Tag Archive for: payments orchestration

The Benefits of Orchestration For Banks and Financial Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

Win New Merchant Customers

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

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

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

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

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

Increase Retention 

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

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

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

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

Future Proofing  

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

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

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

Increase Revenues 

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

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

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

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

Unparalleled Access To Merchant Payment Insights

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

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

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

Seize The Opportunity To Scale And Grow Profits

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

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

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

Start transforming payments today.

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

For Banks
/0 Comments/by

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

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

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

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

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

/0 Comments/by

Values vs Value: The Future of Ethical Payments

By Toby Aikins, Merchant Experience Lead at Paydock

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

Values-Based Ethical Payments

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

Paydock offers a democratic approach to payments.

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

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

The Future for Paydock

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

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

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

Get in touch today

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

/0 Comments/by

What did Black Friday cost you this time?

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be prepared for next time.

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

/0 Comments/by

How can you secure your payments with Payments Orchestration?

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Tokenization with Orchestration

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

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

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

PCI Compliance

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

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

Risk Profiles 

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

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

Securing your payments has never been easier

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

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

/0 Comments/by

HSBC Head of Product joins Paydock

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.”

/0 Comments/by

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

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

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

So… why are they essential for merchants?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/0 Comments/by

Episode 1 with Rob Lincolne & Rene Pelegero

Episode 1 with Rob Lincolne & Rene Pelegero

 

What’s broken? What’s working and where the future is taking us? Join our Founder and CEO Rob Lincolne and Rene Pelegero, Managing Director of Retail Payments Global Consulting Group as they discuss some of the big themes in the payments industry.

PayTalk with Paydock is our very own podcast where our founder and CEO Rob Lincolne dives deep with prominent figures and global leaders in the payments industry – bringing the latest insights and leadership to your doorstep.

/0 Comments/by

    Follow us

    About us + More

    Resources & Information

    Contact


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

    Copyright @ Paydock 2022. All Rights Reserved.