Key takeaways:

·       What five potential customers said about payment flow dependencies

·       Reducing dependencies on a single PSP

·       Unlock the value of a genuinely universal token vault

What five potential customers said about payment flow dependencies

Online merchants lose 62% of customers who experience a failed transaction. So, for every e-commerce or fintech provider operating in today’s online-centric consumer environment, the pressure is on to ensure that every financial transaction is processed quickly, securely, and without a hitch.

We have spoken to a range of medium and large e-commerce businesses, some with complex, international payment flows and summarized their pain points. When asked about payment flow dependencies, their priorities included:

1.       The importance of working with suppliers which are entirely payment service provider (PSP) agnostic;

2.       A desire to own the payments value chain as much as possible but outsource select services such as tokenization, compliance, fraud, 3-D Secure or gateway integrations;

3.       A desire to avoid relying on one PSP. The situation of having “all eggs in one basket” is to be avoided.

Reducing dependencies on one or more PSPs

Everyone agreed that you must avoid dependencies on a PSP to scale a business and its payment flows. To ensure high availability, reasonable payment conversion rates, and many payment methods available to customers around the globe, most e-commerce businesses work with between 3 – 6 payment providers.

Then the challenge comes when you have to manage multiple checkout pages and integrations, PSPs producing different tokens which don’t work together, dealing with PSPs not supporting up to date 3DS versions… the list goes on. Under these circumstances, providing a consistent customer experience and maintaining the profitability of payment flows can feel like an uphill struggle. That’s when organizations look for a universal tokenization solution. Universal tokens enable them to collect payment data from customers seamlessly, uniformly and process the payment with any PSP of their choosing (depending on geography, transaction fees, conversion rates etc.). At this point, decisionmakers must decide whether to build in-house (DIY), which would enable them to maintain complete control but requires expert know-how, additional compliance requirements and security risk. Or they could consider outsourcing it to a dedicated orchestrator such as Primer or ProcessOut. However, this results in losing ownership and control over payment flows. The final option is a strategy that will allow businesses to maintain control and ownership over their core processes while also gaining access to outside expertise and products.

The hybrid approach: DIY and buy

For those organizations wanting to keep control of their payment flows and manage their relationships with PSPs, gateways and acquiring partners in-house, the most suitable approach is a hybrid DIY and buy option. We speak to businesses everyday with various use cases. Some have built their payment gateway in-house and are looking for more autonomy over relationships with acquirers and PSPs; others work with a combination of PSPs and orchestrators. Regardless of the setup, these businesses aim to provide a consistent checkout experience for their customers, high availability, and low transaction fees. This is where tokenization technology is required. By deploying a PSP agnostic tokenization system across your payment systems, businesses can address many of the challenges created by complex payment flows.

Unlock the value of a truly Universal Token Vault

That’s why PCI Proxy built the Universal Token Vault. A completely PSP-agnostic tokenization system allows businesses to develop and maintain control over their payment flows. We tokenize payment data from any incoming channel (iFrames, Pay By Link, APIs and SDKs) and create a simple, universal token applicable to any chosen PSP. Our system removes the need to map different tokens from various PSPs to one another. We operate in a modular, agile way to allow scaling businesses to onboard quickly and keep adding PSPs or payment partners as they grow. If you’re currently evaluating your payment orchestration needs or seeking to reduce single dependencies across your payment flows, get in touch with our team today.

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