Tag Archive for: payments

By Dmitriy Harbuzov, Solution Architect at Paydock

The payment landscape is experiencing a remarkable shift, driven by the evolving preferences of consumers seeking a diverse range of payment methods at checkout that align with their individual choices. From Digital Wallets to Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services, and even cryptocurrencies, the options are limitless. Furthermore, the emergence of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) championed by central banks worldwide such as the Federal Reserve introduces yet another frontier of innovation in the payments landscape on top of the already crowded vendor ecosystem.

Multi-rail payments have of necessity emerged as a critical component shaping the future of transactions. In this blog post, we will explore the potential of multi-rail payments and highlight their importance in a world where payment preferences continue to evolve at pace. Additionally, we will delve into the solutions that can address the challenges that lie ahead…

The Power of Multi Rail Payments

Multi-rail payments have revolutionised the payment landscape by enabling businesses to leverage a variety of payment methods simultaneously without technical or security overheads.  Rather than relying on a single payment method, multi-rail transactions leverage a combination of payment rails (for example, traditional credit and debit cards, digital wallets, and BNPL services) to offer customers a seamless and personalised payment experience.  This approach recognises that no single vendor can cater to the diverse preferences of all customers and gives customers the freedom to choose their preferred payment methods that best suit their needs.  By embracing multi-rail payments into their payment strategies businesses can expand their consumer base whilst tapping into new markets.  

Graphics: Original Multi-Rail Payments Diagram by Panagiotis Kriaris (adapted by Paydock)

Adapting To Changing Needs

In the era of digital transformation, consumer expectations have escalated to demand faster, seamless, and highly secure payment experiences. The global shift towards contactless payments is evident in the growing popularity of digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, this has been driven by various factors, including the convenience and speed they offer.  Similarly, BNPL services are gaining popularity due to their convenience and flexibility and the emergence of cryptocurrencies has given rise to new forms of digital assets that are increasingly being accepted by businesses. As the world now explores the potential of CBDCs, the payments landscape will undergo further transformation and businesses are compelled to embrace multi-rail payments to adapt to shifting customer needs and preferences.

Optimising Transaction Efficiency

Multi-rail payments go beyond providing payment options; they also enhance transaction efficiency. Each payment rail offers distinct advantages in terms of speed, cost and security, by harnessing the unique strengths of each rail, businesses can tailor their payment strategies to align with specific transaction requirements. For instance, secure wire transfers may be preferable for high-value transactions while low-value and time-sensitive transactions could be expedited through faster payment methods. Through the strategic orchestration of payments across multiple rails, businesses can achieve a harmonious balance between cost-effectiveness and transaction speed.

Introducing Payments Orchestration… 

To effectively manage multi-rail payments, businesses require a robust and efficient solution. This is where the Payments Orchestration comes into play. Acting as the “Train” on the payment rails,  Payments Orchestration integrates various “payment rails” and consolidates their functionalities into a single, unified interface, seamlessly connecting with existing payment systems, enabling businesses to leverage multiple payment methods without disrupting their current infrastructure. Payments Orchestration serves as a translator, harmonising the diverse protocols, formats, and APIs of different payment systems. It also remains adaptable, capable of incorporating new payment rails and technologies as they emerge, future-proofing businesses against rapid changes in the payments landscape.

Graphics: Original Multi-Rail Payments Diagram by Panagiotis Kriaris (adapted by Paydock)

Enhanced Security and Compliance

In payments, security and compliance play a critical role which increasingly poses as a challenge for merchants and financial institutions. By consolidating payment endpoints into a single platform, Payments Orchestration takes on the responsibility of handling many security and compliance requirements seamlessly.  Orchestration ensures that sensitive customer data is protected across all payment channels and a large footprint of attack surfaces is compressed and secured through a fully manageable and auditable framework. Additionally,  Payment Orchestration assists businesses in meeting compliance requirements, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), across various payment rails. This consolidated approach to security and compliance instils confidence in both businesses and customers, fostering trust in the payment process.

The Future of Payments

The future of payments lies in the convergence of multiple payment rails and the adoption of Payment Orchestration. Multi-rail payments empower businesses to offer diverse payment options while optimising transaction efficiency. Payment Orchestration acts as a train, streamlining the complexities within the multi-rails payments. By embracing these advancements, businesses can enhance customer experience, adapt to evolving technologies, and stay ahead in an ever-changing payments landscape. The future of payments is here, promising a more seamless, convenient, and flexible payment ecosystem for all.

References: Federal Reserve. (2023). Central Bank Digital Currency. Retrieved from https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm

Sources: Panagiotis Kriaris (2023). The New Multi-Rails Payments Landscape Retrieved from Linkedin

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

No-Code Payments Orchestration Solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Episode 2 with Rob Lincolne & Naby Mariyam

Values, Vision and the Questions VC’s never ask (but should!) – Join Naby Mariyam and Rob discussing authenticity and a theory on what really matters when building long term success in fintech.

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.

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

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

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

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

1. Digital Wallets and Frictionless Payments 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2. Advances in AI and Machine Learning Technologies

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

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

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

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

 

3. The rise of subscription models

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

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

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

 

4. Greater focus on cybersecurity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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]

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.

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

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

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

Four main drivers

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

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

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

Why orchestration = the default

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

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

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

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

The burning question: “how to orchestrate?”

Build vs Buy

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiple Beneficiaries

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

One Big Happy Family

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

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

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

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

About PayDock

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

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

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

Welcome to the future of payments.

—–

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

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

No avoiding the facts

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

What about outpacing?

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Hope is not lost.

How can high street retain their client base?

The next fintech revolution will not be about competition.

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Article by Rob Lincolne and Vasylisa Badan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

PayPal recurring payments are dead easy on Paydock.

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

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

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

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

Why use PayPal with Paydock?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showcase

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

 

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

* Data source comScore Panel, US, Q4 2015

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

 

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


View API Docs

Photo credit rawpixel on Unsplash

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.

How Paydock and The Fundraising People are raising the bar in charity donations

The Fundraising People are an ethical fundraising organisation and have been successfully helping charities secure regular giving donors through face to face campaigns in Australia and New Zealand since November 2008. In order to better increase the return for-cause organisations receive from face to face fundraising, The Fundraising People have worked with PayDock to manage a critical link between:

  1. The capture of donor data;
  2. Initial payment and;
  3. Real time visibility of data

Rather than settle for the industry standard of collecting payment information from donors at the point of sign-up, holding for a few days and then passing onto the charity or payment processor, The Fundraising People worked closely with Paydock to enable all donations to be immediately received by the Charities they serve.  

 

All of this is achieved without a loss of payment or donor details for the not-for-profit.

 

By enabling realtime and direct payments to charities, The Fundraising People are able to dynamically re-attempt failed payments as opposed to waiting for feedback from the payment gateway or losing valuable time (and income) in the process as data is passed through manual channels for later activation.

The traditional ecosystem (below) suffers from fragmented data, lost revenue and continual compliance headaches.

 

The Fundraising People’s difference

By closing the loop without slowing down receipt of payments, The Fundraising People’s Informed and Connected system lifts revenue. Critically, they have been able to achieve all of this in a PCI-DSS Level 1 environment, no matter what payment service or merchant facility is in-use by the charity thanks to PayDock. This often improves the overall compliance of the charities at the same time.

 

 

The Fundraising People is extremely proud to have worked in partnership with Paydock to create this payment processing system.  Our intention was to make it faster and more efficient for organisations to debit their donors. In turn expediting much-needed funds out there to the communities that need it the most.

Rachel Brine Director – The Fundraising People

If you would like to find out more about how The Fundraising People offer their services or manage payments you can visit their website here http://www.thefundraisingpeople.com.au.

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

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

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

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

To Summarise

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

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

Roles Overview

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

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

Admin

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

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

Manager

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

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

Customer Service

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

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

Reporting

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

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

How to access this new feature?

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

2. Visit the “Company Users” page

3. Add new user and assign role

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

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

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

Get to know your customer

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

Reward loyalty with a loyalty program

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

Make it easier for your customers to remain loyal

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

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

Encourage customer feedback

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

Be transparent

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

Communicate to your customers

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

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

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

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

Improved customer engagement:

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

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

Increased transparency:

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

Better customer service:

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

How can Paydock help?

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

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

Unlock your SMS potential with Paydock!

How do I get started?

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

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

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

Cards

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

Cash

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

Cheques

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

Digital currency

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

What does this mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Why should you offer mobile payment methods?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World Payments Report can be accessed here.

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

 

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

 

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

 

What can you do?

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

 

How can Paydock help?

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

What is checkout friction?

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

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

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

For larger merchants:

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

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

For smaller merchants:

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

How can Paydock help?

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

What are recurring payments?

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

What are the advantages for merchants?

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

What are the advantages for customers?

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

How can Paydock help?

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

Paydock would like to congratulate SumoSalad on winning Best Innovation in the Health Category at the prestigious QSR Media Detpak Awards for its My Sumo app! Launched in January 2017, the app allows customers to create and pay for their own salads and wraps before picking them up in-store.

When designing, SumoSalad needed to ensure that the app:

  • Is native on both iOS and Android.
  • Can connect to other APIs and apps such as FitBit to automatically log purchases to the customer’s FitBit diary.
  • Has a centralised menu database that can be updated and rolled out across all franchises on the app in an instant.
  • Has a simplified customer signup solution that can automatically distribute the data to franchises.
  • Can split payments between a customer’s loyalty points and their credit card/debit card
  • Works with any number and a diverse range of payment gateways and methods.
  • Triggers transactions and distributes customer data across multiple franchises and any payment gateway upon request.
  • Allows money and payment sources to be directly connected to the franchisees, so that each store has increased control of their pricing schedule without affecting other stores.

Having fulfilled most of the aims by partnering with Round Table Apps, SumoSalad needed to find a comprehensive payments solution. This is where PayDock came in.

How Paydock helped streamline the checkout experience

  • Paydock’s secure payments token vault gave SumoSalad’s the ability to store and pass on customer information within the app to reduce checkout friction.
  • Paydock enabled SumoSalad to integrate and bolt on additional payment gateways and solutions with ease, without further development costs.
  • Paydock’s ability to connect headquarter’s payment gateway directly with the franchisee’s downstream gateways allowed payments to go directly into the franchisee’s bank account, removing the need for any HQ intervention.

Happy results

SumoSalad is now able to offer a seamless online app experience, scale effortlessly and bolt on additional gateways for new franchises within seconds (they added 94 gateways in December 2016 with ease). Settlement delay is now reduced to as low as 1-2 days and is automated with their chosen payment gateway. In addition, franchisees enjoy the flexibility to add and change their online payments set up without huge development costs and without disrupting the operations of SumoSalad and other franchisees.

How Paydock can help your franchise business

The problem that SumoSalad encountered was not unique in any way. Many franchise businesses lose valuable time and administration cost rerouting payments from HQ back to each separate franchise.

What Paydock offers is an extensive payments solution that enables businesses to directly connect with their downstream gateways and reduce settlement delays. This increases data visibility, upgraded payments flexibility and a synchronised payments system.

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

 

So how can merchants reduce the cart abandonment rate?

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

 

How can Paydock help?

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

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

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

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

But what exactly have we been passing up?

Here’s some facts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here for your benefit!

All of us at Paydock.

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

Quick Income Calculator

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

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

 

 

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

A: You never know till it’s down.

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

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

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

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

We asked if it was affecting all environments…

“Just production at this point.”

Not something you want to hear as a customer.

Paydock enables seamless fail-over

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

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

“Nothing”

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

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

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

 

OUR PRODUCT TEAM CAN HELP YOU GET started today

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

We love solutions where everybody wins

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

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

Many reasons to stick existing/preferred gateways

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

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

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

Don’t switch gateways – just add value

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

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