How Integrated Am I? Common FAQs for Payment Facilitators

Ask most payment facilitators if they can handle integrated payments and they’ll answer, “Of course.” Integration is the very nature of their product offering. The better question to ask is “How integrated are you?” The answer to that depends on how much of their processes truly offer full integration – from seamless merchant onboarding to dynamic funding capabilities. Offering a fully integrated payments experience will require a payment facilitator to solve various challenges and opportunities.

In this blog, we’ll examine the questions payment facilitators should answer to become fully integrated.

How Integrated Should a Payment Facilitator Be?

A payment facilitator can easily function by simply integrating the transactional portion of payments, but there’s more to consider than just payments. The end-to-end process includes merchant onboarding, customer support, settlements, and reporting.

Each step in that process should be as seamless as the next. All the while, customers should have plenty of opportunities to ask questions and get actionable answers. Simply handing off a solution with little to no follow-up or support won’t work in today’s highly competitive payments landscape. In fact, merchants expect white glove service and are easily frustrated with solutions that promise to be simple but prove to be complicated.

What Should a Payment Facilitator Consider for Merchant Boarding?

Payment facilitators typically excel at providing a seamless, automated merchant boarding process. But what happens next? What happens when customers run into trouble during boarding? Who will they call? The longer customers have to wait to take advantage of a payment facilitator's services, the more likely it is that the client will start looking for another solution.

Payment facilitators should offer more than just an API call. Merchants need access to resources that can help them solve their boarding issues quickly and with little hassle.

How the Payroc Gateway Helps

The Payroc gateway allows payment facilitators to collect all pertinent information about each merchant digitally, submit that information through our API, get a digital signature, and provision that account to be up and ready for processing quickly. In addition, our customer service and support teams are unmatched in the industry. Our clients know they will always get an answer to their questions – no matter how complex.

What Types of Payments Should a Payment Facilitator Offer?

For a payment facilitator to remain flexible, they have to be able to offer a range of payment options. The challenge is how to expand into other payment types quickly. Payment facilitator development teams are experts on the payment types those payment facilitators offer, but not much beyond that. And the cost of building functionality can be cost-prohibitive.

How the Payroc Gateway Helps

The Payroc gateway allows all stakeholders to take advantage of virtually any type of payment option – card present, card-not-present, alternative payments, and more. Through PayByCloud, integrators require only a few lines of code to enable processing for that full range of payments through. That means no need for multiple API calls and authentication methods. The seamless transaction process also makes integration with external accounting and management software simple, so settlement and reporting processes can be just as seamless.

Why Is Dynamic Funding Important for Payment Facilitators?

With the increased complexity of payment processing, customer funding requirements have expanded beyond simple single-bank-to-single-bank transactions. Creative partnerships have added more complexity to the settlement process, making dynamic funding the rule rather than the exception. Payment facilitators need to provide or partner with a solution that offers dynamic funding capabilities to manage revenue distribution efficiently.

How the Payroc Gateway Helps

Payroc streamlines funding and settlement processes to facilitate nearly any type of dynamic funding arrangement and payments partner through our platform. This allows customers to direct funds at a granular level easily. This added feature can make a payment facilitator that much more competitive.

What Role Does Reporting Play for Payment Facilitators?

Robust reporting is a critical tool that allows merchants to make key decisions about their business. The more integrated their reporting is, and the more real-time data they can access through the tools that best suit them, the better they can plan for the future and adjust to current challenges.

How the Payroc Gateway Helps

Our Reporting API gives customers insights into every aspect of their payments – demographics, fraud issues, and data to assess the effectiveness of sales and marketing strategies across regions. Customers use our reporting capabilities such as:

• Total funds allocated for partner splits
• Comprehensive end-to-end transaction flows
• Transactions with minimal processing requirements
• Authorizations and dispute details
• The status of disputes
• Automatic submission of 1099s and K-9s

For payment facilitators to truly be integrated from end-to-end within the payments ecosystem, they must be able to solve their customers’ problems throughout the process. With the help of an experienced payments partner, payment facilitators can offer that comprehensive integration without having to build it from scratch. Even better, the seamless manner in which a payment facilitator can “plug into” Payroc’s gateway can create an advantage in a highly competitive industry.

Learn more about how Payroc can make your business more competitive and solve for total integration by contacting us.