Ways to Accept Payments
Cross-Border Payments
Payment Optimization
Payment Types & Currencies
Fraud Prevention
Chargeback Management
Compliance
Payment Analytics & Reporting
Accounts Receivable Automation
Subscriptions & Recurring Billing
Invoice Payments
Virtual Terminal
Sandbox
Production
Competition among software platforms is getting fiercer by the day as new solutions pop up and platforms expand their products and services. As you consider how to differentiate your business and find new revenue streams, upgrading to offer robust global payments capabilities could be the solution.
However, if you don’t have the right payment partner, technical debt can creep up fast, particularly as you expand the features you offer within your payments functionality, from additional payment types to new regions. Technical debt is a serious challenge as development teams are already working overtime to balance customer needs and platform innovation with capacity.
One sure bet to cut down on the resources and costs? Get everything you need in a single integration.
Why Embedded Payments?
When software platforms consider their next enhancements or integrations, clients’ needs come first. That’s why today’s leading platforms are integrating global payments: clients are asking for them, either directly or indirectly, via their activity on your platform.
Companies want to be able to quickly and easily accept digital payments. An embedded payment solution helps you make life much easier for your clients — they can achieve their objectives right from within your platform.
At the same time, your clients’ customers want a better payment experience, too. By designing and controlling the payment experience, you can help your merchants sell more and can benefit from gained revenue share.
But the technical costs of offering a robust, integrated payment solution can be high.
Multiple Integrations, Multiple Costs
Consider the breadth of technical functionality needed for payments. Your customers will have geographic needs, privacy needs, security needs and payment type requirements.
As you discover the various requirements for the payment experience, you could easily end up tacking on a new technology integration to meet each need. In the end you’ll find that you’ve cobbled together a solution for each new geography or each new payment type. Maybe then you add a subscription billing partner, one to cover Australia, and one to deal with fraud prevention. For each new expectation, you’d typically need to add a new technology partner.
This approach adds significant tech debt and maintenance costs. If the purpose of embedding payments is to add a revenue stream, then selecting 30 partners for 30 functions is counterproductive.
Every time you add a new partner, you’ll incur additional tech costs and complexities. You’ll also sacrifice team bandwidth that could otherwise be used for platform development projects — that’s an opportunity cost.
And don’t overlook the maintenance costs of keeping each gateway up to date. When you create your own integrations to multiple partners, you’re responsible for the upkeep, which can bog down your IT team significantly.
Bottom line: responding to customer needs around payments can put your team in the hole. Yet ignoring customer needs is not a tenable option. What’s the alternative?
Identify one solution that has everything you need for today — and tomorrow.
A Single Solution for Payments Minimizes Tech Debt
You must respond to the demand for global payments, but adding integration partners one by one is off the table. What’s next?
You could become a PayFac yourself, and that can entail additional technical debt from the effort to clear the red tape and comply with all laws and regulations. The obvious alternative, then, is to find a single payment partner, one that can meet all your payment needs. The challenge: Finding a global payments integration solution that is robust enough for your customers’ many requirements — even though you may not know exactly what they are.
While you know all your customers need a way to accept payments, the specific currencies, level of protection and even the nature of their business model will differ and morph. To keep up, you’ll need to be able to provide a flexible payment solution without revamping your platform.
To reduce technical debt and maintenance costs while addressing various customer needs, you must provide all payments options and features with one streamlined integration. Your single payments solution should be robust enough to adapt to complex payments requirements, but simple enough for your team to stay above water and focused on your product. And if you can white label the offering to better control your customers’ experience with your brand, all the better.
At BlueSnap, we offer an all-in-one embedded payment solution for platforms supported by our global network of banks. Software platforms can integrate with our API to gain access to practically any geography customers require, while also reducing technical debt. BlueSnap also manages compliance, risk and requirements in every region, taking the maintenance off your hands.
Want to learn more about our All-in-One Payment Solution for Platforms? Get in touch today!
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