Many businesses go through an evolutionary cycle as they grow. They usually start as small companies with very basic needs. Then at some point, as their processing needs become more sophisticated, they tend to outgrow the payment processing platform, chosen at the very beginning. In this article we are going to follow through a typical evolutionary path of such a company, see, which challenges it experiences, which traditional solutions can be used, and what new collaborative payment processing technology can offer.
Our story starts in a small warehouse. A group of people decides to open a book-selling business and launch a web-site, through which they are going to sell books.
Classical third-party payment gateway service
Having neither previous transaction processing volume nor PCI infrastructure, the company chooses the simplest route: to partner with an existing payment gateway, that can connect it to one or more processors that it needs.
As time goes by, the book-selling business expands rapidly, its revenue grows. It gets recurring orders from schools and universities. It starts opening stands and kiosks at book fairs, in airports and other places. Consequently, the need for card-present EMV solution as well as recurring billing solution arises. New payment processing logic is required. Beside that, the company is expanding to other geographies. Support for more currencies is needed.
The current gateway cannot accommodate all of these needs. The company starts thinking of integrations with several gateways. However, these gateways solve similar problems in different ways and cater to different market segments. The gateway, used for US dollars, has robust recurring billing, while the gateway used for Euros has an excellent on-boarding system. And still, there is no common denominator and the bookselling business has to compensate all the differences using its own development team, and, beside that, implement integrations with multiple payment processing back ends.
Gradually, the bookselling company reaches a decision to invest in its own infrastructure and develop some in-house payment gateway that would be used as a centralized system of record.
The managers start to analyze the problem of in-house payment platform development and list related costs and tasks, such as: logic to be developed, integrations, needed for payment processing, implementation of recurring billing functions and reconciliation processes. At the same time, they realize the additional costs of a new data center, PCI audit procedures, tokenization appliances and other operation costs. The company understands that the problem is too complicated to try to solve it with internal resources only.
As a result, the management decides, that the payment ecosystem should be based on some existing open-source payment technology.
Open-source payment gateway solution
The bookselling company licenses and implements an open-source payment technology (adding the missing functionality in-house) and its growth continues. Now it has its own infrastructure, which it fully controls.
With time, however, the company starts facing new problems. First, it has to redo all the necessary certifications and implement new integrations. These integrations start taking too much time to complete. Second, supporting card-present solutions in different geographical locations is not an easy task, so it poses additional challenges. Third, as the company’s core product begins to mature, the management decides to expand their operations to Europe (in addition to North America, where the business is already solidified), and understands that they need to include marketplace offering, allowing participating stores to use the company’s merchant services.
It seems like an endless cycle of growing needs, product updates and constant re-certifications. The solution comes in the form of collaborative payment processing.
The essence of collaborative payment processing
While a payment gateway can connect to a bank or a processor, it can also connect to another instance of itself, running elsewhere (in another ecosystem). Therefore, two payment ecosystems, that use the same payment processing platform as foundation, can connect to each other, forming a cloud.
While the bookselling company expands to Europe, it finds out that there is a payment service provider that uses the same open source payment processing technology. This technology has a cloud capability, allowing the two instances to get connected and, automatically, provision accounts and set them up for processing, as well as process transactions through each other.
The company signs a contract with its European partner (PSP), which allows it to underwrite merchants using the integrations of the PSP. At the same time, collection of merchant and transaction data (as well as other data) is performed using the existing in-house technology, built by the original business. As a result, without the need for any additional integrations, the bookselling company immediately gains access to all of the processing capabilities of their partner in Europe.
After some time, as the company expands further, a similar collaborative payment processing mechanism is replicated in Australia. The three companies (headquartered in the US, Europe, and Australia) form a three-sided partnership, allowing them to benefit from each other’s processing functionality.
Conclusion
Each individual case of a company’s growth is unique, and you should be looking for solutions that work best for you. However, the example, described above, is very typical of what we have observed within the industry. If you feel that this scenario resembles your business and would like to learn more about the concept of collaborative payment processing, we will be glad to provide additional information at UniPay Gateway.
In the next article we are going to describe the concept of payment gateway cloud in greater detail.
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