible that similar strategic moves by Apple and others have laid the foundation for second and third iterations, which will inevitably eat up more of the banking value chain and take further market share from the established players.

 

Do “banks truly understand the threat of Amazon and others like Uber when it comes to banking?”

 

Consumers the world over have fewer reasons to trust banks, especially after recent financial crises [8], poor corporate behaviour [9], clunky user experiences, and increasingly compromised technology [10]. Meanwhile, the “big techies” such as Amazon and Apple continue to deploy elegant financial services that capitalise on their loyal customer base who possess strong brand allegiance. It is well accepted that the traditional advantages enjoyed by the big banks such as trust, product capability, service and reliability are rapidly eroding.

Government policy and regulation no longer protect the banks as they once did. The incumbents’ competitive moat is scattered with bridges (if not filled up completely). The new European Payment Services Directive (PSD2) has lowered numerous barriers to entry in Europe and with it an influx of well-funded, fast-moving and well-received alternatives [11].

Fintechs can respond to market sentiment rapidly and stay ahead of technology faster than the slow moving banks. Unlike banks, fintechs have no “legacy technology” baggage—they are young, fresh, agile and technologically savvy. They possess a culture of innovation and are often staffed by the customers they seek to entice. 80% of banking executives fear that their organisations are at risk of disruption by data-driven competitors.[12]

When it comes to the banks, the attitude toward embracing and adapting technology required to pivot and compete with the startups, simply isn’t there. Moreover, deeply ingrained operational processes create further challenges.

Hope is not lost.

How can high street retain their client base?

The next fintech revolution will not be about competition.

 

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”.

 

While many fintech companies have “known their enemy” it seems the banks have at times neither known their enemy, nor themselves.

The ability to meaningfully compete and stay relevant during the fintech revolution depends on a key (often neglected) factor: merchants.

Whichever bank or platform can best enable the merchant to consume emerging Fintech solutions will keep their customers. Central to the pursuit of this this objective must be a focus on agile customer relationships and data supremacy. Omni-channel loyalty, visibility and agility across payment types with ‘built in’ or inherent future-proofing features are absolute must haves for any bank serious about staying relevant.

The debilitating disconnect between archaic merchant offerings and tech savvy customer demands is what is driving consumer adoption of fintech services. To address this, banks must look to rapidly integrate and deploy as broad a suite of next gen fintech services as possible to their merchant base. If they can succeed in doing so, banks will not only provide their merchants with fintech services as and when they hit the market, but will retain (and perhaps even increase) their customer base.

Our vision at PayDock is to enable banks and established service providers to capitalise on the fintech revolution, enabling them to retain the loyalty and trust of their existing merchant base. We believe Paydock is the “secret payments sauce” that helps each party ‘play nice’ while ensuring that the end consumer’s needs are always front and centre, no matter their choice of wallet, traditional card, buy-now-pay-later service, subscription service or whatever else might be around the corner.

Article by Rob Lincolne and Vasylisa Badan

[1] “The EU and Banks Are Falling behind in the Global Fintech Race: DeVere CEO.” 2019. Fintech Finance. October 3, 2019. https://www.fintech.finance/01-news/the-eu-and-banks-are-falling-behind-in-the-global-fintech-race-devere-ceo/.

[2] KPMG Challenger Banking Report https://home.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/05/challenger-banking-report-2016.PDF

[3] “Alternative Payment Methods Are Taking Over Global Online Businesses” https://gomedici.com/alternative-payment-methods-are-taking-over-global-online-businesses

[4] “Fintech Companies Raised a Record $39.6 Billion in 2018.” 2019. CNBC. January 29, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/fintech-companies-raised-a-record-39point6-billion-in-2018.html.

[5] Bean, Randy. n.d. “How FinTech Initiatives Are Driving Financial Services Innovation.” Forbes. Accessed October 17, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2018/07/10/how-fintech-initiatives-are-driving-financial-services-innovation/.

[6] July 2019, 5th. n.d. “The Amazon-Ification of Banking.” FinTech Futures. Accessed October 28, 2019. https://www.fintechfutures.com/2019/07/the-amazon-ification-of-banking/.

[7] “Uber Money Wants To Be The Bank Account For Uber Drivers, PYMTS October 29th 2019 https://www.pymnts.com/news/payments-innovation/2019/uber-money-wants-to-be-the-bank-account-for-uber-drivers/

[8] “Banks Are Running out of Time to Regain Public Trust.” n.d. American Banker. Accessed October 17, 2019. https://www.americanbanker.com/opinion/banks-are-running-out-of-time-to-regain-public-trust.

[9] “NAB takes another billion-dollar hit as royal commission customer-remediation costs double https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/nab-takes-another-billion-dollar-hit-customer-remediation/11066792

[10] “How to survive bank outages in Australia” https://www.canstar.com.au/credit-cards/bank-outage-australia-survival-tips/

[11] “How PSD2 Will Revolutionise FinTech.” n.d. Accessed October 28, 2019. http://www.aon.com/unitedkingdom/insights/how-psd2-will-revolutionise-fintech.jsp.

[12] Bean, Randy. n.d. “How FinTech Initiatives Are Driving Financial Services Innovation.” Forbes. Accessed October 17, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2018/07/10/how-fintech-initiatives-are-driving-financial-services-innovation/.

[13] Mudassir, Hamza, and Kamal A. Munir. n.d. “Traditional Banks Are Struggling to Stave off the Fintech Revolution.” The Conversation. Accessed October 17, 2019. http://theconversation.com/traditional-banks-are-struggling-to-stave-off-the-fintech-revolution-124201.

[14] “Regulatory Agenda Updates_PSDII_Lux.Pdf.” n.d. Accessed October 17, 2019. https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Regulatory_agenda_updates_PSDII_Luxembourg/$FILE/Regulatory%20agenda%20updates_PSDII_Lux.pdf.

[10] Son, Hugh. 2019. “Bank of America’s Tech Chief Says There’s Nothing New about the Apple Card.” CNBC. March 27, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/bank-of-americas-tech-chief-says-nothing-new-about-the-apple-card.html.

[16] “National Banks Closing More than One Thousand Branches in US in 2019.” n.d. Accessed October 17, 2019. https://wisewage.org.

[17] Barker, Sam. 2019. “Hipster Banks Monzo and Starling Win Customers from High-Street Giants.” The Telegraph, October 25, 2019. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/current-accounts/hipster-banks-monzo-starling-win-customers-high-street-giants/.

/0 Comments/by
,

“Fintech hits major milestone” – Paydock goes mobile with Bluechain

 

Paydock will expand its range of secure, mobile-friendly payment options to merchants to include the new Bluechain service. Bluechain’s mission is to simplify the checkout process for consumers and drive new revenue for merchants. By allowing Bluechain registered customers to quickly and safely pay on their mobile with just a few taps while protecting personal and sensitive information, Bluechain provides the perfect (and with Paydock easy to connect) service for merchants looking to better support customer demands for safety, speed and security in payments.

What is Bluechain?

Bluechain is a global next-gen payment platform that offers central payment networks, financial institutions and the broader payment ecosystem a secure system to streamline all types of payment transactions. Conventional checkout processes for online shopping carts require the customer to type in their credit or debit card details, which typically includes the cardholder’s name, a 16-digit card number, the expiry date and a three-digit security code printed on the back of the card. The Bluechain solution? Consumers simply register their details with Bluechain and receive a payment request on their phone when making purchases in-store or online or when paying a bill or making a donation.

Customers can link any card or bank account to their Bluechain profile, and when they receive a payment request from a store or an invoice from a biller, they select which account they want to pay from, when they want the payment to be made (immediately or some future date), and then simply approve the payment. The payment is completely secure because the details of a registered customer and their accounts are never revealed to the merchant or biller, so the information can never be stolen or misused.

How Paydock makes it easy

The Paydock payment platform facilitates simplicity and security for merchants wanting to connect with customers, stay in control of their payments ecosystem and reduce costs.  By supporting Bluechain we further this vision in the market.

 

Safer, simpler and cheaper all adds up to a better experience for both consumers and merchants.

 

Want to know more about the details for this upcoming integration? Email us at [email protected]

Want to find out  to our friends at Bluechain about their technology? They’d love to hear from you at [email protected]

/by

PayPal Makes for Easy Recurring Payments with Paydock

PayPal recurring payments are dead easy on Paydock.

Online merchants can access rich recurring functionality, improve their brand experience and reduce internal time, cost and effort when taking and managing recurring payments through PayPal with Paydock.

PayPal is a vital part of the payments ecosystem, with over 7bn transactions processed during 2017 (Statista). If you are not taking PayPal as part of your payment strategy, you could be missing out on significant revenue.

PayPal had a higher overall conversion rate than all competitors with the next payment option scoring 36.4% lower than PayPal on average. *

Paydock provides rich benefits to any merchant seeking to drive subscriptions, memberships or recurring donations on PayPal.

Why use PayPal with Paydock?

[accordion] [accordion-item title=”No restriction when scheduling dates, interval and frequency of recurring payments”]No more need to force the customer to cancel, opt-in again or restart just to change a date. Simply change it, in realtime with no effort, stress or confusion.[/accordion-item]

[accordion-item title=”Unlimited flexibility when it comes to changing recurring payment amounts.”]Easily adjust payment amounts month to month, week to week. No more frustration if your customer can’t pay for a month, and the whole process must be restarted.[/accordion-item]

[accordion-item title=”Smart features such as ‘pause’ and ‘catch up'”]Take better take care of your customers and manage the customer experience when using PayPal as a payment source for recurring payments. Other features include being able to set number of retries and interval between.[/accordion-item]

[accordion-item title=”Easy, consolidated reporting”]Filter payments which have come from PayPal and which payments have come from other payment sources (even ‘tag’ your campaigns as a unique payment type) from a single dashboard.[/accordion-item]

[accordion-item title=”Better customer experience”]Provide a seamless checkout experience across all payment types – giving customers a selection of options, with less risk and cost for your development team.[/accordion-item]

[accordion-item title=”Easy to use API”]Benefit from an intuitive and RESTful API that your developers will enjoy. Create, update and query your customers, subscriptions and transactions through Paydock’s easy-to-use API.[/accordion-item]
[/accordion]

Showcase

The team at Leafcutter recently developed a donation experience for the Children’s Hospital Foundation lifting conversions and reducing cost of integration and payment management.  See the payment experience in action below. The solution includes both one-off and recurring payments through a single integration.

 

If you would like to find out how Paydock can help improve your conversions, simplify your payments life and reduce effort, contact our friendly payments team and drop us a line.

* Data source comScore Panel, US, Q4 2015

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

/by

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) with Paydock

Buy now, pay later (or BNPL). What’s possible for merchants and how Paydock closes the gap.

 

I don’t have to pay for this right now?

The retail industry has experienced an enormous boost since payments service providers such as Afterpay, ZipPay, OpenPay, Affirm and Sezzle are allowing consumers  instalment payments over multiple weeks or even months following a purchase. Happy days for those shoe lovers! But what does this mean for the merchant?

BNPL (buy now pay later) services have opened up new markets for online and in-store retailers. Those markets consist of purchasers who may not typically spend as much as frequent shoppers or those who don’t always have a steady income.

As an example of the impact this has had, the retail chains Cue, SurfStitch, and Princess Polly have reported order value increases of 20%, 52%, and 60% respectively. The model “offers convenient instalment plans at checkout with zero risk” (Afterpay) which has been a reason why uptake has been so rapid over the last few years.

What’s possible on Paydock?

Paydock offers customers easy integrations with Afterpay and zipMoney, two Australian companies, as well as a sophisticated native Paydock repeat payment service. We frequently bolt on additional payment services, and would love to hear who your customers would like to see at your store’s checkout page.

Services like Afterpay and zipPay require the business to set up a merchant account and to cover the general per transaction fees. The customer at the other end, applies for an account with the service provider and can pay at any online or in-store retailer that supports this particular service. zipPay allows customers to pay a purchase of up to $1,000 in instalments of their choice (min. $40 per month), whereas Afterpay processes the total purchase amount in 4 fortnightly equal payments.

You can review further benefits and functionality on our website and enquire with our tech team via the Live Chat. Find out more about:

Paydock merchants wishing to experiment with BNPL functionality can also create payment plans with instalment and total amounts via the subscription function in the background. This is a great tool for irregular instalment payments requests by the end user where an Afterpay or zipPay solution may not be the right fit.

Setting up a payment plan in Paydock is simple. This step by step guide shows how to  set up a payment plan in Paydock.

 

1) Go to payments and add a new subscription and customer. Alternatively, go to your customer and add a subscription to their existing details.

 

Option 1:

Option 2:

 

2) Fill in the subscription details and save the subscription.

 

In this example, the customer will pay a total amount of $450 in 4 weekly instalments of $100 via Bambora. The payment will start on 25th June and the last payment will be $150, to reach the total end amount of $450.

We hope you enjoy this new feature and please reach out via our live chat or email on [email protected] for any further questions.

/by

Multi user access and role management

Managing a team’s permissions and access to sensitive customer and payment data in an increasingly complex payments world has traditionally been complex and difficult.

With new payment methods entering the market and different providers providing different logins with different permissions, managing an organisational-wide policy has been difficult… until now.

As one of our most asked for features, we have been working hard over the last few months to:

  • Provide greater data security to all stakeholders
  • Increase the ease with which you view and manage customers and connected payment services
  • Reduce the cost and time associated with payments administration
  • Gain greater value from preferred service providers

To Summarise

You can now add multiple users on the PayDock platform and grant various permissions for each user.

For existing clients, this feature has already been turned on and activated on your account at no additional cost.

Roles Overview

There are four new permission levels: Admin, Manager, Customer Service and Reporting.

Admin Manager Customer Service Reporting
Users All
Customers All Search, Modify Search, Modify Search
Notifications All Search, Create, Modify, Resend, Delete
Charges All Search, Create, Refund Search, Refund  Search
Subscriptions All Search, Create
Payment Methods All Search, Create, Modify

Admin

This is the full access permission which has no restrictions on capabilities. This is normally reserved for the business owner or an administrator of your platform.

The login used to create the account is granted admin permission by default.

Manager

This role gives you full control on the payments through PayDock such as creating charges, subscriptions, notifications and drive refunds.

This role is designed for someone in accounts or sales where they need control of the transactions but without some of the admin permissions.

Customer Service

This is for your support service centre with the ability to edit customers information, get status on existing transactions and perform refunds.

There is no ability to create any new transactions or add customers inside PayDock, only modify existing records.

Reporting

This permission allows your bookkeeper or accountant to view payments and customers information with being able to download the results into a csv.

Some other applications of this role could be sales managers needing to create reports or even allowing future investors to get real live data of sales through your platform. This function can save the task of exporting the data and sending it manually.

How to access this new feature?

1. Access the “My Company” tab of your user administration

2. Visit the “Company Users” page

3. Add new user and assign role

For more information or help on how to set this up please contact [email protected].

/by

Boost traffic to your website with a great user experience

What is UI/ UX?

User interface (UI) and User experience (UX) are both becoming increasingly important in today’s digitalised world. UI refers to the series of screens, buttons, pages, icons etc. that users use to interact with a certain device. UX, on the other hand, refers to the whole experience users have with the interface. Whilst the two terms are often used interchangeable (and often wrongly), UX and UI are two different things, with UI focusing more on the design elements, and UX focused on creating a positive experience for the customer.

What are the benefits of a great UI/ UX?

A recent study from Forrester Research found that a well designed user interface raises a website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, and a better UX design has the potential to increase conversion rates up to 400%.

With Australians spending $21.65 billion on online stores, the importance of UX is evident for all firms wishing to capitalise and make the most out of the digital economy. Developing an interaction rich experience will drive traffic to a site, which in turn provides more conversion opportunities, increases sales opportunities and, further down the line, increased revenue.

How to improve UI/ UX?

A number of steps could be taken to improve the UX of your eCommerce store:

  1. Easy to understand: Ensure that your website uses clear and concise language, removing any ambiguity with your website’s product and messaging.
  2. Personalise it: Maintaining a constant theme and design throughout your whole website can be integral to cultivating customer loyalty. By exposing your customers to your website’s personal tone, messaging and style, you help to create a dialogue with them, incentivising them to return.
  3. Slim your checkout process: Reduce the amount of steps within the payment process. Whether this means taking advantage of token vaults (to store your customer’s payment information), or reducing the amount of form fields, customers will be glad that their purchase is made much easier.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock provides a Client Side SDK that allows you to create a widget (an application that allows users to perform a certain service) as an independent part or within your payment form. Furthermore, our SDK allows you to customise the form to suit your website design, changing styling, form fields, border and font colours, text size and more, allowing your eCommerce site to maintain consistency.

As well as this, the provision of a single interface able to offer several different payment methods (all of which could have different form field requirements) into one reduces online clutter. This minimises the amount of decision points (and potential lost sales) for consumers due to confusing payments processes.

Let Paydock help you maximise the payments UX of your website!

Talk to one of our friendly payments advisors today for more information at: [email protected]

/by

What is customer loyalty and how to maintain it

Customer loyalty is the success of a business in maintaining a long term relationship with the customer. When a customer is loyal, they are likely to return to the brand to make purchases. It can also be described as ‘brand loyalty’. With 82% of adults loyal to brands and 84% loyal to retailers, building up brand loyalty is integral for revenue creation.

Below are six ways in which you can win loyalty from your customers:

Get to know your customer

By getting to know your customer, sending out ‘Happy birthday’ and other personalised emails, your customers feel as if they are worth more than a single purchase. Furthermore, a study showed that personalised emails deliver 6 times higher transaction volumes, an incredible opportunity for savvy eCommerce stores. Remember, it is easier to maintain an existing customer than it is to find a new one.

Reward loyalty with a loyalty program

Discount coupons, sent through email or text can ensure that existing loyalty from your customers is rewarded. As well as this, by making your loyalty points are not transferrable to other sites, your customers are more incentivised to make purchases on your eCommerce site.

Make it easier for your customers to remain loyal

This refers to your eCommerce store making it easier for returning customers to make purchases. One method in which to do this could be to store your customer’s payment details within your website (or in token vaults), ensuring that your customer no longer needs to input their credit card details every time they make a payment.

PayDock can help you here, offering a PCI compliant token vault to help you save payment details.

Encourage customer feedback

Sending out email reviews to your existing customers can provide invaluable feedback for your eCommerce stores, alerting you of problems that you may not previously have known about. Apart from being a great learning opportunity and a chance to further improve your site, it also allows your customers to feel more valued, further increasing their loyalty towards your brand.

Be transparent

If something doesn’t go as anticipated, instead of hiding and covering up, you should aim to communicate this to your customers. An open relationship is likely to lift trust, which in turn, promotes loyalty within your existing customers.

Communicate to your customers

Providing a live chat tool on your eCommerce website, or even ensuring that a physical person is easily contactable can make a huge difference in improving customer loyalty. Great customer service make a large difference, with research finding that people who had bad experiences with customer service were 50% more likely to talk about it on their social channels than those who had good experiences. Ensure that your eCommerce store has a good reputation.

/by

How to use SMS notifications to expand your business

SMS (Short Message Service) is one of the most reliable and influential communication mediums in the market today, with around 82.1% individuals saying that they open every SMS text message they receive.

How you can take advantage of the trends in SMS messaging?

SMS messages have an overall 98% open rate, compared to a 20% open rate for email. The large reach of these messages mean that they could offer many advantages to business who are able to exploit them:

Improved customer engagement:

High cart abandonment rates is a challenge for any eCommerce store owner. This can be reduced by integrating SMS into your website and texting a discount coupon to a customer who has abandoned a cart to attract them to complete their purchase.

Furthermore, by keeping your customers engaged via SMS, you increase customer acceptance towards future messages, increasing future marketing opportunities.

Increased transparency:

The prevalence of internet and ATM fraud means that SMS notifications is a great safeguard to stopping criminals and protect victims. The ability to instantly alert on payments and withdrawals means that SMS messages increases security. Individuals are then able to verify their transactions creating an additional layer for legitimacy.

Better customer service:

The ability to send out instantaneous notifications regarding transactions provides a smooth and hassle free experience for your customer. 77% of consumers have a more positive perception of companies that communicate via SMS, relaying reminders, confirmations and transaction monitoring.

How can Paydock help?

With over 64% of consumers believing that businesses should use SMS messages to interact with them more often than they currently do, the potential of using SMS notifications is endless.

Working with Paydock will allow you to automate customer engagement with event-triggered (e.g. “transaction success”) customised notifications, providing you the ability to notify your customers through email, SMS or webhook every time a transaction event occurs. As well as this, through Paydock, you can personalise messages sent to customers to improve engagement.

Unlock your SMS potential with Paydock!

How do I get started?

Paydock offers a sandbox for testing, as well as excellent developer docs for you to use and test out.

You can also talk to one of our friendly payments advisors at [email protected]

/by

How do Australians pay?

A recent survey by the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) detailing records about every transactions individuals made for a week, as well as value, payment method, channel (online or in person) and type of merchant provided key information about Australian payments preferences and attitudes.

Cards

Australia is among the top-ten non cash markets in the world. The market share of card payments is increasing, from 9% in 2013 to 52% in 2016. However, mobile payments only accounted for 1% of the number of Point-Of-Sale (POS) transactions over the week of the survey (around 2% of in person card payments).

Cash

The use of cash is slowly decreasing, accounting for only 37% of all transactions, compared with 47% in 2013 and 69% in 2007. However, cash is still used for smaller transactions, being the most common payment method for transactions of $10 or less. In particular, older Australians and lower income households still make a substantial share of their payments in cash. Yet, even this figure is declining, with older Australians increasingly adopting non-cash transaction methods.

Cheques

According to the 2017 World Payments Report, Australia will be phasing out of all cheque payments in the near future. Using cheques as a form of payment in itself is declining, accounting for only 0.2% of payments made by participants in the 2016 survey, compared with 0.4% in 2013.

Digital currency

Digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are slowly gaining traction in Australia. In March 21, 2016, the Australian government announced that it would address the “double taxation” of digital currencies under the GST. This refers to the fact that if you used a Bitcoin to pay for coffee, you would be charged GST for both the coffee and Bitcoin. The new policy has removed some of the frustrations of the fintech community.

What does this mean?

The movement from paper based methods such as cash and cheques towards electronic payment methods creates a huge market for the provision of payment services. Stores, both physical and online, are incentivised to deliver a number of payment services for the ease of their customers. This doesn’t include just merely offering a range of payment methods, but also payment services, such as recurring billing, anti-fraud technology, SMS notifications and the ability to track payments.

This is where Paydock comes in. By offering an easy-to-integrate RESTful API, Paydock is able to help you. Whether you are an eCommerce platform, a developer or an integration specialist, we will allow you to make the most out of your payments ecosystem.

[gravityform id=”32″ title=”true” description=”true”]

/0 Comments/by

Key Trends In The Growth of Payments In China

China’s eCommerce market is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 23% through to 2020.

China’s movement from being cash dominated straight to mobile payments has been attributed in part to the late mover advantage. Since China does not have an entrenched credit card culture, the jump from cash to mobile was much easier. Mobile is now accepted as an everyday transaction method.

For businesses wanting to take a share of the options associated with the rise of mobile as a payment method through which to pay, the Chinese market represents a great opportunity. With a phenomenal eCommerce growth rate of 63.2%, mainly as a result of a higher adoption of digital payments initiatives in rural areas and a shift from cash to mobile payments, and around USD$300 billion worth of online sales, China is a formidable market.

Furthermore, with the number of people in China using their phones to pay for goods and services at the point of sale doubling last year, it is expected by 2020 that half of all of China’s smartphone users (an estimated 350 million people) will use mobile payments. Thus, the Chinese commerce market represents a great chance for SMEs wishing to tap into both global expansion (especially Asia) and take advantage of mobile payments.

In particular, the rise of Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which are both able to settle transactions in more than 10 currencies and are now in the business of global expansion, represent a great way for businesses to take their first step into the Asian market.

 

Why should you offer mobile payment methods?

Mobile payment platforms can lead to increased consumption not only in eCommerce, but also in offline retail. By integrating online mobile payments with offline purchasing experiences, convenience and overall consumption is increased. This results in additional growth for your business.

/0 Comments/by

2017 World Payments Report Summary

The World Payments Report reported that global non cash transaction volumes grew 11.2% during 2014-15 to reach 433.1 billion, the highest growth of the past decade, and slightly above last year’s prediction.

Developing nations increased global non-cash transaction share, with two regions in particular fuelling this growth.
Asian countries experienced impressive growth in non-cash transactions across all regions due to an increased adoption of mobile payments and wallets such as Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay, with a growth rate of 43.4%. This was particularly driven by China’s phenomenal 63.2% growth in non-cash transactions, a result of higher adoption of digital payments initiative in rural areas and a shift from cash to mobile payments among payment service users.
The second highest growth of 16.4% was recorded in CEMEA (Central Europe, Middle East and Africa), recording the highest growth in card transactions and credit transfers in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Poland.
In Australia, contactless payments account for about 70 to 80% of MasterCard and Visa payments.

Debit cards and credit transfers were the leading digital instruments in 2015, while check usage continues to decline globally.

Transaction volumes for all payment methods except cheques increased. Payments by card grew faster than other instruments, an indication of superior convenience and security.
Globally, debit card market share increased to 70.5% while credit card market share dropped from 30.1% in 2014 to 26.5% in 2015.
In Australia, almost 70% of credit card transactions are contactless, and there has been notable growth in volumes of credit card, but also of scheme debit card transactions.

Despite the increased adoption of digital payments, cash continues to be in the mainstream, especially for low value transactions.

Cash is the main method of payment for smaller purchases such as food, personal care supplies, general merchandise and gifts. It is also used in peer to peer transfers despite the increasing popularity of money transfer apps such as Venmo and PayPal.
Key factors contributing to the persistency of cash include the anonymity associated with cash transactions, lack of a modern payments infrastructure, and limited or no access to the banking system in developing markets.
In Australia, cash in circulation remains steady at around 4-5% of GDP.

The World Payments Report can be accessed here.

/0 Comments/by

How To Be A Gateway Ninja

What are the current problems surrounding gateway integration?

Talking to some of our payments advisors, we found that common problems faced by developers surrounding the integration of gateways include:

 

  1. Upfront cost
    • Different technologies used by each gateway
      • Each gateway has its own API (eg REST, SOAP) as well as a different required data and sets of calls required
    • The time and cost of integration
      • Not all payment methods were created equal and some may have layers of complexity that need to be carefully integrated. 
  2. Maintenance cost
    • Maintenance costs due to the ongoing coding required
      • Need to update your code to stay up to date with the gateway’s API.
  3. Aggregation of gateways
    • Inability to view all transaction data from a single point after integrating several payment methods
    • Difficulties in accessing customer payment information across different gateways
      • Can’t store Gateway X customer payment details on Gateway Y
      • Do not have a central location to store all your customer payment details

 

Why Paydock?

We know the struggle of working with multiple payment gateways (while juggling client requirements). Like you, we know that development, profitability and third party management can be a tall order, especially in payments, where there are multiple barriers to final delivery. This is where PayDock can help.

 

Paydock is a smart payments platform designed for merchants and developers. We offer a number of features to solve your payments pain:

    1. Upfront cost
      • Reduces cost of integration with gateway development effort
        • Development time and cost for your website or app is significantly reduced-you only have to integrate with Paydock once to enable access to all payment methods globally.

 

    1. Maintenance cost
      • Reduce maintenance costs.
        • Paydock keeps up to date with the gateway so you don’t have to worry about updating.

 

  1. Aggregation of gateways
    • Enhances available functionality through a built in recurring, notification and processing engine.
    • Enables easy monitoring of transaction data through a single interface.
      • If you do decide to move to a new gateway, your history, data and account will all  remain with you/move with you as Paydock’s external token vault stores all payment sources regardless of payment gateway or payment type.
    • Enables a frictionless payments experience for your client .
      • Customer experience and technical solutions are improved through the realtime workflow engines.
      • Sales friction is reduced by offering your customers a number of gateways including Pin Payments, Stripe, eWAY, PayPal, Worldpay and more!

 

What else?

We offer an easy to work with REST API which can be used to integrate Paydock into your application, with a flexible subscription engine that allows you to set specific start dates, end dates, amount, frequency and interval, along with other payment facilities such as multi-currency routing and automatic retries and webhooks/ alerts.

 

Paydock also offers a variety of software development kits (SDKs), including Javascript SDK, .Net SDK, Java SDK with iOS and Android on the way, to make integration as easy as possible.

 

How do I get started?

Paydock offers a sandbox for testing, as well as excellent developer docs for you to use and test out.

 

You can also talk to one of our friendly payments advisors at [email protected]

 

/0 Comments/by

Buy Now, Pay Later: How to Generate More Revenue

From prehistoric systems of barter and trade to simple forms of currency, and paper cheques to little plastic cards, it is evident that payment methods are constantly evolving. The modern rise of new alternative payments methods (non cash methods of transaction) such as E-wallets, digital currency, mobile payment methods and so forth can be seen as a new chapter in the world of payments. Alternative payment methods (APMs) are now predicted to take a 59% share in all e-commerce transactions in 2017. An example of an Alternative Payment Method that is changing the e-commerce industry are Buy Now, Pay Later schemes.

 

The increased popularity of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) schemes such as Afterpay and ZipMoney have created new opportunities for savvy e-commerce stores. Consumers are able to pay for their goods with instalments over a period of time while retailers receive payment on the day of the purchase with all credit and fraud risk taken on by the relevant BNPL scheme.

 

In particular, the flexibility of Afterpay has attracted a large amount of consumers, holding a 10% share of all transactions in the Australian online fashion market and a 2.1% share in the online retail market. Various retailers, such as Veronika Maine and General Pants Co have stated that their average order value increased by 22-25% after introducing Afterpay.

 

What can you do?

By offering BNPL schemes such as Afterpay and ZipMoney, you not only capture potential customers but also increase the amount and value of goods they purchase. ZipMoney observed an increase in average order values of between 40%-130% (where zipMoney is the chosen form of tender) and a 40% increase in items per order.

 

How can Paydock help?

Paydock enables e-commerce stores to offer both APMs and traditional payment methods to their consumers. Paydock customers can now snap up more customers and generate additional sales through BNPL schemes with ease through our API.

/0 Comments/by

How to Reduce Checkout Friction for Your Customers

What is checkout friction?

Checkout friction is anything that stands between your customer wanting a product and being able to purchase it. This includes things that slow down the process, including typos, slow loading pages, pop up ads, sign up processes or even things that stop the purchase altogether, such as an outdated link on a “buy now” button.

Checkout friction is the largest cause of cart abandonment rates; even higher than hidden shipping costs, complicated return policies and security concerns.

How can I decrease the amount of checkout friction on my website?

For larger merchants:

  1. Flexibility: allow customers to pay via mobile apps and mobile optimised sites.
  2. Offer a better customer User Experience (UX): this may mean using autofill APIs to remember customer information, or making the payments process as easy to navigate as possible. A better UX could potentially yield a 400% increase in conversion rates.
    Examples include;

    • Personalised payment process: This might mean keeping the colour, design, and font the same throughout your website. By keeping your payments pages synonymous with the theme of the website, an increased sense of cohesion is created.
    • Reduce checkout time: The Checkout Conversion Index found that the optimal time for checkout success is 134 seconds, with the worst performing sites needing 220 seconds. A way to reduce time taken to checkout is by integrating your payment gateway’s interface directly into your website instead of using a payment redirect page, which means customers no longer need to wait for a pop up to load.

For smaller merchants:

  1. Fewer info fields: More successful merchants ask for as little information from consumers as possible, whether that mean payments information, address fields or even registering for an online account.
  2. Slim your checkout process: Amazon’s patented “one click checkout” is a great example of reducing checkout friction. By allowing consumers to make a purchase through a single click, Amazon’s sales have increased by 5% each year. Instead of offering four or five different pages for consumers to click through as they attempt to pay, a single page interface that provides all the information (including what’s in the cart, the price etc.) drastically reduces checkout friction.
  3. Offer more payment methods: By accepting a variety of payment methods such as credit and debit cards, as well as alternate payment methods such as Afterpay, PayPal and zipMoney, the number of decision points for customers is reduced which maximises conversion rates. On average, better performing sites offer 6.8 payment methods versus 4 for underperformers.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock’s developer friendly REST API makes payment method integration easier. Our clients are able to drive greater conversions with no redirection and offer an optimised customer payments experience.

/0 Comments/by

A Quick Guide to the Advantages of Recurring Payments

What are recurring payments?

Recurring payments are automatic payments deducted from a credit card or bank account on an agreed schedule (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). Recurring payments are useful for a wide range of payments – such as subscriptions for magazines, membership clubs and utilities bills.

What are the advantages for merchants?

  1. Decreases late or missed payments: As recurring billing happens automatically, there is a reduced risk of delayed or missed payments. Furthermore, budgeting is made much easier as payments are expected at regular intervals for customers.
  2. Improve customer relationships: By signing customers up to subscription arrangements, business are able to reduce the risk of churn and build stronger, sustainable customer relationships over time.
  3. Saves time and money: Business owners no longer need to manually manage all billing cycles. This frees up time so they can focus on their core business.

What are the advantages for customers?

  1. Saves time and effort: By setting up automatic payments, customers no longer have to manually input payments for their subscriptions.
  2. No more late fees: Previously, if a customer forgot to input a payment manually, they could potentially be hit with a late fee. The automatic nature of recurring payments means that such scenarios will no longer happen, saving money and effort for the consumer.
  3. Keeps information secure: Recurring billing allows customer information to be managed securely. The lack of paper bills means that the risk of duplicating and circulating sensitive information is minimised, as is the risk of employee error.
  4. Environmentally friendly: Each year, more than 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions are created by transporting paper bills alone. There is no longer a need for physical bills to be sent out as almost everything can be done online in this day and age.
  5. Leverage the growing demand for subscription services: Research has shown that there is an increased demand for the convenience and ease of subscription services, especially within younger generations. As of 2017, 70% of millennials have a subscription to a product and 89% have a subscription to a service. As a business, offering recurring payments can greatly improve customer experience, and help differentiate your business from others.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock is a smart payments platform that allows merchants to connect to various payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Paypal and more. We offer a recurring payments engine that overlays on top regardless of payment type, gateway, or frequency. Our clients are able to automate flexible customer subscriptions, increase revenue and reduce time spent with managing customer billing.

/0 Comments/by

How to Combat Cart Abandonment Rates Effectively

According to Statista, the global average cart abandonment rate for the second quarter of 2016 was 74.52%. This means that out of 100 potential customers, 75 are leaving for reasons such as “extra costs too high”, “the site wanted me to create an account” and a “too long/ complicated checkout process”. Yet, the high cart abandonment rate is no cause for despair. Approximately 63% of abandoned sales is potentially recoverable by savvy online retailers.

 

So how can merchants reduce the cart abandonment rate?

  1. Offer free shipping. Savvy online consumers are looking for ways to save money. If you are unable to offer free shipping completely, promotions such as “Free shipping for orders over $75” or even making shipping costs clear and upfront have been shown to increase sales.
  2. Create a guest checkout process. Shoppers are reluctant to provide private information upfront, but are happy to create an account after they have purchased a product to track shipping and delivery times.
  3. Reduce the amount of steps taken to checkout. Conversion studies have shown that the less clicks to checkout there are, the lower the cart abandonment rate. If many pages are needed, it is a good idea to provide a progress bar or another visual indicator.
  4. Improving the security of transactions. Adding a security logo such as Symantec can increase sales by up to 42%
  5. Increasing the amount of payment methods. Offer common payment processes such as PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, as well as alternate payment methods (APM). APMs (such as E-wallets and mobile payment methods, transfers, digital currencies etc.) will account for more than half of all transactions by 2017, up from 43% in 2012. In a time where payment methods are becoming increasingly varied and complex, online merchants risk losing sales if they are unable to offer their customer’s preferred method.

 

How can Paydock help?

We aren’t saying that we can offer all solutions to high cart abandonment rates, but Paydock can definitely increase conversion rates by connecting your e-commerce store to multiple payment gateways and allowing access to new payment methods. We allow you to future proof your payments ecosystem in a time of rapid change and development.  

/0 Comments/by

How To Boost Revenue With More Payment Methods

 

You get a hit on your e-commerce store, they browse around your site and find an item they like.

They have filled their online shopping cart and are ready to purchase.

They get ready to pay… and find no PayPal or AMEX.

They get frustrated and leave.

Does this sound familiar?


It’s the story of “cart abandonment”. Two words that every e-commerce retailer hates and sees over $159.6 billion of global online sales at risk from the modern customer not finding exactly what they want and leaving – most likely to competitors. In the digital age where attention span is a valuable commodity, e-commerce retailers and merchants who invest in reducing checkout friction win big.


From a study conducted by YouGov, a UK-based international market research firm, it was found that:

“40% of participants said they would feel more comfortable buying from a merchant that offers multiple payment methods” – YouGov


Digital wallet options are on the rise with 67.6% of top online merchants offering PayPal and global non-cash transactions increasing 8% year on year. So many merchants are confused on how to keep up and are turning to payment platforms like Paydock to help them trial and adopt new payment methods and gateways quickly and easily.


Imagine what a 1% increase in conversion could do to your bottom line.


Why Paydock?

Paydock is a payments platform built to help merchants and e-commerce retailers increase their conversions and reduce internal process management. It enables merchants to connect multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Braintree and Westpac PayWay in seconds and keeps your business on your toes with emerging payment methods. Contact Paydock here to speak to a payments expert.

/0 Comments/by

Customer Defined Retry Logic

One of the most costly aspects of running a SaaS, member-based or Not-for-Profit organisation is the cost of failed payment management. We’ve seen extreme cases where it’s been cheaper to write payments off as bad debts, rather than chase, such is the cost.

We’d like to solve that problem for you.

Paydock helps with our automatic retry (dunning) feature. We’ve received a lot great feedback on this, however, one of the most common feature requests we get is:

“Great, but can I set the number of retries, and the gap between them?”

We’re pleased to announce that as of today, yes you can. Paydock customers are able to define how they want Paydock to manage their dunning processes for them, removing significant cost, better managing the customer experience and assisting with cashflow by reducing the period which a payment remains outstanding for.

The two settings Paydock customers can manage now are:

  • the number of retries on a soft failed payment
  • the time between those retries

You could specify Paydock to perform 2 retries, each 48hrs apart, for example.

This is available today under the My Company link. See screenshot below.

 

This is available today on all gateways and payment types which we manage recurring payments for.

We hope you enjoy this new feature and find it of great use in removing payments pain and increasing your bottom line.

To payments freedom.

All of us here at Paydock

 

/0 Comments/by

How To Integrate PayPal Express Checkout With Paydock

We’re putting even more power back in the merchants’ hand with our PayPal Express Checkout integration. Merchants on Paydock and using PayPal as their payment gateway can now use PayPal Express Checkout as an integrated service for smoother consumer purchasing experiences.

Merchant now have the power to deliver seamless checkout experiences and create new revenue all the while still enjoying the power to flexibly set up recurring billing, retain customer data for easy reconciliation and tokenise their customers’ financial information.

PayPal button

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn more about PayPal’s Express Checkout Service

For assistance on how to take advantage of this feature in Paydock, please contact one of our consultants on [email protected], +61 2 8218 2141 or review our documentation.

Love,

The Paydock Team

/0 Comments/by

Direct Debit Recurring – Save Money, Earn More

Easy and automated access to alternate payment types increases conversion – yet traditionally has been something of a challenge for merchants. Wiring in new (or multiple) gateways, stitching back-end integrations and layering accounting and reconciliation processes often means the cost-to-benefit ratio stops stacking up even before you’ve even begun.

So, while we know the payment structures on payment types such as direct-debit are attractive (i.e. flat-rate transaction fees) and accessing these facilities could reduce cost and raise conversions – we just can’t ‘get there’ easily.

For many of us it seems better to pass up the financial boost just to avoid the headache.

But what exactly have we been passing up?

Here’s some facts:

 50% of those who regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method is not available, they will cancel the purchase.  [1]

…alternative payment methods are expected to grow with approximately 6-7 % in the next few years. [2]

Latest analyses show that every additional payment method which is offered by a Merchant can help increase conversions with 14%. [2]

Depending on the characteristics of your site you will probably see somewhere in the region of 5 to 10 percent improvement in your site’s overall conversion rate, which is still significant enough not to be ignored. [3]

Correspondingly, WorldPay’s data shows us that alternative payment methods (types other than credit or debit cards) will account for more than half (59%) of all transactions online by 2017.

This means that you’re not already offering ready access to multiple payment sources, you’re leaving real money on the table.

How can we fix that? With Paydock it’s on average 50% quicker to work with gateways. You can stop missing out on lost transactions and take new payment types. You can be up and running in hours (if not minutes) in your website while also delivering seamless user-experiences and consistent business process.

Find out how much you could be earning by calling us today on +61 2 8218 2141 or Use the Quick Income Calculator below to see what difference using Paydock can make to your brand.

Here for your benefit!

All of us at Paydock.

P.S. Combine with the built-in subscription, notification and backup gateway services and Paydock can raise conversions in excess of 40% while simultaneously saving you thousands.

Quick Income Calculator

Use the form below to see how much money you could be leaving on the behind without Paydock.

[gravityform id=”19″ title=”false” description=”false” ajax=”true”]

 

1. ‘Survey finds that retailers are losing millions.‘ Retail Technology Review, 2009
2. ‘Boost conversion rate by offering alternative payment methods’ eMerchantPay, 2012
3. ‘Alternative Payments and Ecommerce Conversions’, PracticalEcommerce, 2013

 

 

/0 Comments/by

$4000 in minutes

Q: What’s the value of a backup gateway?

A: You never know till it’s down.

Today, one of our valued customers, ‘Mitch’, had an experience where his payment gateway’s production API was unresponsive. Orders were coming in and hitting a brick wall.

While we understand there’s a range of reasons why this might happen (and very often the gateway is not to blame), for most of us, payments is critical.

‘Mitch’ called us here at Paydock asking what might be the issue and we quickly investigated by reaching out to the gateway. You may have experienced something similar to the response we received below:

“Thanks for your patience, I have been advised we are currently having some connectivity issues with our API. Our team are working to resolve as soon as possible….”

We asked if it was affecting all environments…

“Just production at this point.”

Not something you want to hear as a customer.

Paydock enables seamless fail-over

Through the Paydock API, ‘Mitch’ was able to dynamically route payments to an alternative provider where over $4000 of otherwise failed orders were successfully processed.

When describing what the staff had to do different to manage the sales process to his staff ‘Mitch’ had a single word:

“Nothing”

What’s a seamless fail-over worth to your organisation?

Just count the transactions you have, multiply by time, and you’ll know. For ‘Mitch’ it was thousands of dollars per hour.

When Paydock can be deployed in hours you have to ask, “How much is a Paydock enabled backup gateway process worth to your organisation?”

 

OUR PRODUCT TEAM CAN HELP YOU GET started today

/0 Comments/by

Paydock provides more value for both customers and gateways

We love solutions where everybody wins

Building Paydock we noticed many of us typically experienced gateway discomfort when, with our existing (or proposed) payments provider, the functional set didn’t fully meet current or emerging business needs.

The juggling of many different criteria and the looking for the ‘uber’ service we actually needed without creating too much disruption or cost was hard. Very hard. And waiting for our current gateway to release the feature we needed could also take more time that we had.

Many reasons to stick existing/preferred gateways

Beyond this, other factors not just the ‘transaction’ component also formed part of the decision making scenario. These factors could be:

  • the convenience because we already banked with them
  • really good fees as a result of long term relationship with the existing bank/gateway
  • amazing support team and service
  • …or that ‘particular admin feature’

These are all good reasons, but what none of us wanted to find was that the gateway we finally engaged with (or currently used) had some unexpected limitation or drawback we didn’t realise.

Don’t switch gateways – just add value

Our gateway friends might even have ticked 80% of the boxes but because they didn’t have ’that’ critical feature (e.g. multi-currency or direct-debit processing), though all the other things were great, we couldn’t move ahead. Read more

/0 Comments/by

2015 Payment Gateway Survey

If you could use one word to describe dealing with payment gateways what would it be?

 

A cornerstone of doing business online, and taking payments through web apps, websites, or now even in-store, is having the right infrastructure to support your business. Key to this is having a payment gateway.

 

Payment gateways are a little like traffic signals. When they’re working they work really well and help things go smoothly. When they’re problematic, all sorts of trouble can occur. Having the right setup for online payments that will keep working when and how you need it to, makes a world of difference.

 

To better understand the relationship between businesses and their payment gateways we conducted the 2015 Payment Gateway Survey. We have had a hunch for some time that people ordinary business owners and workers find online payments a troublesome task. The hunch told us that things were not as simple as the marketing tells us it is.

From a business perspective, there’s something about taking payments online that feels… hard.

 

Grab the white paper now, we interviewed a wide range of people from developers, nonprofits and industry to reveal the top payment gateways they used, how businesses feel about dealing with them, and what they would like to see changed.

 

Download the whitepaper now

  • [gravityform id=”13″ title=”false” description=”true”]
/0 Comments/by

Why Paydock is the Captain Planet of Payments

By using Paydock you too can combine the powers of your payment gateways (and get some added benefits too)

Take two great payment gateways Pin Payments and Ezidebit.

Ezidebit are the direct debit experts. Their platform allows you to get paid in multiple ways and direct debit is obviously one of their biggest features.

Pin Payments is another great payment tool. Businesses love their ease of setup, the fact that no merchant account is needed, and the tools that come with it.

Both of these companies offer features that you may need for your business, and may want to integrate to software, or website. And by connecting both of these through Paydock, and you’ll be able to do more than what both of these fantastic tools offer by themselves.

By their powers combined they are…

Not only will you have direct debit, easy setup, multi currency abilities all in Paydock single API call, but you’ll also have webhooks and instant notifications as you need them.

Paydock brings you the best of both worlds, and offers you even more. The same is true for other gateways that you might want to combine.

/0 Comments/by

A word about dealing with payment gateways

‘If you could use one word to describe dealing with payment gateways what would it be?’

For the last decade the web has radically changed the way we live. Paper bills are almost a novelty, picking up a parcel at a ‘parcel locker’ because we do so much shopping online is now a thing.

Large and small businesses are relying more and more on transactions conducted over the Internet.

However from a business perspective, there’s something about taking payments online that feels… hard. Our experience speaking with business owners and members of the technology world told us that this was true.

As a part of our recent 2015 Payment Gateway Survey we asked people to describe dealing with their payment gateway in one word.

Most responded with negativity, using words such as:

  • Frustrating
  • Painful
  • Paperwork
  • Necessary
  • Time-consuming
  • Friction
  • Annoying
  • Confusing
  • Cumbersome
  • Complex

The overall sense that we took from this was that engagement with payment gateways as a labour intensive task that could prove confusing, complex, and yet was something they were unable to avoid due to its necessity.

This backed up our understanding of businesses over the last decade, and confirmed that there is still a need to improve upon the existing customer experience of a fundamental part of our modern economy.

Do you feel like this is something you have experienced? Some respondents came back to us and said it was painless, or routine. We’d love to hear your feedback. Have you switched gateways and found one easier than the other? Tell us your story in the comments below.

/0 Comments/by

If you could fix one thing with your payment gateway what would it be?

In May and June we conducted the 2015 Payment Gateway Survey, we wanted to know what people thought of their payment gateways, and how they would improve on what they were offered. It was an eye opening survey, with some of our assumptions challenged, and others reinforced.

We heard from businesses, developers, and nonprofits – some were happy with their gateway, some were frustrated. But when it came to wanting something more from their payment gateway, every respondent had something ready to share.

We thought ‘lower fees’ would be one of the biggest themes that businesses would want to change about their gateway. Only 20% of the respondents answered to this effect, there were a myriad of other responses, here were some key quotes from people who responded:

“Being able to preset regular payments just once and not have to do it every time. There is no capacity to create recurring payments in one hit.”

“More information about what is happening as it happens.”

“Nothing is clear and there is no ability to receive real time notifications.”

“Speed of onboarding and deployment of a solution is a critical factor.”

/0 Comments/by

How to enable a best-practice ‘redundant’ payments approach

With all the issues at NAB’s online payment service recently…

Which also affected Secure Pay customers…

It’s now more clear than ever the need for businesses to safeguard themselves from unexpected and disastrous downtime from their payment service provider.

With extreme losses recently suffered by both businesses and not-for-profits alike many found themselves highly exposed and looking at either one of two solutions.

Pre Paydock Solution #1: Switch providers

This is an obvious yet expensive approach approach I’ve seen many organisations take. Requiring a business-level disentangling of services, websites, applications, management and accounting – it’s always been a highly expensive option (and no more guaranteed) when it comes to stability.

Functional limitations still exist and merchants hold their breath hoping their new partner stays online and their business needs don’t outgrow their gateway.

It really falls into the ‘what else could we do’ department, as Option Two (below) carries its own price tag.

Pre Paydock Solution #2: Incorporate multiple providers

We’ve spoken to organisations who now consider this route. The costs here are extraordinary, with development needing to ‘wire in’ two (or more) gateways to cover functional needs yet provide some kind of backup. There are direct fees from the gateway provider as well as development and administration costs, not to mention the difficulty in managing customer data.

It’s not hard to see that neither of these solutions do not truly represent a elegant insurance policy against gateway downtime.

Paydock provides an alternative approach to the market.

 

The Paydock Solution…

With Paydock customers have the opportunity to wire into a single API – and work with many gateways. You can ‘red-light, green-light’ gateways through a simple check with our API and perform transaction routing depending on the result.

What this means is that if a payment hits a brick wall because a given gateway is down, Paydock customers can literally pass that through to the next gateway in runtime.

 

Paydock will minimise downtime, disruption & loss of income.

Furthermore, because we have a semantic API, it’s easy to add to your existing services and as new gateways are added you can drive down direct costs and increase your functional mix with our built-in recurring engine.

We’ve found our customers often don’t even have to uproot their existing merchant/gateway facility but can maintain established banking relationships but, this time, sleep at night knowing there’s a backup, new features and a better solution, ‘just in case’.

We’d love to have a discussion about how we can help your specific business needs, reduce pain and ensure business stability. Email us on [email protected] or contact us online.

~Rob

/0 Comments/by

How to Get The Most Out Of Two Payment Gateways

It’s a refrain heard so many times – and it’s why PayPal has become so popular, even in Australia.

‘Let’s just use PayPal, it’s so much easier.’

Using PayPal has become one of the first things to think of when you’re thinking about taking payments online. Many businesses start down this track, and continue for as long as the PayPal solution will take them, which for some is a fair way. But for many, PayPal will become just one of many options they have for taking payments.

Taking payments through multiple payment gateways can be a bit of a problem though – for one, there are development costs. Getting another payment gateway up and running with an existing website can cost thousands of dollars, weeks of work, and interruption to your customers’ experience. Making sure the site switches between payment types, or just getting the code together can just be too big a hassle to bother trying.

This is where the beauty of Paydock lays. Just connect to Paydock once, and you can instantly connect to multiple payment processors. You might start with PayPal, and add an additional gateway later down the line. It’s as easy as entering in your new account details into Paydock, and you’re ready to go.

In Paydock you can choose which payment processor your payment will go through. You have the flexibility and choice you need to continue your business without interruption. Maybe you want to take subscriptions through Paypal, or maybe you have two payment accounts because your company requires different payments to go to different places. Either way, you’ll be able to choose.

As we continue to add more and more gateways to Paydock, you will see a greater choice. The more choice you have the better for you – this will mean continued savings, and a better experience for your customers.

/0 Comments/by

How To Own Your Own Data

So you’ve decided to move to a new credit card processor. You think to yourself it won’t be a problem, because with today’s technology you should be able to move any information that’s yours. It’s yours right?

It’s not always in the front of your mind, but consider the following scenario.

“If you want to leave Authorize.net… they will put up a fight when you ask for your data. They will claim they can’t do it or at best they will say it costs anywhere from $500-$1500 to export the data into a CSV file for you.”
Robert Oswald, on Quora.com
Authorize.net aren’t the only processor to squeeze you when it comes to your own data. One of the pitfalls of going with a payment gateway or credit card processor, is not only having to pay, but that you may not even be able to get your data at all.

Let me present to you a different way of thinking about it.

If instead of building a connection to your credit card processor and hoping they give you your data when you want it, why not get someone to securely keep the data for you? That way when you switch payment gateways, your data isn’t lost – and it’s not at the whim of a business that only wants you for themselves.

Build with Paydock, and keep your customer data independent of your credit card processor. Not only does Paydock make it easier for you to take payments, but your customer data changes with you when you change too.

/0 Comments/by

Businesses Feeling Insecure About SecurePay.

It’s something you probably wouldn’t think of when you’re building an online store – What happens when my payment processor breaks? After all, it doesn’t seem like a problem that happens often, and considering it means thinking about thousands of dollars more in building backup systems that you may never use. Or does it?

Customers of SecurePay have been frustrated, and anxious over the last few weeks with constant downtime, and outages that have rendered their sites largely inoperable. Burst SMS tweeted that they are looking for other providers as a result, and have had to field comments from frustrated customers.

Something that isn’t their fault has become a big problem for them. They’re not alone either, other companies who use Securepay have felt the real business impacts of not being able to serve their customers.

https://twitter.com/morris_kate/status/592512944736374784

https://twitter.com/AnnaCushion/status/592337118216740864

Avoid Downtime Insecurity with Paydock

Building a backup plan into your website’s payment system doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars. Use Paydock to connect your payment gateway and your website, and you automatically get a way to switch between credit card processors. It’s simple, and it gives you choice when you need it.

The choice that Paydock brings, means you don’t need to fear downtime. You won’t have hundereds of customers tweeting or emailing you that you can’t take their money, and you don’t have to explain to your customers that you made the wrong choice.

So before your credit card processor breaks, make the right decision and use Paydock.

/0 Comments/by

    Follow us

    About us + More

    Resources & Information

    Contact


    PayDock is PCI-DSS v3.2.1
    Level 1 Service Provider

    Copyright @ Paydock 2022. All Rights Reserved.