Paydock, an enterprise-grade payments orchestration platform appoints Jenela Gunasekaran as its Chief Product Officer. This significant appointment emphasises the increasingly recognised role of payments orchestration as well as Paydock’s leadership in the sector.

Jenela brings over 16 years of experience across product, technology, and financial services to her new role at Paydock. She joins from HSBC where she held the role of Head of Product at its mobile payment service PayMe in Hong Kong for almost three years and led a team of product managers, engineers and tech writers to launch online payments for merchants and numerous distribution models for partners, serving over 2.3 million PayMe consumers.

Prior to her role at HSBC, Jenela spent over five years as Principal Product Manager at PayPal where she was responsible for multiple products focused on minimising seller fraud and credit risk across geographies. In this role, she partnered with global business units and policy makers to create product vision and lead multi-year product strategies and a scalable and robust platform to deliver business positive outcomes for PayPal. 

Commenting on the appointment, Robert Lincolne, founder and CEO of Paydock, said: “We are delighted to be able to attract such high calibre international talent to our team. Innovation sits at the heart of Paydock and our market-leading team, product and services is a testament to this. Jenela’s expertise will undoubtedly add significant value and competitive advantage to our offering. 

Jenela is passionate about creative use of technology to build inclusive and sustainable products. She has vast experience in e-Commerce, Digital Payments, Fraud and Credit Risk, API as a Product and Software Application Life-cycle Management.

Commenting on her appointment, Jenela Gunasekaran said: “With accelerated digitisation and businesses eager to rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, Paydock’s payment orchestration is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in helping businesses offer fast, secure, reliable, and a cost effective payments experience to their consumers in their preferred mode of payment. I am very excited to join the incredibly talented team at Paydock and I look forward to driving further innovation on the platform.”

In welcome news to medium and large merchants looking to compress compliance scope and yet provide leading IVR experiences to customers, Paydock can now be enjoyed as part of the Payshield offering, providing merchants with dynamic choice of over 30 processing partners within an orchestration environment while delivering seamless over-the-phone payment experiences. 

Payshield’s capability enables merchants to securely capture credit card data and process through any of their Paydock-connected payment gateways. By working with Paydock+Payshield, merchants are able to further their orchestration solution and benefit from a single source of transaction truth regardless of the acceptance point.

Rob Lincolne, founder and CEO of Paydock said: “Harmonising compliance, consumer experience and payment vendors hasn’t always been easy. As credit card security breaches become more prevalent, we are excited to be able to remove common pain points with the team at Payshield to deepen merchant security, improve brand experiences and work closely with their choice of processing partner.” 

Paydock’s technology is used by leading global merchants and platforms who benefit from a myriad of features such as dynamic vaulting and routing capabilities, sophisticated user management and vendor support.

Commenting on the collaboration, managing director of Payshield, Dmitri Muntean said “Integration with Paydock allows us to instantly enable over 30 payment providers for our customers, speeding up the deployment and adoption of our services that help merchants reduce their PCI-DSS exposure.”

 

To find out more about Paydock visit paydock.com

CONTACT:

For media enquiries related to Paydock, please contact:

MINERVA PR 

Malika Shermatova 

+44 (0)7979 852604 

[email protected] 

Paydock partners with Aplauz to enable in-store payments for digital merchants

Paydock, an enterprise-grade payments orchestration platform announces its most recent partnership with the introduction of Aplauz, a digital payment method that can be purchased in-store and used online, enabling online merchants to reach and capitalise on market opportunities within a yet untapped customer base.

By working seamlessly alongside other payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay and Afterpay currently supported by Paydock, merchants can by using Paydock and Aplauz extend their product strategy to include in-store payments made at convenience stores without increasing effort.

Paying for goods or services online using traditional payment methods such as credit cards is still inaccessible, inconvenient or untrusted for many customers, such as the generation Z, who would like to protect their privacy, are wary of online fraud and prefer not to share financial data online. Aplauz also promotes conscious spending by enabling customers to have better control of their online spending habits – whether they want to control impulse buying, have ghost subscription payments that are still active or overlooked charges made on a registered credit card. Aplauz puts consumers squarely in the driver’s seat.

Rob Lincolne, founder and CEO of Paydock said: “Aplauz offers a compelling proposition for consumers and merchants. We are extremely excited to collaborate with Aplauz on this project and play our role in closing the gap between offline and online transactions by offering a solution that truly adds value to digital merchants as part of their payments mix.”

 Paydock’s technology is used by leading global merchants and platforms who benefit from a myriad of features such as dynamic vaulting and routing capabilities, sophisticated user management and vendor support.

Commenting on the collaboration, CEO of Aplauz Goran Abramović said: “We are excited to collaborate with Paydock to make Aplauz easily available to merchants everywhere regardless of their payment vendor set-up. Beyond the convenience, Aplauz has been launched with a vision of empowering conscious spending by enabling consumers to better control their online spending. I strongly believe that Aplauz can be a great opportunity for online merchants to further increase their social responsibility contribution towards their customers and the industry in which they operate.”

Aplauz is currently available across over 2000 convenience stores in Switzerland and will be expanding across Europe during 2021.

NOTES TO EDITORS

To find out more about Paydock, please visit paydock.com

To find out more about Aplauz, please visit aplauz.com

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, major retailers, not-for-profits, global travel platforms, insurtech leaders and fast food chains.

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.

 

About Aplauz

 Aplauz is prepaid digital credit that empowers people to make conscious spending. Aplauz credit vouchers can be bought at convenience stores and used to make online payments without any of the traditional online payment methods, and without having a bank account. It is ideal for those who don’t own a credit card or don’t want to disclose financial details, to securely buy online while staying in control of their spending.

CONTACT:

For media enquiries related to Paydock, please contact:

MINERVA PR

Malika Shermatova

+44 (0)7979 852604

[email protected]

For media enquiries related to Aplauz, please contact:

Delphine Bos

CMO Aplauz

[email protected]

Paydock, an enterprise-grade payments orchestration platform joins the ranks of strategic partners alongside leading industry players selected by Markaaz, the world’s first global operating system for small businesses.

Paydock is set to provide a unique payments orchestration backbone to Markaaz and its members. Paydock’s technology is used by leading global merchants and platforms who benefit from a myriad of features such as dynamic vaulting and routing capabilities, sophisticated user management and vendor support.

The partnership enables Markaaz to offer its SME base a wide range of both traditional and cutting edge payment capabilities, reduce compliance, technical and administrative costs and return lost time and money to ever more strained SME owners and operators.

Markaaz is an SME community where they can find all the resources and tools they need to succeed. For its partners, Markaaz is a network through which SME-friendly solutions can be offered and enhanced by Markaaz’s proprietary operating system underpinned by powerful AI.

Commenting on this partnership, founder and CEO of Markaaz, Hany Fam said: “We are pleased about the partnership with Paydock, as we are not only aligned in our values to bring down the cost of payments, but also we are on a shared mission to help SMEs succeed.”

Rob Lincolne, founder and CEO of Paydock said: “We are delighted to partner with Markaaz and be part of this purpose-driven business. Paydock has been built with enduring purpose of benefiting platforms such as Markaaz to simplify and streamline the way they engage and support payment service providers and associated vendors. Markaaz’s mission of reshaping the SME landscape is highly innovative and we look forward to working with them to transform the status-quo that exists in the payments environment.”

Businesses can find out more about Paydock by visiting paydock.com. To become a Markaaz community member and take advantage of some of the first FREE assessments including CRM / Network assessment, powered by Salesforce, or a Cyber Security Health assessment for your business visit markaaz.com.

 

CONTACT:

For media enquiries related to Paydock, please contact:

MINERVA PR

Malika Shermatova

+44 (0)7979 852604

[email protected]

 

NOTES TO EDITORS

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, major retailers, not-for-profits, global travel platforms, insurtech leaders and fast food chains.

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.

 

About Markaaz

Markaaz is the world’s first global operating system for small businesses, supported by a pre-populated global directory of vetted businesses.

Markaaz is a community for small businesses, and a network for its partners. Markaaz develops and applies proprietary technology to support SMEs, including an AI and recommendations engine to create best-in-class SME-friendly tools, and using natural language conversations with SMEs it will develop and deliver custom tools in real-time for the specific needs of each SME. Founded by a team who has done this before, supported by a world class leadership and board, Markaaz has been internationally recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Global Innovator, and is driving digital adoption for SMEs globally.

 

CONTACT:

For media enquiries related to Markaaz, please contact:

Markaaz Marketing

[email protected]

We’re excited to announce todays’ update of the PayDock branding.

Extending our progressive narrative on the foundational harmonic and interoperable elements drawn from previous interlocking symbolism we are now releasing a cleaner and sharper iconography. By doing so we establish a stronger, more prominent and recognisable brand presence as a market leader in payment orchestration and strategic merchant and processor solutions.

We have retained our core hexagonal motif as one of nature’s most foundational skeletal structures – from tessellated stone, interconnected organic compounds, high-strength synthetic structures and how we understand and communicate the harmonic and productive bonding of elements. The PayDock product and brand is designed to communicate these same values. Matched with our name PayDock we seek to communicate foundational strength and applied, regular and useful ordering of independent objects, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Our mission has never been more important than in payments, with service fragmentation at an all-time high and merchants urgently looking for means to control the chaos, create strong payment structures and stop the profit loss they’re currently suffering.

PayDock remains and ever will be committed to bringing order to chaos and simplicity to fragmentation.

We trust you enjoy our updated brand.

Note: If you’d like to download brand assets for your websites and publications you can find these here.

Paydock contributes a chapter alongside IBM, Dell and CMS in a recently launched book “Growing with Blockchain”

London, UK: PayDock, a revolutionary payments orchestration platform, is delighted to have contributed a dedicated chapter focusing on blockchain and the changing face of payments, alongside other contributors such as IBM, Dell and CMS for a new book “Growing with Blockchain” published by Novaro Publishing.

Edited by Kevin R. Smith, the book draws on the knowledge and experience of 18 top-level blockchain performers who lay out their expert opinion on how to turn the disruptive potential of blockchain into operational reality. It has been described as a ‘must-have’ for anyone wanting to easily understand the varied practical and commercial applications of this revolutionary technology.

In his chapter, Rob Lincolne, the founder and CEO of PayDock expresses his thoughts on the subject and highlights some of the key areas such as: 

  • Lockdown triggered shifts in the payments industry increases relevance of blockchain.
  • Authentication and authorisation are different concepts, how blockchain helps resolve these transactional pillars.
  • A seismic shift toward political trust anchors has the opportunity to reshape commerce.

Commenting on his involvement, he said, “Even though blockchain is here to stay, its practical and accessible value can still at times be hard to grasp. It is my hope that in Growing with Blockchain, we have been able to make this revolution tangible, applicable and perhaps even exciting for corporations today.”

Other contributors include experts from IBM, Digital Catapult, CMS, Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering, Dell Technologies, Team Blockchain, Omnitude, DAG Global, Coller IP, Totalinfo, Kession, Blockchain Rookies, Robbie Moulding, Kate Baucherel, A Transparent Company, BEEN London and Boom & Partners.

 

Priya Guliani, Head of Operations, Government Blockchain Association, UK

‘Blockchain has surely touched, if not disrupted, every major industry and is even altering the norms of interaction between people and societies. As the expression goes, “power to the people”. The dust of being a buzzword has fallen off and Growing with Blockchain covers the foundational underpinnings, the industry paradigms, as well as the implications of blockchain, helping you pivot to the new sensibly. Read, reread, learn and apply.‘

An independent review by the Cointelegraph described their experience of engaging with the book

‘However, at this point, it seemed better to persevere straight onwards and am very glad I did. The later chapters flow so well from one topic to the next that I found myself thinking of ways to implement blockchain technology into my own (non-existent) business.’

PayDock is pleased to offer a 25% discount to its followers and friends via the Novaro Publishers’ website https://novaropublishing.com/growing-with-blockchain/.

The 25% off discount code is: 25off-blockchain

London, UK: Payments orchestration platform PayDock has announced a multi-year exclusive agreement with ECAL, a leading calendar communications platform to offer seamless calendar-driven payment solutions. Currently relied on by around 3m monthly active users, ECAL is a preferred pipeline for time-sensitive, actionable communications between brands and consumers. PayDock’s capabilities as a mature payments orchestration platform provide a strong foundation for ECAL’s payments roll-out.

Patrick Barrett Founder and CEO at ECAL:

 

Today, the calendar sits squarely at the forefront of the merchant-consumer relationship. Our success in driving consumer action and response from right-time communications will be elevated via seamless in-calendar payment capabilities. ECAL Pay powered by PayDock will offer consumers a simple, direct and timely way to pay bills, support charities or buy tickets to their favourite events instantly, and without leaving their preferred personal time-management platform. Merchants similarly benefit from improved cashflow, reduced costs and greater transparency within their customer relationships.

 

Rob Lincolne Founder and CEO at PayDock 

 

Our mission at PayDock has always been to equip businesses that stand at the forefront of consumer experiences. We are excited along with Pat and the team at ECAL to announce a new era in frictionless time-sensitive payment solutions for merchants, consumers and donors. PayDock’s seamless payments and event orchestration service combined with ECAL’s powerful in-calendar engagement capabilities results in a new era of secure, trusted payments in the world’s most reliable and immediate consumer facing tool. We’re excited to further our value to the payments and consumer community now with ECAL.

 

PayDock is a payments orchestration platform serving an international merchant base and over 30 payment service providers globally. PayDock makes it easy for businesses to rapidly harmonise and deploy payment ecosystems for increased value.

ECAL is a world-leading calendar communications and marketing platform, used by hundreds of major brands globally in sports, ticketing, media and now payments. ECAL’s ‘sync to calendar’ technology enables smart, dynamic, event-based communications straight to calendar, for better business outcomes.

We’re ecstatic to announce our partnership with Bleckwen AI as part of the continuation of our vision to ensure merchants are maximising acceptance while minimising fraud.

 

If as a merchant, you are not currently optimising your fraud strategy you are likely leaving significant profit on the table. It’s time to put that  money back in your bank account.
– Rob Lincolne, Founder @ Paydock

 

Bleckwen is an award-winning Behavioural Analytics software company, dedicated to help Banks and Financial Institutions to defeat fraud and make a safer world. They take state-of-the-art technologies, applied research, quality engineering and passion to deliver great solutions.

Matching this with Paydock’s agnostic and accessible  infrastructure, means merchants and charities can rapidly ‘step up’ and adopt leading tools and services without having to undergo disruptive internal change.

We have overnight removed the requirement for you to wait for your gateway to update their fraud infrastructure, removed the requirement for a 12 month internal payments transformation project, and eliminated the need for you to to create an internal fraud division to be ‘best-practice’.

PayDock’s agnostic payment rail is specifically designed to enable you to rapidly capitalise on and adopt best-of-breed solutions such as Bleckwen and ensure you are always ahead of the curve and capturing previously lost profit within your overall payments system.

 

“We’re excited to partner with PayDock as this allows us to combine our expertise and technology to out-smart the bad guys and better protect consumers. Our purpose is to Create a Safer Societe and our relationship with Paydock delivers a cost effective, fast, frictionless and more secure service for merchants.”
– David McLaren, VP Sales EMEA at Bleckwen

A major and fast-growing problem

Card-not-present (CNP) fraud is set to tear a USD $130bn  hole out of the e-commerce and digital market between 2019 and 2023 [1]. Efforts to combat the growing problem are expected to exceed USD $9.6bn in 2018 alone. This is a big deal.

Beyond the 33% CNP fraud increase from 2015 to 2016 [2]  false positives stripped a further $331bn out of the retail market in 2018 [3], itself a significant increase from 2016. So it’s not just a simple case of locking out the fraudsters, many legitimate purchasers have their customer experience disrupted or stopped completely due to efforts to address this growing threat.

A false positive is an expensive problem alongside the legitimate blocking activites – and it’s all expensive and costing the merchant, even if they don’t realise what they’re ‘not getting’.

Old approaches give way to sophisticated solutions

Older ‘rules based’ fraud services simply no longer have the firepower to combat fraud as needed [4] however the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) technologies have provided a number of exciting tools necessary to combat this rise.

The ability to stop fraud in real-time rather than ‘after the fact’ is a gamechanger. AI/ML can analyse transactional information immediately as and when transactions take place and enable assessments that ensure false positives are kept to a minimum while contemporary and nuanced information is incorporated in runtime for results in less than a second.

 

Inflexible rule-based fraud solutions deliver too many false positives, locking out genuine buyers or causing obstacles in their shopping journey. Unsurprisingly, this makes them rethink their purchase decision. In contrast, machine learning continuously monitors buyer data based on identity and behavior, resulting in a highly accurate fraud score. [5]

 

AI and ML is the future. As the fraudsters come to grips with these tools it’s also up to providers like PayDock as well as merchants to make sure they are well protected and consistently ahead of malicious operators in the market.

See our announcement (and why we’re excited)

 

[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/

[2] Card-Not-Present FraudIs Skyrocketing. – https://www.clear.sale/Infographics/cnp-fraud-is-skyrocketing

[3] False Positives: The Unintended Consequences of Mitigating Card-Not-Present Fraud. – https://www.fisglobal.com/insights/what-we-think/2018/october/card-not-present-fraud-cnp

[4] Rise of the learning machines: How AI is becoming the newest weapon in the fraud fight. – https://www.retaildive.com/news/rise-of-the-learning-machines-how-ai-is-becoming-the-newest-weapon-in-the/434191/

[5] Rules vs Scores: keeping fraud simple with Machine Learning – https://thepaypers.com/expert-opinion/rules-vs-scores-keeping-fraud-simple-with-machine-learning/773108

Paydock customers will be excited to hear of Simon Lenton‘s appointment to position of Chief Operating Officer at Paydock.

 

“Paydock is a truly unique company. It’s product and service offerings are compelling and its ability to execute is unstoppable. However, what really sets Paydock apart – the reason why I joined this company – is the passion, drive and vision of the founders: to create a lasting impact within the payments space and beyond. Paydock has an audacious mission, a monumental goal – it knows where it wants to go and it’s running hard in that direction. And life is simply too short and too precious to be aligning yourself with anything less.”

– Simon Lenton, COO

 

Simon’s successful executive and entrepreneurial background (founder of Escrow Angel and Protecti) will accelerate the Paydock mission to provide sophisticated merchants the ability to better manage their customers and payment systems while increasing profit.

Beyond his experience in payments, Simon’s professional background includes people management, commercial strategy, and law, having commenced his professional career at two of the world’s largest law firms. Simon has been a long standing advisor to and and advocate of Paydock. Given Paydock’s compelling growth trajectory the timing is right to have him join us in a formal capacity.

 

Having long-term respect for Simon’s professional skill and personal characteristics it is a great pleasure to be working together to serve both our industry and customers. Simon’s personal tenacity and integrity makes him an invaluable support for our customers and our mission in payments.  We are deeply privileged to have him join the Paydock  family and look forward to our growth in the market together.

– Rob Lincolne, Founder

 

Paydock has partnered with Digital Junction to produce a seamless plugin for the popular WHMCS platform broadening the accessible gateway support from approximately 30 to over 50.

WHMCS is trusted by over 35,000 customers in over 200 countries and with Paydock web hosts will be able to better work with current and new payment service providers. Digital agencies, internet service providers, site hosts and other professional service providers using WHMCS will be able to connect to the payment service providers Paydock supports directly within their WHMCS account. Native gateway support includes eWayNAB TransactWestpac, PaywayEziDebitPayPal CheckoutPin PaymentsMerchant WarriorSecurePayBamboraPayment Express and more.

 

Running a Web business, I charge my clients on a monthly basis. The two biggest issues I have with regular payments is 1: Changing payment providers, and 2: Offering direct debits from bank accounts seamlessly. Paydock allows my business to operate a secure payment solution that is PCI Level 1 compliant with the level of flexibility necessary, so I can spend my time managing my customers and not be held to ransom by payment gateway merchants”.
– Paul Battaglia, Founder, Digital Junction

 

The WHMCS plugin will be available December 2018 from the team at Digital Junction. If you are interested in gaining early access please email [email protected]

Need help with your eCommerce website? Reach out to the guys at Digital Junction to get professional support and real results at [email protected]

 

It is our hope that by making it easy for web hosts to work with their payment services of choice within the WHMCS platform, they will benefit from one of the leading web hosting management and billing software platforms on the market. We are excited to help bring costs down and increase the overall satisfaction web hosts have, in using their WHMCS environment.  – Rob Lincolne, Founder, Paydock

 

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]

 

Closing the payments loop

Our mission to accelerate payments innovation and  improve our customers’ bottom line has taken a significant leap forward this week with the release of our Split Payments integration.

As our first live payouts/transfers feature, merchants are able to further reduce cost and grow their businesses with efficient and cost effective payments operations.

An Australian based banking and remittance service, Split Payments (link) enables merchants to transfer money to and from Australian bank accounts without the high costs associated with alternative marketplace payment solutions. We love Split Payments because their model also does not require vendors or suppliers to maintain anything other than simply a working bank account. No third party signups, no delays, just a bank account.

How it works

What does this mean for me?

While benefits include easier reconciliation, better reporting, end-to-end payments automation and greater user satisfaction, the two key benefits our customers enjoy are cost savings and speed.

Who benefits the most?

1. Marketplaces and Apps

If you are an online marketplace who takes payments on behalf of vendors and/or service providers, Paydock + Split Payments can reduce costs by 35% or more when compared to alternative solutions.

By connecting a Split Payments account to your Paydock account you can now both receive and remit payments in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost of other methods through a single service.

Choose the amount, trigger, timing and target of your transfers with Payment Destinations loaded into Paydock. You can also use Paydock + Split Payments to arbitrarily remit money as needed for larger settlments and remittance where further information is required before release of finds.

What would a 35% saving on your current payout costs and effort mean for your business?

2. Franchisees/Franchisors

Paydock + Split Payments enables franchisors to reduce costs, increase the bottom line and build efficient payment channels within existing infrastructure (further reducing change management cost).

A simple use case follows.

  1. Receive payments through an ordering app (iOS/Android) connected to the Paydock SDK  (for example, credit card, direct debit, paypal)
  2. Receive payments into your master franchisor account
  3. Remit payment to franchisee’s current business banking account.

This payments flow can take place in as little as few minutes if desired with automated webhooks and API triggers.

3. Platforms, Resellers, Sophisticated e-Commerce

If you are a fundraising platform, reseller or sophisticated online commerce platform, you can now use Paydock to accomplish two critical business functions.

  1. Collect and remit monies in a genuine marketplace model.
  2. Connect directly to customer merchant facilities (removing a common objection of larger organisations).

Paydock will in this case improve the bottom line as well as open up larger more sophisticated opportunities.

You are able to streamline the transmission of funds as well as the collection, while keeping the customer at the center through the Paydock Vault and Customer object.

Why Paydock + Split Payments

Paydock enables merchants to have a single interface to securely onboard customers and work with payment service providers. Merchants are able to manage their customers, store payment types and sources, store payment destinations, see transaction history, and consume services as required to grow the business.

Costs are further reduced (beyond those identified in this feature release) through development cost reduction, compliance cost reduction as well as a risk decrease in the event of downtime exposure when/if a payment processing provider has an outage.

Conclusion

Our mission is to help your business grow, and to connect you to service providers that best assist you doing that.

We are proud to be a PCI-DSS compliant payment service provider and to enable you to grow your customer base, reduce costs, and overcome payments challenges without endless distraction from your core business.

Please contact us if you have any specific questions on how Paydock Transfers can help you with the exciting Paydock + Split Payments launch.

Next Steps


Contact us today to find out how your organisation can benefit


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Interview with Andrew and Rob about payments, Fintechs in Australia and what disruption really is.

 

The interview was held in the Paydock Sydney offices on 26th September 2018 with Andrew Stein, Founder and CEO of Payreq, and Rob Lincolne, Founder and CEO of Paydock.

Those two experts went very deep into various topics around payments, tech and business.

  • What fascinates you about payments?
  • Can and should payments be easy?
  • What is Payreq?
  • Why does Payreq use Paydock?
  • Discussion about consent and identity in payments.
  • What’s your advice to Australian Fintech founders?
  • What payments editorials do you read?

Carmen: Rob and Andrew, you are both Australian based Fintech founders in payments and before we get into the depth of it, what is it that fascinates you about payments?

Andrew: As someone who runs businesses, getting paid is the critical part of any business. You do all the stuff and in the end, you need to be paid. I have encountered issues where people do not pay you. And not because they don’t want to pay you, but they just forget to pay you, or can’t remember to pay you.

You do all the stuff and in the end, you need to be paid.

After several years of evolution in financial services we still cannot seem to get an invoice to the right person and getting it paid on time. But whenever there’s gap between the request for payment and the actual due date it creates a big impact on cash flow. You start chasing and stressing. And the smaller your company is, the more important the cashflow. After all this development of technology and all the amazing things we’re doing in technology, we’re still sending out a piece of paper or an e-mail with an invoice and you wonder, “can’t we do better than that?”. I have personally been very, very interested in and aware of this problem.

Rob: I spent a lot of my career consulting for digital merchants, particularly those, who were seeking to take payments. We saw them drowning in costs and losing control of their customers while they tried to work with the different payment services that are available in the market. Then we saw an increase in the number of payment services that are available right through to WeChat, Alipay, PayPal, and of course Visa and Mastercard. What a lot of the merchants that we were consulting for at the time discovered, was that what was on the box was not the same as what was inside the box. There were hidden fees and different ways things were structured in any time merchants tried to move to a different provider. They would constantly encounter a new set of problems, they would lose customer data, they would have compliance overheads or exposure, they would have to rebuild recurring payment programs and all of that is very hard and very costly to manager.

They simply had no agility.

We saw the opportunity in providing a thin service that took all that pain away and enabling merchants to build recurring or one-off payments against any gateway of their choice, store and manage their customers credit cards in an independent vault, managed their PCI compliance without enormous cost, and be able to scale out without fearing a lock in around cost from different gateways. So from our point of view I think, re-empowering the merchant to better work with and manage their payment services without being trapped, was a big opportunity in the market. I think particularly as we look at where the market’s going. You know we have these things like mobile point of sale and secure PIN on glass and we’re going to see iPhone’s become acceptance devices and so on. Paydock is in a unique position to be able to introduce technology providers, who provide specific niche payments technology to merchants without forcing each one of those technologies to become a gateway in their own right. Or to have to go through lengthy integration processes with payment gateways and banks who have other prioritie.

Carmen: It’s great to hear about both your niche focus in the large world of payments. Do you think payments should and can be easy? 

Andrew: Everything can and should be easy, everything. Let me go back a little: There’s actually four transactions that occur of which “payment” is merely one of them. These four transactions are:

1. The intent to buy. That is the purchase order in a business sense or the verbal “Yes, I’d like to buy your goat”.
2. Then there’s the invoice: “Ok, here is my request for the payment.”
3. Then there is the actual payment.
4. And then there is the receipt. “Great, you have given me the money and here’s your receipt.”

And in there, there’s nuances of all that: There is partial payments, overpayments, disputed payments, all kinds of things, but it’s all around those four transactions – “payment” merely being one of those. When we talk about the ease of payments, it has to be in the context of all four, because payments in isolation can be easy. I mean let’s face it, from day one, handing over cash to someone was really, really easy. Pretty simple, so why has it gotten more complex? Firstly, often we are not face to face. Secondly, we don’t have cash, we have something else. I write a cheque or I pay by credit card. It used to easy, actually it was always very easy. I mean, bartering system: Hand over three chickens, done. Now I hand over cash. Now I hand over a cheque. Now I hand over credit card. And now it is getting more difficult because of the complexities of the technology and because we are not face to face anymore.

Everything can and should be easy, everything.

And I think some of it becomes easier if you look at the four transactions, which is something Payreq is looking at, which is the second one, “the invoicing part”. The payment now becomes a lot easier because you have an invoice and you can tie the two together nicely.

Rob: Great structure Andrew. Carmen, to your question if payments should and can be easy: Yes, it should be and no, it isn’t. If we look at Paydock based on Andrew’s structure, we are very much focused on the third transaction, where we saw a huge degree of complexity and that’s what really interests me about payments too. It is now very complex and my challenge is, how do we simplify it for the merchant?

Andrew, would you put reconciliation under the fourth step in your structure?

Andrew: Yes, each of those transactions have a link and therefore “invoice to payment” is a link. And the tighter you make that link, the more reconciliation comes out. And link between “payment to receipt” means “the receipt is because of the payment”. The payment is linked to the invoice. But then in the payment you both have a payer and a payee, so there’s reconciliation on both sides. You look at that pattern, there is senders and receivers and each of those have a different set of complexities and problems they are trying to resolve. But in the end you always try to tie it to one of those four transactions. So, the receipt is tied to a payment which is a reconciliation.

Carmen:  Andrew you shared a little bit already what Payreq does. For those who don’t know your business, can you give us your elevator pitch? 

Andrew:  Payreq is a company that brings products to market that help billers to get paid on time. And I guess conversely if that’s the word, helps payers pay on time. The first product we brought to market was a biller app, which helps billers send out digital invoices to their customer’s systems that the customers want to receive on. We call those systems “payer apps” which is something a customer receives a digital invoice on, they can receive it, they can view it and it helps them to pay it. And the biller app connects to those initially third party systems. For example BPAY View is a biller app embedded in your online bank. PayPal is a third party system that you can send or receive a request for payment on. If you’re a Chinese citizen you might use WeChat or Alipay and so you can receive a request for payment of an invoice on those two platforms. So those are third party payer apps. Our first product , the biller app, allows billers to send digital invoices to the customer’s preferred payer app.

Carmen: Which countries do you currently operate in Andrew?

Andrew: One is obviously Australia, you know building in your backyard, trying it out. Australia has a number of reasons why it is a really good place to do stuff. And we’re also in Canada, which we chose because we found some similar payer patterns there. They have something called epost in Canada and our first payer app we connected to was BPAY view here in Australia.

epost, run by Canada Post, had a similar pattern and similar set of problems as BPAY View had here, which effectively is a great payer app, but not many billers to connect to it.

By putting our biller app into Canada we opened up epost and made it much easier for the biller to offer epost as a delivery channel for invoices.

Carmen: Thanks Andrew. You are an existing Paydock customer. How do you use Paydock and why?

Andrew: Rob already touched on a few things that attracted us to Paydock in the first place. We have global aspirations for Payreq. It’s a global platform. Billers send invoices to the world and customers everywhere. The challenge we had, is each country has specialized payment gateways and services. Because of the single platform model we run, we didn’t want to have bespoke connections in Canada to Moneris for example and another one in the U.S.,  another one in Australia, another one in Sweden and so on. We don’t want to build all of these bespoke things and for us one of the features of Paydock is that we can connect to Paydock once and having configuration rules put in place. For example: “A customer has signed into the Canadian Payreq account, now we use the Canadian gateway of choice.” We can keep it in the country, keeping the foreign fees down for the poor payer, who may not know their pumping fees to a foreign gateway and all these sort of things.

It essentially allows us to have full flexibility with multiple gateways around the world. But we only had to integrate once. That was really what why we decide to integrate into Paydock versus into the default gateway.

And the second thing why we use Paydock is that when you have lower volumes some gateways are more efficient to use than other ones. So, if you go with a gateway that doesn’t have a monthly charge but only charges for transactions, then that’s more efficient at the beginning. However, you might want to switch to a gateway that offers a monthly charge and a much lower transaction fee once you feed through lots of transactions. So how do you do that? It’s very expensive and time consuming to do the work in-house, but with Paydock we can just switch it one day.

Paydock essentially allows us to have full flexibility with multiple gateways around the world. But we only had to integrate once.

The third reason is that the only way you can switch gateways like that very flippantly and without impacting the customer, is if the credit card is stored within some neutral third party like PayDock versus a gateway. Because one of the things a lot of people don’t realise is, when you go to a gateway and you save credit card details in the gateway, the gateways are the ones who are storing your credit card details. To then switch gateways, you potentially have a data hostage situation where the gateway says “Well you know, we have all your credit cards for your customers. Are you sure you want to switch?” And it may turn out very costly or really hard to move the customer’s credit card file to the new gateway. So worst case when switching gateways, is you make your customer re-enter all their credit card details, which is just a bad experience. A number of those features Rob touched on are attractive to us for different reasons.

Carmen: Thanks Andrew. Rob, I know that Andrew is a very generous customer when it comes to giving honest feedback. As founder and CEO of Paydock, how do you embrace that?

Rob: I want it. Actually, it’s one of my favourite things about Andrew (laughs). I hope that Andrew never stops picking up the phone to tell me, that this and that needs to change. a

Carmen: I know that there’s a topic you both like exploring in your own time but also together, which is “consent and identity in payments”. Could you tell me a little bit more about that? 

Andrew: Well, let’s look at a pay request: Obviously as a payer I consent to pay you, the payee, money. So there’s a consent there, that’s obvious. But then, when we look at direct debit, the payer gives the payee the consent to pull money from the payer. Now let’s say the payer wants to stop their gym membership. How do I stop that all of a sudden, how do I un-consent? It’s difficult. And then the identity-side is interesting. If I go back to sending a payment to someone, how do I know whom I’m really paying? In the worst case, the person on the street wearing a koala outfit says “Hi, I’m from World Wildlife Fund. Give me a hundred dollars in my bucket.” and I say “Sure, but who am I really paying?” I consent to give but who am I really paying? Identity of the payee is really tricky and there is all kinds of fraud out there. We read in the papers of people paying someone who they think they’re paying cash to. But in fact, they’re paying a fraudulent party. Identity is really important in payments.

We read in the papers of people paying someone who they think they’re paying cash to. But in fact, they’re paying a fraudulent party. Identity is really important in payments.

And part of the solution, if you look just at the payment, is kind of hard. But if you tie it to the four transactions then, when you receive an invoice from someone you merely say “Oh, I haven’t paid anything yet, but I can see who I received it from or if it is someone pretending to send me an invoice.” And this is where you start getting into these solutions, the complexity of technology. How do I know when someone sends me an invoice that it really is from Telstra? I received an email from Telstra, but I don’t know, it could be fraudulent or it could be real. They’re all over the place, these scams. They’re everywhere. We conclude e-mails are a really bad way to prove the identity of the sender. But in the digital world, where Payreq lives, it is the digital systems that are sending invoices instead of e-mails and there’s a much higher level of identity baked into these digital systems. So if you register with Telstra in BPAY View, there is actually a consent saying to Telstra “Please send me my future bills to this payer app called BPAY View where I live at Westpac.” Telstra sends me the bill and based on my consent I know that it is truly from Telstra. The BPAY View payer app world is run by the banks, so it has KYC AML all baked into it and that way I have consent and identity on both sides. Telstra knows it’s me, their customer who has consented, because of the nature I’m doing it through my bank. The identity consensus is really important for senders and receivers and all transactions, but certainly around payments and part of the solution is around the requests for payment.

Rob: Consent and identity? We have a saying at Paydock “We are agnostic as what constitutes in exchange for value”. So as long as the two parties agree on what is being exchanged and what the value is, it doesn’t matter if it is Dollars, Qantas points or some Bitcoin. So at this point where the two parties come to an agreement, then consent becomes very important about what is it you are agreeing to. And then verifying that these two parties are who they claim to be is also very important. Let’s look at it from a payments point, based on point three of Andrew’s transaction structure in the form of payments acceptance:

We have 3D Secure, we have got pin codes, we have face ID, there is just so many different mechanisms out there to try and establish identity. And the complexity comes with digital payments and the ability for fraud to creep in.

Because you can’t actually look the person in the face means that finding ways to verify identity is very important.

And to your point Andrew, where I trust the bank, then that’s my source of trust. The question is, where do I have my trust anchor. And are banks going to continue to be those trust anchors?

Andrew: Well, that was only one example of how it works in the BPAY view payer app. If you’re on WeChat or Alipay, then there’s a different trust anchor. In this case your social media is your footprint that proves who you are. So, it is just an example how one payer app solves it – and in this case you need to trust your bank which is higher than an email you receive. It’s just that every payer on a payer app or a billing app, has to identify. I guess our question around those apps is, what is their strength of identity, what’s the strength of consent?

Rob: You said something a while ago, about “de-identifying” yourself, what was that about Andrew?

Andrew: Oh yeah, it’s not about knowing who you are, but it is actually the opposite, where I don’t want to expose who I am.

Rob: What role does that have in payments? Do you have to know who somebody is?

Andrew:  In the world of Bitcoin for example, there is no identity. In the end this is a strength and why people are attracted to it, because there’s no identity. It’s just I received it anonymously. It’s interesting because on the one hand you go “Oh that’s really cool.” And let’s be honest, cash was the original “You have no identity.”- cash was the value transfer. I could leave an envelope with cash for you and you have no idea who I am.

Rob: It’s okay if you want to do that too by the way. (laughter)

Andrew: The interesting thing is, if there is no identity in payers and payees, on the one hand we think that would be cool, but on the other hand it would just lead to so much bad stuff. If you imagine every rule we have whether it’s AML, or you cannot donate x amounts of dollar to a political party and all this. If there was no identity, you couldn’t have any restrictions and people would just be sloshing stuff around and no one would know anything.

It would actually be financial anarchy if there was no identity everywhere.

Rob: But what if that identity was de-personalised and had the correct trust anchors, would that be sufficient? So, you would say “This party has the so-and-so verified tick, I know they’re safe, I don’t know who they are but I know their silhouette and it’s safe to pay.”

Andrew: But you’re really putting your trust in a third party here. So, the third parties know who the payee is. What I mean when I say “de-identify” is that I would as an individual, “de-identifying” all transactions but payments. For example, if I go and get a quote for a credit card or for a home loan, they don’t need to know anything about me, just some parameters, maybe my income. But they do not need to know who I am. But as soon as I do the payment or they lend me the money, you have to have identity. I’d say “de-identify” outside anything but payments.

Rob: I agree with you. And I’ve been turning this over in my brain: How is identity manifested? And where is the trust and what do I actually need to know to establish that trust and who from? But the other side of that is consent. For example, if you want to make a recurring payment on WeChat, you don’t have a system there, that automatically takes money month on month from you on a subscription, but you actually have to consent to that payment month on month. So, you’ll get a push notification that says “So and so requested a payment, are you still cool with that?” I see a lot of the industry going that way.

Andrew: That’s exactly what Payreq is about, you approve the request. So, if someone said they would like some money from you and you reply “yes” to this request. Now, you can make your life easier and set up an auto approval. But you, the payer sets that up. And you could cancel it any time. That’s your choice. The person on the other end doesn’t have to know whether you as a human being actually said “Yes, approve”, they just know you approved whether you set up an order rule to approve it or not. It’s your business. My flippant headline answer is, that we will stop paying each other, but that we will be replying to a repayment request. There’s no more payments on its own. You want to be paid? Send me a request and I’ll decide. And that gives me context, that gives me who the identity of the payee and I can consent. So even the guy in the Koala costume that comes up to you asking if you can donate $10 to WWF, I ask him to send me a request. This transaction now includes the consent to pay and the payer’s and the payee’s identity.

Rob: Do you think that still works when we have like 30 different request per month? I am thinking of all the platforms, like Netflix and Spotify, I am signed up to.

Andrew: One thing you need to separate, is the legal contract and the payment. Foxtel might want to lock me in for 12 months, which I legally agree to. But what they try to do is link it to the direct debit. Now, what I’m saying is that they are two different things. Legally, sure, I’ll take it up for 12 months but if I decide to stop paying them, well that’s a different thing. That’s a legal problem for Foxtel, not a payments problem. In the world of Foxtel the idea is that I legally agree to a 12 months subscription or as the world is moving to a “pay as you go model”.  Anyways, the idea is that Foxtel sends me a request every month and I’ll pay it. And to make my life easy I set up an auto pay rule – or maybe I won’t. But the thing that I can do, is that I can decide this month to pay off my credit card and next month pay off a different credit card. And then next month pay off whatever. So, it’s kind of separating the legal contract to take the service versus the payment per month versus the source of funds. It’s deconstructing those things as those have always been linked together.

What I mean when I say “de-identify” is that I would as an individual, “de-identifying” all transactions but payments.

Carmen: That was great guys, thank you. Let’s move on to my next question: What is your advice to other Fintech founders and leaders in Australia? 

Andrew: There’s two types of Fintechs out there: There is those that go into a space where they see money to be made, and certainly often around payments. And the second one is a Fintech, that goes into a space because it’s truly innovative. Let me give you examples: There are Fintech companies all over that will lend you money, for literally anything: Education, home loans, small invoices, you name it. All of these lending companies are after the interest in the transaction. And I’d say, they probably all be Billionaires in a few years time, but is that innovation? This is where I’m a bit snobbish because in my opinion that’s not innovation, that’s just doing the same thing we’ve always done, just adding that “tech veneer” over it. However, my tip to any Fintech founder: I think Australia’s a great place to try things because it’s a hard environment. I have been told numerous times that if you can succeed in Australia you can succeed in the world. It’s a hard place to grow up. At the same times it’s a small country, so you can get out there and meet people inside a bank easily. It’s not like in the US, trying to meet the CEO of the Bank of America, which is impossible. So there’s pros and cons to starting a Fintech in Australia, but if you can succeed here, I think can succeed anywhere with great.

Rob: I think there are Fintech founders, that see an existing model and try to iron out kinks and optimize and somebody else’s margin is their opportunity for businesses. But I don’t think that’s innovation. I think innovation in Australia, is a really tough gig. Because we are a country that loves the status quo and if you want to change the status quo or change the narrative, you either need to be very tenacious or very rich. Maybe both. So, my advice to those founders who want to try something new is manage your risk, be tenacious, don’t expect too much love from the market and stick to your customers. Understand the problem you’re seeking to solve for them. Make that as valuable as possible, so you’re delivering happy customer, you’re delivering value. And I think in order to nudge the status quo, take a lead from “Crossing the Chasm” (Book by Geoffrey Moore): If you are in the B2B world like Paydock, you need to deliver significant value to stay in the game. Otherwise the status quo will just carry on. But fortunately, because payments is such a complex world, there is value to be created because it’s highly complex and it’s hard for people to understand. And if you can turn something complex into something simple, understandable and approachable you’ll always find an audience.

I think innovation in Australia, is a really tough gig. Because we’re a country that loves the status quo.

Andrew: I agree Rob. Being a disrupter in Australia is really, really, really difficult because of the status quo and the culture here. Being an enabler is a much more interesting space, and I you can still enable and bring innovation.

Rob: I don’t even know if you can be a disrupter in Australia unless you have the network. And you can’t have a network unless you are enabling one way or another. If you come in and “disrupt everybody” then that’s probably the final nail in your coffin in the market  #laughter

Andrew: Yes, I don’t even know if you can create new stuff in payments, because we’ve been exchanging value for goods forever. You can certainly carve out big niches, but can you be truly disruptive? I mean, you look at Twitter and Facebook. They were not disrupting anything, they created a whole new category. We often talk about future jobs and things, and there will be jobs out there that we haven’t even thought about. They won’t be disrupting or taking anything, but they will be completely new, solving new problems that we never ever had before. So, I think disruptor implies that you have an existing place that you’re disrupting but outside of Fintech for so many places, there is whole new products and worlds being created.

Rob: Do you think though, now that they – Twitter and Facebook – have the network, they could actually disrupt? They could introduce the “Facebook Bank” and that would disrupt something. But at the beginning, when you create something new, you don’t really disrupt anything, right?

Andrew: Yes, that’s right. I could keep exploring this forever, but let’s move on.

Carmen: My last question for you guys: What is your go to source of truth when it comes to the latest and greatest payments news?

Andrew: There is a bunch of news feeds and things that I sample, but to be honest, there is just a lot out there and it is just a lot of noise. Things that are trumpeted as news, is actually just an iteration of something else. In the end you actually need to get on with what you do. I think with emerging technology companies, you have to be aware of what’s happening in the world, but you can’t stop it. And all you can do is, innovate, focus on your day to day stuff and what your key spaces are and keep getting feedback from your customers. I actually think that for a Fintech founder, payments news, may just be a distraction.

Rob: I think I agree with you. It is a distraction on one hand. On the other hand I do get some of my creative inspiration from seeing the way other people are trying to solve common problems. And the way people deal with identity and consent and recurring payments and payment times and customer experience and all that is very interesting to me. But of course, if I spend too long looking at it, it becomes a massive distraction. One thing that I’m looking out for, is seeing how other people try to solve the problem that Paydock is trying to solve. Having external points of reference to demonstrate that Paydock has competitors says this is a real issue and is an important part of a narrative.

“Never compare somebody else’s outside to your inside.”

I like www.pymnts.com and glance over that email in my Inbox each day. But back to Andrew’s point, we have customers to support and listen to. And you know I could spend all day just looking at what other people are doing and not actually building our own business. I remember this saying: “Never compare somebody else’s outside to your inside.” And as business owners it’s easy to look at all these shiny headlines of other Fintech’s and there’s all these things you want to do, but truth is stranger than a fiction for those who keep their heads down and just persevere.

Carmen: Thanks guys. Any last words of wisdom before we end here? 

Andrew: In the Jane Fonda movie “Logan’s run” everything just worked. There is this complex machinery, but it somehow just maintained itself and worked. And that’s where we’re moving to: You turn the light switch on and light comes on, you turn the tap on and you get fresh water. And in the world of Fintech and payments, there is so much complexity, but the idea is that we just make it work. So that people in the future don’t have to think about the process but it just works.

Carmen: What a great way to end. Thank you, Andrew and Rob for sharing your insights and experience. Good luck making this world of complexity easy and simple.

–> Want to know more about Payreq? Check them out here.
–> Want to know more about Paydock? Contact us here.

Assign single charges to subscriptions

A rarely talked about but important feature of subscriptions is the ability to take a one-off charge and have it applied to a subscription.

The good news is we’ve now released this for all customers in the Paydock API (see docs).

This feature is designed to combine with Paydock’s ability to pause subscriptions and create intelligent payment plans. This is a powerful feature that gives more options to merchants and charities to improve both their bottom line and customer experience while reducing payments effort.

Here’s two use-cases we thought of where you might consider this feature:

  • Paying off a good or service over a period of time. If you have a customer (or even a student) paying off a loan or a service you are now able to offer them the ability to ‘accelerate’ repayments with a one-off fee – and have it cleanly assigned to their recurring payment profile.
  • A donor needs to ‘pause’ their gift.  We know that it’s not always possible for everyone to fulfill their monthly commitments when giving to a charity. Rather than disconnecting completely, this feature combined with the capability of ‘pausing’ a subscription provides a clean way to maintain the relationship and at the same time allocate a ‘catch-up’ payment to ensure every opportunity is presented to the donor to continue and deepen their commitment once they are able to resume their giving.

While we’re sure you will be able to identify more use-cases (we’re always impressed by how our community utilises the service) we hope these two give you some inspiration around this new feature.

Ezidebit and Paydock Partnership

We are excited to announce our official partnership with Ezidebit. We believe that together we can improve merchant and consumer payment experiences to deliver more value and better experiences to the Australian payments market.

Connecting Ezidebit via the Paydock API has never been easier: Simply set up a merchant agreement with your Ezidebit account manager, collect your API keys, jump into your Paydock account and under “Services” connect your Ezidebit account in a few easy steps.

Some of the benefits include instant credit card payments as well as recurring direct debit payments through the Paydock dashboard. Combined with other important payment services and Paydock’s built-in sophisticated payment features, Paydock & EziDebit provide Australian merchants the ability to rapidly increase profit in their payments systems without undergoing extensive and time-consuming overhauls.

If you’re an existing Ezidebit or Paydock customer and want to know more about the possibilities that are available for your business, please contact us directly at [email protected] or submit an enquiry form.

Paydock UI updates introduced to you in this video

The latest UI updates in your PayDock account include:

  • Ability to delete your customer’s payment sources
  • Easier editing of your customer’s details
  • Better overview of your customer’s payment sources
  • Expiry date and CCV editing
  • Better overview of available payment gateways and services
  • Changed the word “gateways” to “services”
  • Available overview of your resources on your dashboard

 

Industrie&Co and Paydock partner to accelerate payments innovation in Australia.

 

Since 2007, Industrie&Co has helped clients build software-powered products, platforms, and deliver  enterprise grade solutions at startup speed. Founded by Con Zeritis, the organisation’s vision is to harness the power of technology to improve our lives at work and beyond.

Within offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore, the diverse and growing team of thinkers, builders and innovators work with established organisations and high-growth startups across APAC to help build the most innovative products and platforms that are shaping our future.

Following recognition as a Level 1 PCI-DSS Service Provider, Paydock launched in early 2017 with a goal to re-empower merchants in the chaotic and confusing world of payments. With the rapid growth in realtime, cashless and online transactions, businesses now must rely on multiple services to succeed (i.e. Afterpay, PayPal, Credit Card) or risk losing revenue. Paydock’s unique compliant technology allows merchants to rapidly connect to services (online, in-app, offline, marketplace) via one platform while introducing invaluable features such as recurring payment, real-time notifications and payment source storage – all this, while ensuring merchants do not lose control of their customers or data. Today Paydock supports over 24 payment services and works with global services for payments innovation entering the market in 2018.

Industrie&Co and Paydock have forged a key partnership that aims to tackle the complex challenges of creating a new kind of payment infrastructure. Industrie&Co’s experience helping solve some of Australia’s most complex technology problems and specifically helping build part of Australia’s New Payments Platform, coupled with Paydock’s expert knowledge in online payments and innovative platform and ecosystem makes for a powerful duo.

The proven history and success in innovation and leadership represented by Industrie&Co and Paydock will provide benefit to Australian merchants, consumers and service providers in the payments sector.

We look forward to accelerating payments innovation in Australia together.

To get more information or set up a meeting, please email [email protected].

Following on from our .Net & Java SDKs, we’ve now released our php SDK. This provides a friendly way to access Paydock, making it even easier to use Paydock.

 

You can pull this down through composer on Packagist

The code is open source on github.

Providing the right interface

One of the questions when putting together a new SDK is how to support this in a way that is as language friendly as possible. What we’ve put together for a strongly typed language like .Net, just doesn’t make as much sense for a dynamically typed language like php.

The simplest approach to this would be to simply map through the request, serialised as json, eg something like this:

1 $request = [“amount” => 100, “currency” => “AUD”, “token” => “token_id”]
2 $response = Charges::Create($request);

This works fine with simpler requests, but it tends to make it hard with larger, more complex request. In those cases, it’s easy to create a situation where you send through either too many parameters or too few. Also, when you can send through nested sets of parameters, it’s easy to send through parameters encoded at the wrong depth, e.g.:

1 // missing items object
2 $request = [“amount” => 100, “currency” => “AUD”, “token” => “token_id”, “transfer” => [“amount” => 25, “destination” => “account_id”]]
3 // correct structure
4 $request = [“amount” => 100, “currency” => “AUD”, “token” => “token_id”, “transfer” => [ “items” => [“amount” => 25, “destination” => “account_id”]]]

For this reason we settled on a fluent style interface.

Fluent interface

Using a fluent interface, you build up a request through a number of calls. Some good examples of fluent interfaces are things like LINQ in .Net:

1 var topOrders = orders.Where(o => o.Currency = “AUD”)
2 .OrderBy(o => o.Amount)
3 .Take(100)
4 .Select(o => o.Email);

These are often a very natural way of searching for data, but also work well to build up complex requests.

In order to make this as clear as possible, we’ve followed certain conventions. An example of this in the SDK is creating a charge with bank account details:

1 $response = $svc->create("John","Smith","[email protected]","+61414111111")
2 ->withBankAccount(self::bsbGateway, "test", "012003", "456456")
3 ->includeAddress("1 something st", "", "NSW", "Australia", "Sydney"2000")
4 ->call();

The first call is part of the call specifies the action (create). If this needs additional data, this is send through as with<Something>. Optional data is added through include<something>. And finally call() makes the actual call.

This made the API more complex to build, but provided a better experience of using the API.

As always, we’re open to improving this, so please raise any issues or concerns on on github and we’ll jump on it!

PayDock has now released Java SDK, which can be downloaded from JCentre. There are different dependency snippets to be inserted in your code based on your selected build settings (we support Gradle, Maven or Ivy).

The library is opened sourced and can be found here. Specific tests for you to reference in your program are here.

Planning

Writing the Java SDK was interesting and our approach changed over time. There were a few considerations

  1. Which HTTP library to use: I settled on HttpsURLConnection instead of Apache’s client. I found an example which worked early on so I didn’t change it.
  2. Which JSON library to use to map the data models: I settled on the GSON library from Google as it also handled the date format.
  3. How to deal with ever increasing API functionality while keeping the the code base similar: You will find I extend a few base classes to try maintain the peace.

IDE

I used Android Studio to write the PayDock Java SDK. As I was also planning to write an Android SDK, it only felt natural that I use this IDE to create the library. Creating Java libraries in this IDE are quite simple and it allowed me to use the same repository and build scripts that I would for the Android SDK. Having written a few projects in Android Studio in the past made me feel comfortable using it. From the one IDE, I had the ability to write the Java library, include the functionality tests, link into GitHub for source control and then upload the library to JCentre for distribution. In the project file, I had a simple app which referenced the remote Java library on JCentre. This allowed me to verify that the library worked as expected when downloaded from the repository.

Structure of the SDK

The SDK is split into three sections:

  • Models – contained the structure of the data to be sent and received.
  • Services – contained the methods exposed in the SDK, such as add charges.
  • Tools – contained helpful methods that the services used, such as the HTTP connection class and the query string to url class.

Using this format made it easy to add new endpoints and features as they were added to the API.

Publishing

I used some libraries which easily allowed me to upload the SDK to Jcentre via Bintray. Once some of the artifacts were set, all I had to do was change the library version every time I wanted to upload the library. After the initial set up it now only takes a few seconds to upload a new version of the library to JCentre.

You can use the following steps to upload the library to Bintray, assuming you have already set up an account with them:

  1. In local.properties of your project file set your bintray credentials
    bintray.apikey=<your api key here>
    bintray.user=<your user name>
  2. Add the correct scripts and the library artifacts in your build.gradle
    My build.gradle can be found here
  3. Run the following commands in the terminal
    ./gradlew build
    ./gradlew install
    ./gradlew bintrayUpload

Use the SDK

I put a link to the SDK earlier in the piece so you can download the SDK and I look forward to any reviews and comments. Happy coding!

We’re excited to announce we’ve released our .Net core SDK for Paydock. This is SDK makes is easier to use Paydock from any of the .Net based languages and deals with a lot of the plumbing necessary to make the HTTP calls.

You can pull this down through nuget (.Net 4.0.Net Core) and the code is open source on github.

Supporting .Net Core

We released our .Net 4.0 SDK earlier this year. We targeted .Net 4.0 as this was the most immediate need and most of our customers were running on .Net 4.0-4.5. However, we knew we’d also want to provide good support for .Net core.

When we built the .Net 4.0 SDK it was based around supporting the maximum number of developers, which limited our options. With the .Net core SDK we had more freedom to use more modern libraries and tools. The question for us was to find the best way to support both.

Option 1 – Complete re-write

We could release a completely new SDK, re-written from scratch. This would mean that we could choose the best tools, unencumbered by any limitations of .Net 4.0 era. However it would mean no re-use and any changes to the SDK would immediately have to be applied to both core and 4.0 SDKs.

Option 2 – Single codebase

We could completely re-use the codebase. This is a little problematic as some of the features used by the 4.0 SDK were not available in Core. We could handle this with pre-processor directives, however that can become difficult quickly. It also meant we could not support features asyc/await.

Option 3 – Partial Sharing

We could share some parts of the SDK between Core and 4.0. Essentially the .Net 4.0 SDK is: a HTTP wrapper, Models for request/response, helper classes and service classes that glue it together. Some of these can be completely shared (e.g. models), however others (e.g. HTTP wrapper) are more complex.

In the end, we decided to select this option.

Tech Details

Given that we’re sharing part of the code, it made sense to keep this in the same repo.

However, for ease of building the code, we split this into two separate solutions. For the .Net core app, we shared the code files as links, which meant we could add the Core SDK without significant restructuring to the existing codebase.

Functionally the two SDKs looks very similar (just add await), but under the sheets there are quite a few differences, including a heavier use of generics in the .Net core SDK.

We welcome feedback and we’d love to hear about how we can do this better in the future, feel free to raise an issue on github.

We are excited to announce our partnership with eWAY as one of our supported payment methods. We are delighted to enable all of our clients access to eWAY’s payments services to create more value for your customers.

What is eWAY?
Trusted by more than 26,000 Australian merchants, eWAY is one of Australia’s leading payments providers. The eWAY platform is jam-packed with features including fraud protection and more, and offers the peace of mind that only tier 1 security, fast settlement and free live support can bring.

What does this mean for the merchant?
You can connect eWAY now or anytime in the future as long as you have PayDock integrated into your payments portal. Paydock merchants also have the option to offer any payment type that customers want by using any of the payment service providers that we integrate with.

Looking to connect eWAY into your payments portal?
See a full guide on how to integrate eWAY here.

What is Paydock?
Paydock is a universal payments adapter giving merchants complete control over their customer’s payments experience. We enable our merchants to offer their customers more payment methods and drastically reduce the cost of payment gateway integration. Please see here for more information on Paydock’s features.

 

It’s now even easier for developers working with .Net to drop Paydock into your payments ecosystem. Paydock has just released its .Net Software Development Kit providing a low friction development experience on .Net.

 

Find our SDK on Nuget – https://www.nuget.org/packages/PaydockSdk

 

At Paydock, we want to be an active part of the developer community. So we’ve open-sourced the code for the SDK on GitHub (Paydock), we’re keen to receive feedback on how we can improve this. We’ll be releasing SDKs in other languages in the coming months to make sure all our new customers receive the best development experience possible.

 

Don’t have developers to get Paydock running for you? Not an issue, we partner with a top tier development agency Houston Apps who can work with you to get this done.

 

Contact us to see how we can get this working for you.

We’ve made eliminating payments pain even easier for ecommerce retailers and online transactors with our better looking and more user friendly developer documentation.

Jump over to https://docs.paydock.com/ to experience a refreshed user interface, comprehensive code snippets and intuitive user experience on top of the same easy-to-digest information on navigating the Paydock API, Paydock.js and iFrame experience.

We want to make the developer experience using Paydock as painless as possible.

Also, integrated into our entire domain is also our new chat tool for both technical and non-technical support. The entire Paydock team is only a message away so don’t be afraid to pop up!API Documentation

 

With love,

The Paydock Team

Clean Is In

– and that’s why we’ve given our platform a facelift with a new interface. We’re pleased to announce that everything our customers know and love is now sleeker, more professional and easier to use. And don’t worry, we’ve only optimised the user experience – all our functionality still remains (What do we do?). Take a sneak peak below.

Inline with our mission to make managing payments easier, simpler and faster, we’ve also integrated a few little time-savers you’ll love. Some of these include:

  • Ability to rapidly query a Customer, Subscription or Payment by clicking on the row
  • Helpful ‘Actions’ items throughout to provide additional drill-down information and capability
  • Far more intuitive Notification service including a new Notification Event (see below)

Before

v3_ux_old

After

v3_ux_new

API Release

  • New Notification Event, “Subscription Finished”

Web Client Release

  • Rapidly query a Customer, Subscription or Payment by clicking on the row
  • Helpful ‘Actions’ items throughout to provide additional drill-down information and capability
  • Updated overall styling for your enjoyment

 

We love how involved our customers are, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you think at [email protected]

Also, don’t miss out on Twitter and Facebook.

Love,

All of us at Paydock

Gateway Tuning Configuration Capability

We love how involved our customers are in Paydock.

One of the most frequent requests we hear has been, “I’ve connected my gateways, but now I’d like to tune the behaviour of each of those gateway connections.”

This may be configurable field mapping or the ability to utilise certain, gateway-specific functions and features as you choose. This can depend on your specific plan, pricing or internal data needs.

Today, we’ve released the EziDebit config. This enables you to toggle between the “Real Time” processing engine (if you don’t know what that is you can read more here) or you can use Paydock to route to the standard processing endpoint (AddPayment or AddCardDebit).

We’ll be rolling out more specific ‘tuning’ capabilities for our other gateways over the coming weeks. To stay informed, follow us on twitter or send your email to [email protected]. We’ll keep you in the loop.

We’re here to make it easy for you to get the most from your gateways, however you prefer to work with them!

Love, all of us at Paydock

API Release (v1.2.19)

  • New Gateway Customisation Logic
    • EziDebit
      • Processing Mode Setting

Web Client Release (v1.2.3)

  • UI Updates: Dashboard updated with dotted line for current month
  • UI Bug Fixes: Pagination, Recent Transactions Page

Interface Screenshots

release_gateway_config

chart_update

Photo credit @flattop341 via Flickr

More than just your average recurring engine

While many services have the ‘recurring’ sticker, we strive to deliver the kind of recurring you can build your business on.

We’ve now extended our subscription engine to include some fancy (and handy) termination logic. This means you can, as of today, build products and services that create new opportunities for your brand and reduce cost and effort for your team.

For example, you can now for any frequency and interval build ‘payment plans’ (a.k.a. lay-by or lay-away) directly into the platform. You can also set recurring payments to persist for only a specific number of transactions or simply deploy a set of auto-expiry events (of course ‘never’ is still an option too).

Build subscriptions that meet your product needs and customer expectations without pain or cost.

Check the notes for the goodness, we’re pretty stoked.

Love, all of us at Paydock

API Release (v1.2.13)

  • New Subscription logic. Now terminate Subscriptions…
    • Never
    • At target date
    • After specified number of transactions
    • When target value is either reached, or first payment after exceeding
    • Prior to reaching a target value
    • Complete target value (remainder paid on last payment)
  • Ability to filter Subscriptions and Customers and by Gateway

Web Client Release (v1.1.19)

  • Ability to create and manage Subscription end-events
  • Fixed an issue where new users were not immediately redirected to dashboard
  • Small UI improvements

Interface Screenshots

subscription_termination2

Yes, the client always comes first

You guessed it. Client-side tokenisation and the release of paydock.js. Build secure client-side and javascript apps, reduce your PCI compliance scope and take advantage a lovely drop-in JS script.

Read our friendly docs for how to implement it.

Also delivered direct your door are a fresh batch of Web Client updates we hope you like. Each designed to help you manage Customer and payment settings even easier. See below for specifics.

Love, all of us at Paydock

API Release (v1.2.0)

  • paydock.js
  • client-side tokenisation
  • public key release

Web Client Release (v1.1.1)

  • Customer Reference field now available on the Add Payment page
  • Filtering improvements for list pages: Charges, Subscriptions, Customers
  • Add payment source(s) to your Customers directly through the interface
  • View and manage your Public API key on the My Account page

Interface Screenshots

API Keys

public_key

 

Customer Object Payment Source

payment_source

 

Global payment management across a distributed giving-base can be hard if you’re an international NFP.

Factor in local fundraising offices, currencies and admin you can be taking (and managing) money all the way from India to the UK and USA.

We know that using only a single ‘super’ provider rarely delivers the best value to your organisation. The friction  involved with re-routing your organisation to a single provider (who may not be best suited in all localities/currencies) can be high, and the direct and indirect costs involved with integrating multiple local services can itself increase expenses dramatically.

So, this leaves many not-for-profits in a challenging position. How do we manage global giving in a way that’s low-cost, easy and effective?

We know you would love to take recurring and one-off payments, in various currencies, with data and payment-event transparency, without disrupting existing banking and reconciliation processes or introducing prohibitive cost and pain. Read more

New week, new updates, new value.

We’ve got some tasty treats for you in the latest release – including Pre-Card-Expiry Notifications and support for NAB Transact.

This is great news if you’re an existing Transact customer or looking for the right gateway partner to grow with. Pending-expiry Notifications mean you can pre-emptively connect with your customers/donors and avoid lost income and reduce admin effort.

Payments power to the people. 

Love, all of us at Paydock

 

API Release (v1.1.9f)

  • New Notification type
    • -1 Month Pending Card Expiry
  • New Gateway
  • Updated to new version of PayWay REST API

Web Client Release (v1.0.5)

Updates:

  • Added Description and Reference fields to the Web Client (not just in API now)
  • Manage your new Pending-Expiry Notifications
  • Add and Manage NAB Transact Gateway

Read more

So yeah,

We’re pretty fixated on delivering a platform that builds ever more value into your payments experience.

‘Geneva’ is no exception, but we’ll let the release speak for itself – see below.

As always, we’re here for you,

The Paydock team

API Release (v1.1.9)

Web Client Release (v1.0.4)

Updates:

  • Quickly see what Gateway is currently in-use for any Subscription on the Subscriptions page
  • Easy sort-by headings to order Subscription information
  • Archive transactions
  • Delete customers
  • Create Refund Notifications

Read more

We’re very excited to announce some exciting new features on the Paydock API as well as overall improvements to the admin interface.

Summary: “More goodies we hope will make your life easier – and more exciting”. (well we try)

See the screenshot below then a little more detail of some of the new ‘under the hood’ power.

If there’s something you’d love to see added, please shoot us a line at [email protected].

We love building payment solutions to help your business.

Love,

All of us here at Paydock

API Release (v1.1.8)

  • Searchable parameters when requesting Charges through the API. You can add these as query parameters today. Simply add use like ‘/v1/charges?gateway=1234567890&from=ddmmyyyy’
    • “gateway” – include a specific Gateway ID when requesting the charges log to filter output by gateway
    • “from” – include charges from a specific date (ddmmyyyy)
    • “to” – include charges up to a specific date (ddmmyyyy)

Web Client Release (v1.0.3)

Updates:

  • Ability to manager your user avatar under My Account -> Personal/User Details
  • Ability to manage refund requests through interface
  • Ability to leverage new API capabilities through interface

Read more

Someone recently said to me, ‘I have a payment gateway already, why should I pay to use Paydock?’ Of course I immediately thought, ‘Well it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? I mean it’s Paydock it’s amazing.’

It’s not a big shock that he wasn’t 100% sold on it without being a part of it already. So here’s a brief overview of how I replied.

  1. Using Paydock significantly reduces development time & cost for your website or app. Integrate once – and we link to all the gateways. It can be very expensive when setting up software/websites.
  2. It reduces maintenance costs in the long term. We maintain the code so you don’t have to.
  3. You get features that your gateway doesn’t have, and you don’t have to pay to have them made just for your website.
  4. Move to a new gateway & payments move with you. Your history, data and account all stay where they are, you just switch.

It’s core to the reason we have worked on Paydock for the last two and a half years. I believe it will make things so much easier for web developers and app developers.

After 2.5years of development, and a lot of sweat, we have launched!

The team has worked so hard with a vision to make online payments easier to setup, manage, and maintain with less cost than traditional approaches.

Businesses and nonprofits are often limited in their ability to drive real-time engagement and manage their one-off and recurring donations. We want to make this a thing of the past.

We have made Paydock both easy to use and as powerful as possible.

  • Office staff processing donations will find the web interface uncomplicated, and enjoyable to use
  • Web developers will love the power, speed, and simplicity of our API.

At the moment we have connected major payment gateways PayWay, eWay, PayPal, Stripe, Pin Payments. Major international gateways Authorize.net and Braintree are in the development pipeline.

One of the biggest benefits of the platform is being able to do more with your current payment gateway just by plugging into Paydock.

We hope you come with us on this journey, and enjoy the benefits that come with using Paydock.

Signup now

It’s a great day! Paydock is now connected with Westpac’s PayWay payment processor. PayWay is already one of Australia’s most popular payment gateways and is now even more powerful with the technology of Paydock.

Along with Payway’s stability and security Paydock brings the power of:

  • Webhooks & notifications
  • Integration with other SASS products
  • Error handling

Connect today and enjoy these benefits and more. Take a look at our gateway market to see how else an Paydock connection can charge up your payments.

We’re excited to announce that Paydock is now connected with Ezidebit, the direct debit experts. Ezidebit is a great way to take direct debit payments, and powers payments for over 16,000 businesses.

Now along with Ezidebit’s direct debit powers, PayDock adds the ability to:

  • Easily integrate with other SASS products
  • Accept multiple currencies
  • Use webhooks and notifications

Connect today and enjoy these benefits and more. Take a look at our gateway market to see what else an Paydock connection can charge up your payments.