Digital Commerce

Gateway to Powering Digital Commerce

fsstsprod — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 11:32:44 +0000

Gateway to Powering Digital Commerce fsstsprod Mon, 08/01/2022 - 17:02

Ecommerce, Digital Payments, Shopping Carts, etc. may sound as common “every-day” terminologies now but were nothing but a set of jargons to most, only a decade ago. It’s simply brilliant how ecommerce adoption has accelerated not only in India but across all major developed and developing countries around the globe. This acceleration was never a standalone feat. It was backed by constant and fast developments in the field of payments and technology. Afterall, digital adoption at a population scale can only be possible if it can be supported by a strong digital ecosystem and technology infrastructure. Smartphones, fast-internet, payment gateways, etc. all need to function in a sync to make millions of transactions successful every minute.

Governments and organizations continue to push towards a larger digital economic footprint while trying to offer solutions that can cater to a larger set of audience. They realise the potential of having a strong digital business environment – both in terms of cost as well as transparency. While we continue to see a growing shift in payments from cash-based transactions to digital transactions, the demand towards faster, simpler, personalized technology solutions is also on the rise. Today, on one hand we have large merchants who need scalable technology solutions that can be personalized to the specific merchant needs, on the other hand smaller vendors need simpler, nimble solutions that can be easily integrated and be used in a plug-and-play manner without high investments. Payment solutions that cater to these varied needs ensure long term growth in business as well as digital payments.

Successful digital payments are dependent on three key factors:

Ease of acceptance, i.e., the ability to accept payment digitally through any method be it card, wallet, QR, or other non-card rail options.
Processing speed, i.e., to be able to process thousands of payments in a matter of a seconds, without failing to load or break in between, leading to cart dropouts.
Payment security, i.e., to ensure complete payment and data security by ensuring speedy authentication and authorization of the payee.

A combination of these three factors provides a holistic solution that ensures faster adoption from both the buyer as well as the seller. Payment gateway innovations across industry have been crucial in bridging this gap between cash vs digital payments as well between seller vs buyer adoption. Being the principal enabler of ecommerce and digital transactions across economies, payment gateway innovations like multi-channel acceptance, ease of integration with systems and carts, and complete payment security have provided merchants the comfort as well as confidence to accept digital payments hassle free.

Choosing a payment gateway solution in 2022 however, is a lot different than what it was decade ago. With technological advancement, growing risks, and varied payment methods, payment gateway offerings are also becoming complex.

Some of the key features in a modern-day payment gateway solution include:

Mobile-first, form factor agnostic integrations
Multiple currency conversions and payment acceptance
Tokenization for card-on-file transactions and efficient key management procedures
Multiple risk configurations
Multiple Integrations – Plug-ins, Hosted, Buy Now Buttons, SDKs, etc. for ease of implementation at the bank’s end towards any type of merchants.
Personalization and Branding
Multilingual Support

At FSS, we are building solutions that cater to the changing needs of the industry.

FSS Payment Gateway

FSS Payment Gateway Solution is a best-in-class, complete PG solution built to deliver high quality customer experience at speed and scale. Benchmarked to process more than 8000 transactions per second, compliant with PCI DSS 3.2 standards, FSS Payment Gateway powers some of the largest banks in Asia.

As a payment gateway solution, enabling maximum payment user journeys becomes both crucial as well as complex. FSS’ Payment Gateway is solving in that regard by supporting more than 30 user journeys involving smallest vendors to large conglomerates. At a time when all businesses, big or small are moving towards digital payments, FSS’ solution - with specialized features like Pay Now - is built for all sizes, and all nature of business.

Whether a big multinational or a small seasonal vendor, whether a digital-native modern company or a traditional offline store – FSS Payment Gateway is built to enable digital payments in any business environment with simple integrations and ZERO capital expenditure. With multiple API integrations like Refund, Enquiry, etc. FSS PG provides banks the ability to offer end-to-end configurability to their merchant customers.

At FSS, we understand the importance an efficient payment gateway solution plays in the business cycle of an organization. With growing digital adoption across the globe, we are building solutions that facilitate this adoption at every stage, and we are partnering with organizations who are bring this change in their region.

Connect to know more!

Write to us at products@fsstech.co.in

Riding the Omni-Commerce Wave

fsssiteadmin — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 09:33:46 +0000

Riding the Omni-Commerce Wave fsssiteadmin Tue, 12/28/2021 - 15:03

We’re seeing a step change in how customers pay. Modern consumers are using multiple channels and devices to discover, initiate and fulfil their purchase journey. Industry developments such as the launch of cashier less stores, Amazon Go, and automatic payment services, like those deployed by “born digital” companies, have set a high service bar and considerably changed consumer expectations around digital interactions and transactions

Instances where customers explore a product on a social media channel, go to a nearby store to experience the product, decide to purchase the product, make a partial payment by scanning a QR code using a mobile wallet and convert the rest of the payment to an equated monthly instalment mode are now an established norm. In this case the payment acceptance strategy of merchants should allow seamless and smooth transition between multiple payment channels and modes and vice versa. Regardless of webrooming or showrooming, it’s clear that merchants should provide a continuous seamless experience to their customers.

Payments management consequently is no longer a back-office activity but are a crucial part of the overall frictionless customer experience. Customers today want their payment preferences to be valued, and it is increasingly important for merchants and acquiring organisations to adopt a cohesive strategy that seamlessly integrates online and offline payments, empowering shoppers to shop when, where, and how they want.

To address consumer demands, merchants are demanding more from their payment providers. Merchants are looking for a streamlined solution, that manages and consolidates new payments innovations onto a single platform, provides best-in-class functionality for fraud management, reconciliation and settlement and innovative added value services to differentiate their services.

This is easier said than done. Over the years, payment acquirers have deployed vertically aligned channel-centric payment systems and are weighed down by an architecture consisting of a collection of point solutions that are not designed for continuous change and interoperability. Merchants, as a result, contend with different payment suppliers and distinct systems for payment acceptance through their website and in-store, that don’t connect with each other. This hampers the merchant’s ability to recognise consumers across channels and makes it harder to deliver the unified experience customers naturally expect. What is more, the siloed systems introduce operating complexities, such as additional maintenance overheads, complexities related to multiple daily reconciliation, and settlement cycles, and in some cases multiple reporting formats and portals.

Omni-Channel Payments Approach

Forward leaning acquires are embracing an omni-channel payment approach that can interconnect multiple systems. An omni-commerce payment platform consolidates discrete channels, merchant lifecycle management, clearing and settlement systems into a unified acquiring hub, enabling payment processors to futureproof their capabilities. The benefits of deploying a unified commerce platform include:

Single integration to bake payments seamlessly into the customer experience across channels
Optimise revenues by enabling digital and alternative payment methods to shoppers across channels.
Provides consolidated cross-channel view of transaction data for improving business and operating performance
Offer adjacent added value services to optimise revenues
Improve authorization rates by reducing false positives that are flagged as potentially fraudulent transactions.
Consolidate data across channels, analyse to derive insights into customer behaviour, offer meaningful promotions/discounts and to prevent true fraud

Broaden Payments Coverage

The more shopping behaviours change—from social media to in-store to the Internet of Things and a mix of anything in between—the bigger the implications for the ways we pay. The Internet of Things and voice-activated technologies, for instance, bring opportunities to connect with consumers via everything from cars to refrigerators. With growth in social networks, buyers likewise can discover a product on Instagram or Facebook, tap the Pay Button, and be immediately directed to a checkout page. Livestreaming commerce sites is gaining in popularity.

In addition to multiple channels from which customers can initiate a transaction, new payment methods are continually entering the market. There’s a plethora of instruments -- cash, card, account rails, alternative payments and a wide variety of options for using that tender (mobile wallets, Buy Now Pay Later, QR code, Pay by link, Contactless, Tap and go and so forth). Recent research indicates BNPL players will earn nearly 3% of global ecommerce spend by 2023. Another study by Juniper Research indicates by 2024, 50% of world’s population will use e-wallets.

Acquirers need to ensure wide payments coverage in line with merchants and shoppers’ preferences. Be it online, mobile or in-store, prospective customers want to make purchases using a payment mode of their choice. Generally, onboarding an individual payment method can take between one and six months, depending on complexity. The extensibility of the platform to add new payment mechanisms will be a defining factor for businesses wanting to sharpen their competitive edge with payment options that suit the “connected life.”

Simplify Payments for Small and Micro-Merchants

Many consumers migrated to at-home consumption and have started to do more online shopping after so many retail premises were shuttered over the last 18 months. Accommodating those changes inevitably creates challenges for smaller retailers, many of which have had to build virtual storefronts to cope (from scratch in some cases). With an omni-commerce payments platform, acquirers can extend asset-light payment acceptance models to enable smaller pure brick and mortar merchants stay relevant. Innovative acquirers and PSPs that develop new solutions to support simple, cost-efficient, and easy to deploy payment acceptance models such as Pay by Link, Pay Buttons, Branded Hosted Checkout, Soft POS can profitably tap into the long tail represented by the small merchant segment.

Curate Added Value Services

Acquirers are beginning to recognize that the most strategic and expedient way to prepare for the future needs is to build an extended ecosystem through partnerships with diverse providers to fast-track digital innovation, create new sources of revenue to combat margin erosion. This means that when a merchant onboards, they can integrate a readily available set of adjacent applications to drive revenue growth. Major players are investing in and partnering with third-party apps to deliver an innovative services catalogue to improve frequency of customer transactions and engagement. Examples include loyalty program management, voice commerce, recurring payments, subscription management, reporting and analytics, lending at POS, card offering and POS terminal monitoring. The underlying platform needs to support open payment APIs that merchants or app developers can embed in their platform.

Tap Transaction Data

With Unified Commerce, all payment data feeds into the same system, enabling acquirers capture rich transaction insights to optimise business performance across multiple levels:

Improve Portfolio Performance -- Analyse records of merchants to spot top performing merchants, identify future markets and the best areas for new investments to create a more profitable merchant portfolio
Boost Revenues -- Boost revenue by gauging the preferences and behaviours of individual customers – leveraging transaction history, location, preferred channels, payment methods and currency to deliver connected experiences, and better targeted service offerings including discounted offers or instant lending at check-out or nudges to use low fee payment methods thereby improving transaction volumes conversions
Lower Transaction Declines -- Continuous real-time transaction and terminal monitoring and logging across channels to improve success rates
Improving Operating Efficiencies -- Operational insights enable better decisions for a range of back-office activities -- for example minimise chargebacks, and dispute volumes, maximize terminal uptime through continuous real-time transaction monitoring
Create New Monetization Opportunities -- Insights into customer transacting patterns will enable acquirers develop new business and income sources by sharing aggregate transacting patterns with partners in the ecosystem

Deliver Optimum Level of Défense

Fraud is a growing problem, with Juniper Research estimating that total e-commerce fraud losses alone will exceed $20 billion in 2021, an 18% increase on 2020. As the number of devices, interfaces, payment means, and channels continues to proliferate, payment fraud threats are growing in complexity and sophistication. Against this backdrop, data security is a top priority for retail CIOs who must work harder to insulate their existing systems and processes from the ever-present threat of security breaches. Practical steps acquirers can take to address the problem include establishing and maintaining payment card industry (PCI) compliance and conducting regular vulnerability and security audits to check whether e-commerce software, plug-ins and SSL certificates are up to date.

These can be supplemented by authentication processes that analyse the characteristics of a payment including merchant profile, IP address, device type, customer transaction profile, order value, time and transaction velocity, type of card and location enabling acquirers to dynamically risk-score transactions and then determine whether to accept or reject the transaction in real time. Only transactions that are truly suspect are stopped, avoiding any undue customer friction and dissatisfaction or investigation labour overheads. Other critical security elements include cross-platform tokenization and point-to-point encryption (P2PE), which ensure transaction security.

Strengthen Compliance Maturity

Digital payments is a highly regulated business and service providers face an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Simply keeping up with the ongoing mandates is a mammoth undertaking in addition to platform capabilities, the strength of the payments service provider to meet constantly evolving regulatory requirements is critical.

Data Privacy and Regulation: Across geographies, governments are implementing data privacy laws to safeguard customer data.
Security and Fraud: In Europe, 3DSecure 3.2 is a mandate with introduction of Open Banking PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) standards across the continent. Similar regulation is in place in other regions or in the process of being adopted and acquires need to gear-up.
Ongoing Mandates from Interchanges: In addition to regulation by international Card Schemes, PSPs need to comply with region-specific mandates and local interchanges resulting in high compliance overheads.
In-Country Regulation: With growth in digital payments regulators across countries are monitoring the emerging landscape to safeguard all stakeholders. Changes in interchange fees, consumer payment rights, new regulations around security are being constantly updated and acquirers need to maintain compliance at all times

Achieve Architectural Agility

Changes in payments are likely to go into an overdrive. To drive long-term value, payments leaders look to adopt more flexible, modern platforms that allows them to respond and adapt to future changes with agility. In many instances, the end goal is to transform a monolithic core system into a service-based platform with distinct capabilities organized around customer needs. The key is establishing an enhanced model of service delivery built on three main pillars: open architecture, which can provide unprecedented flexibility through a modular approach; a cloud-based platform, which can increase resiliency as well as enable scalability and faster delivery of new products and enhancements; data-driven insights, to make smarter, quicker business decisions.

How FSS can Help

FSS platform is acquirer agnostic and enables service providers to bring in-store and online payments onto the same universe to provide an optimal omni-commerce experience. Leveraging the FSS white-labelled payment processing capabilities, acquirers can provide seamless payment services to their merchants without having to incur upfront CAPEX. FSS offer access to this platform as a service and is 100% responsible for the platform’s development, maintenance, upgrades, compliance with security standards.

Support large and small merchants with or without complex hierarchy.
Faster merchant onboarding leveraging a single connection with flexibility to activate channels and instruments basis merchant preference
Wide coverage for international and local payment mechanisms
Powerful engine that gives flexibility to propose attractive and transparent pricing options to merchants.
Complete control over the merchant billing, clearing, and settlement processes
Support counter-fraud measures such as Secure3D 2.2 and tokenization
Multi-institution, and multilanguage capabilities allow clients to manage international acquiring operations with relative ease significantly reducing cost of expansion
Compliant with International and local data privacy laws to safeguard customer data
Manage merchant portfolios in different countries and for different acceptance institutions to meets the needs of global and multinational merchants.
Analytics console which will allow acquirers to identify hotspots in merchant performance and to get a handle on customer behaviour
On-demand scalability and high availability/uptime, performance benchmarks and resilience

In Conclusion

A winning payments strategy converts shoppers into customers, keeps them happy, and provides them a seamless, superior experience, they’ll want to return to. Acquirers need to invest in omni-channel payment acceptance capabilities to keep pace with merchant expectations. The right fintech service delivery partner is one of the most important decisions an acquiring institution can make. The ability of the technology provider to consistently deliver comes from deep experience in implementing similar solutions across a variety of customer sgements in different geographies, with varying execution paths. The fintech provider should be able to leverage this knowledge and expertise to innovate and future-proof key functions whilst create a smoother, more predictable outcome for both implementation and ongoing service.

Merchant Acquiring – Architecting Value for Growth (Part II/II)

fsssiteadmin — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 10:17:07 +0000

Merchant Acquiring – Architecting Value for Growth (Part II/II) fsssiteadmin Fri, 12/24/2021 - 15:47

To read Merchant Acquiring - Winning in a Digital World (Part I/II), click here.

Architecting Value for Growth

The mandate for merchant acquirers is clear. The merchant segment is a complex, at-scale business and market leadership require a laser-like focus on rapid value creation. Each model discussed above is underpinned by certain foundational capabilities that make it work. For example, acquirers that want to succeed must have a flexible payments tech stack that offers an integrated payments experience; evolve an open services ecosystem to deliver contextual experiences that create customer delight and invest in intelligent risk management frameworks.

Simplify the Payments Stack

As retailers transform their business to serve omnichannel customers, acquirers need to step up to simplify the payments stack and support cross-channel commerce experiences -- online-to-offline or vice versa. Acquirers that can provide all-in-one omnichannel acceptance capabilities position themselves to successfully deliver a simpler payment solution to their customers. The key benefits include:

Eliminate complexity and operational redundancies that a multi-back-end architecture creates, such as channel-specific merchant onboarding, numerous settlement file formats and multiple settlement cut-off times.
Enable easy integration via application programming interfaces (APIs) and provide choice to merchants related to channels and payment methods
Leverage high-quality API opens new routes to market through third parties and create a channel for complementary value-added services (VAS)
Improve payments coverage via acceptance of multiple payment methods, especially local and alternate payment methods across channels
Optimise infrastructure costs for merchants via support for low-cost payment acceptance modes -Soft POS, QR codes
Stable, reliable processing capabilities to accommodate spikes in transaction workloads
Configurable parameter and product flexibility along with seamless, cross-channel integration of offerings—both standard payment acceptance offerings and value-added services—is essential
Data-driven architecture to enable acquirers leverage descriptive and diagnostics data that can be shared across the enterprise for real-time response to specific customer and merchant triggers

Build a Strong Pool of Value-added Capabilities

Price differentiation is becoming less relevant when compared to the range and the quality of VAS offered to merchants. Traditionally acquirers have offered dynamic currency conversion and basic fraud prevention tools. The challenge – and the opportunity – is to extend this approach to add an innovative catalogue of ancillary services that enrich the customer experience. Examples include EMI at checkout, working capital loans, instant virtual cards at checkout, recurring subscriptions, lending products and autonomous payments -- that can be seamlessly accessed by customers to manage their financial lives.

Monetize New Data Flows

Acquirers are leveraging data for deeper insights to provide new ways to expand a merchant customer base and to reduce a merchant’s overall transaction cost and risk of accepting payments. Rather than relying on just one stream of data, acquirers are combining data sets to get a full 360º view of the merchant and customer shopping experience. For example, leveraging data insights to offer working capital loans to small merchants or loyalty-integrated payments. It is also possible to gauge the demand for “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) payment methods and other emerging trends such as QR codes and self-checkout.

Strengthen Fraud and Security

Intelligent, data-driven anti-fraud technology that can authenticate transactions seamlessly in the background based on customer and merchant risk profile -- mitigating risk, and permitting more qualified transactions to occur—thus lowering merchant cost and increasing revenue.

A fast-expanding market is fuelling massive changes within the payments landscape and will require acquirers to adapt their strategy, business and operating models, and go-to-market approach to keep pace. At the core of this change is the need for technology agility. Pure play technology processors such as FSS are gearing to support these transaction scenarios by providing robust, industrialised plug and play infrastructure that acquirers can plug into to serve global at scale merchants as well as smaller businesses.

Merchant Acquiring – Winning in A Digital World (Part I/II)

fsssiteadmin — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 10:01:36 +0000

Merchant Acquiring – Winning in A Digital World (Part I/II) fsssiteadmin Fri, 12/24/2021 - 15:31

The Middle East and Africa is among strongest frontiers for digital payments globally, with revenues predicted to grow from US$ 22B in 2020 to US$ 62.8B by 2023. Spurred by a highly digitized population, strong Central Bank support and a lockdown-induced spike in consumer demand, digital commerce has gained significant traction. This is true not only in more mainstream verticals, such as fashion and groceries, but also in merchant segments like healthcare, professional services, and education, which historically have not received a material portion of payments through B2C digital channels. UAE consumers, in fact, the region is amongst the highest digital spenders in the world. On average consumers in UAE spend US$122 per e-commerce transaction. For reference, the average value for e-commerce transactions in emerging and developed markets is $22 and $76 respectively.

The shifts in consumer behaviour have unlocked significant new market opportunities. Traditionally merchants considered payment acceptance as a cost centre. Retail businesses spend about 2 percent in credit card processing fees. The fees creep up to about 2.5 percent for card-not-present businesses. Merchants across sectors understand that they must be fully connected with consumers and are rethinking their acceptance and payments needs and journeys post COVID-19. Alongside the clear opportunity to enable the growth in online payments, there is considerable scope to displace more cash payments in the face-to-face environment and better integrate the virtual and the physical worlds. The implementation of a solid payment’s strategy will prove to be an opportunity for merchants to gain revenue advantage.

Riding on the demand wave, the acquiring space is experiencing a dynamic transformation. More opportunities are opening for a diversified range of players, Fintech providers, newcomers in new payments service provider (PSP) roles (telcos, FMCG players, payments processing companies) and even card issuers local, regional, and global payment providers to capture market share as regulatory changes allow new players to enter the payments business. They are competing for the same segments, introducing disruptive technologies, and bringing rapid innovation. Whether by introducing payment-services licenses or issuing open-banking regulations, the region’s regulators and governments are looking to attackers to help them achieve ambitious digitization goals, such as Saudi Arabia’s target for 70 percent digital payments by 2030. Tech giant Facebook, for instance, plans to expand Facebook Shops to WhatsApp and Messenger by adding experiential elements and convenience to the online shopping experience. These companies’ broad reach and technological prowess give them a strong foundation for competing in a field where the ability to rapidly develop, tailor, and refine customer propositions confers advantage

Firms such as Dubai-based Careem (acquired by Uber for US$3.1billion in 2020) are launching super apps and have emerged as local champions, expanding from ride hailing to grocery delivery and payments. These super apps are building a platform for retailers to create more value for customers and merchants. They process a billion shopping sessions every day, and we want to help those consumers find more of what they're looking for right away. Elsewhere, Egypt is home to Halan, which recently secured investment of US$120m and offers financial services from buy-now-pay-later to microfinancing, as well as ride hailing and grocery delivery. Similarly, Algeria-based Temtem, which started out as a ride-hailing app, recently launched Temtem ONE, its very own version of a super-app. incorporating e-commerce, transport, and delivery.

The country is also seeing the emergence of new acquirer processors, BNPL, and alternative lending players to take advantage of the growing commerce market. In April 2021 Tamara raised $110 million in a Series A round from U.K.-based FinTech unicorn, Checkout.com. Australian BNPL giants Zip and Afterpay quickly followed suit, with Zip announcing the acquisition of Dubai-based BNPL FinTech Spotii for $26 million in May and Afterpay injecting $10 million into UAE player Postpay in June.

Just as importantly, traditional acquirer processors are beginning to resemble marketplaces by offering solutions like payments disbursement, financing, and onboarding for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), commerce marketplace risk and identity solutions. Emirates NBD, for instance, has plans to partner with auto-sellers, insurance, and real-estate agents.

A Kaleidoscope of Players and Business Models

Given the ever-expanding value chain as a new wave of players enter the market, fragmentation, payments commoditization and compressed margins are inevitable. Many players are thinking differently about their technology and business models to grow and scale whilst lowering risk and costs. A kaleidoscope of business models is emerging to keep pace with fast-changing customers and markets:

Do-it-Yourself -- Established large-scale market players are investing heavily in enhancing their value proposition to safeguard market share. They may prefer a “build over a buy” technology model, especially during a time of economic uncertainty like today to avoid upfront costs and annual licensing fees associated with software-as-a-service in favour of custom builds that use internal resources. These acquirers are vertically aligned and create, package, and distribute their products and maintain direct merchant contact and control and have a 360° merchant view. Acquirers who pursue a ‘Make’ strategy must be backed-up by the right level of investment to keep pace with constantly evolving market demand.

Collaborate with Competitors -- New entrants are partnering with established payment processor, with proven technology and innovation capabilities for their processing infrastructure. For established acquirers, these companies seek scale by delivering technology or business processes to other companies. The upside for acquirers is that they can maintain direct customer contact and control, with the innovation and payment processing burden shifted to a specialist, scale player. The model is viable when two companies pursue distinct market opportunities with very different approaches and resources. In fast-growing, competitive markets where acquirers are directly competing for the same merchant segment and need to maintain a rapid innovation rhythm, this can however place the new player at a disadvantage in terms of ability to introduce innovative products and propositions at speed and low costs.

Collaborate with TSPs -- Some players have opted to outsource their processing infrastructure to a third party, enabling them to achieve scale, lower technology, and operating overheads. Pure play technology providers seek growth by manufacturing white-labelled technology products that are invisible to end clients. The cloud is the technological and economic foundation for unleashing market opportunities, and the technology partner assumes responsibility for functional and technology roadmaps, enabling new players to keep up with agile, asset-light players and create value by tapping into resources and capacity that they don’t have to own. Acquirers benefit from direct customer contact and control, and they retain a 360° customer view. This scenario is most common among players, who see acquiring as a core business but want to keep costs low.

The technology service provider’s software architecture, roadmaps, risk management expertise, and local regulatory savvy adaptation to, ongoing industry innovation and regulatory changes or mandates will be crucial attributes for partnering with the service provider.

Ecosystem Play -- Pure payments players must form business models that create value beyond payments transactions alone. Ecosystem partnerships offer benefits such as rapid innovation, operational efficiencies, scalability, and a better customer experience. To avoiding diminishing returns associated with market commoditization, acquirers seamlessly package complementary markets products into their own offerings. The core acquiring system is also available to third parties that want to use the system to power embedded offerings. By bundling products in new ways—acquirers can unlock a multitude of new growth opportunities and emerge stronger.

Shopify is partnering with Stripe and its financial institution partners to build Shopify Balance, the business account designed to help merchants take control of their finances. BNPL companies, for example, are embedding their product into the checkout process at the point of sale rather than being an overlay that customers navigate separately. As an example, Network International, is collaborating with buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider Tabby to expand the credit market and enable its UAE e-commerce merchants to offer consumers the option to split their purchases into interest-free payments with a ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) credit.

Resellers -- To improve reach and scale, acquirers are breaking capabilities into sellable micro-units that can be offered and consumed via APIs. This enables any other player—a retailer, a Bigtech or a business—to use these components to weave transactions-related capabilities into more offerings. This will increase the competitive stakes, but it will also create new partnership and revenue opportunities.

The specifics of the response will be determined by the acquirer’s circumstances, the size and characteristics of its merchant portfolio, and the nature of the retail environment in its home markets. For acquirers the key to success in this flexible, fluid environment is to adapt one or a combination of models to support strategic ambitions. As a starting point, acquirer banks evaluate the areas they want to develop their own capabilities and products, and in which parts of the business they could benefit from partnering or sourcing capabilities and products.

To read Merchant Acquiring - Architecting Value for Growth (Part II/II), click here.

Ecommerce Fuelling Digital Payments In GCC

fsssiteadmin — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 10:35:41 +0000

Ecommerce Fuelling Digital Payments In GCC fsssiteadmin Tue, 11/30/2021 - 16:05

FSS Launches Embark to Digitally Strengthen MSMEs

admin — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 11:49:14 +0000

FSS Launches Embark to Digitally Strengthen MSMEs admin Wed, 08/19/2020 - 17:19

Chennai (India), 19th August 2020: FSS Technologies (Financial Software and Systems), a global leader in payment technology and a payment processing company today launched Embark, an “Acquiring Platform as a Service” offering for Acquiring Banks, and Payment Aggregators. Embark facilitates digital inclusion of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME), with reliable, cost-efficient payment acceptance tools to expand addressable market, engage with customers in new ways and thrive in today’s digital economy.

MSME’s form the backbone of the economy -- representing an approximate 90% of businesses, generating over 50% of employment worldwide. Formal SMEs contribute up to 40% of national income (GDP) in emerging economies. Yet, the segment remains underpenetrated. Person to business payments worldwide to medium, small-and-micro retailers amount to USD 18.8 T, and only 37% are made electronically.

Embark, a multi-sided payment acceptance platform, orchestrates interconnections between crucial ecosystem players – banks, processors, merchant acquiring institutions and MSMEs — to address this opportunity and create exponential value.

With Embark acquiring banks gain access to an underpenetrated MSME market via strategic partnerships, without having “feet on the street”, transforming the economics of MSME acquiring. This alleviates acquisition and servicing costs and brings efficiencies into a high-volume, low-value business. Payment Aggregators benefit as they do not have to tie-up with each bank individually. Embark provides a single-entry point that reduces the time and effort spent on complex integrations, enabling them to focus on core business activities.

Speaking on the launch, K Srinivasan, Global Chief Revenue Officer FSS, stated: “Medium and small businesses are on the frontlines of the global economy. With Embark our objective is to bring MSMEs into the digital payment fold, a crucial step for sustainable economic and payments growth across markets. We want banks and other ecosystem players to collaborate with us in this journey and create a true network effect that would encourage adoption of digital payments and spur local entrepreneurialism and commercial activity.”

Commenting on the latest offering, Sandeep Gomes, Global Business Head Acquiring FSS, stated: “The digital wave is reinventing the MSME marketplace across the globe. Embark offers industry players a real opportunity to profitably tap into the underserved MSME segment by adopting ecosystem models to create a ubiquitous payment acceptance network and achieve service differentiation on the strength of innovative products and superior business models.”

An all-in-one acquiring platform, Embark brings the following benefits:

Omni-channel digital payment acceptance capabilities– online, mobile in-store channels, and a range of payment methods on a single platform to expand into new markets and support new customer journeys.
Complete set of transaction capabilities spanning processing, authentication, authorization, and settlement
End-to-end operations support including payments integration, connectivity to card and other payment rails, terminal and security certification and compliance
Access to innovative payment propositions enabling MSME’s to launch new services
Robust risk management and fraud detection capabilities to improve authorization rates
Unified reporting and built-in analytic tools for insights into business performance

An improved supply of reliable, easy-to-access payment services infrastructure unlocks new revenue opportunities and promotes growth. In addition, digital transactions leave an auditable trail that can be leveraged by credit constrained MSMEs to gain access to institutional finance for further business expansion.

About FSS
Financial Software and Systems (FSS) is a leader in payments technology and transaction processing. The company offers an integrated portfolio of software products, hosted payment services and software solutions built over 29+ years of experience. FSS, end-to-end payments products suite, powers retail delivery channels including ATM, POS, Internet and Mobile as well as critical back-end functions including cards management, reconciliation, settlement, merchant management and device monitoring. Headquartered in Chennai, India, FSS services leading global banks, financial institutions, processors, central regulators and governments across North America, UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and APAC and has 2,500 experts on-board.

Media Contact
Global: Rajalekshme.R - +91 9500088290
rajalekshmer@fss.co.in

FSS and Fair Play Partner to Bring Online Payment Acquiring Services to the Czech Republic

admin — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 12:30:41 +0000

FSS and Fair Play Partner to Bring Online Payment Acquiring Services to the Czech Republic admin Wed, 06/10/2020 - 18:00

FSS and Fair Play Partner to Bring Online Payment Acquiring Services to the Czech Republic

Amsterdam/ Chennai, 28th April 2020: FSS Technologies, a global payments products and solutions provider and payment processor, announced a collaboration with Fairplay Pay s.r.o. one of the Czech Republic’s newest payments innovators specializing in fair, fast and secure SEPA and domestic transactions for its full-stack online Acquiring suite. Under the umbrella of the partnership, Fair Play will deploy the FSS Payment Gateway and Merchant Hub for secure, online payment processing and transaction settlement.

FSS will host the Payment Gateway and Merchant on FSSNeT, its global payment processing center, enabling Fair Play to benefit from an easily deployable, scalable, and secure payments infrastructure. FSS will assume a single mantle of accountability for authorization, processing, clearing and settlement of e-Commerce transactions.

FSS full-stack Online Acquiring suite provides the foundation to improve business performance via the crafting of differentiated merchant-centric propositions. The FSS Payment Gateway offers a platform for ubiquitous payment acceptance via support for a range of alternate non-card payment methods to ensure an optimized payment set-up that accounts for local transacting habits for higher sales conversion. This is augmented by merchant lifecycle management capabilities and added value services including sophisticated 3DS 2.0 authentication capabilities, real-time fraud prevention and advanced analytics for improved business decisioning.

Commenting on the collaboration, Haresh Hemrajani, Head of FSS Europe, UK and America’s, said: “Online commerce is a fast-growing digital payments segment in Europe. We are excited to be working alongside Fair Play to support its expansion plans in the online acquiring space. Our unique SaaS model enables Fair Play to improve speed to market, deliver innovative online payment services to merchants and rapidly penetrate new segments.”

Commenting on the partnership, Dajnis Vasiljevs, Head of the Board, Fair Play, said: “As a new entrant it is critical that we earn the trust of our merchants. The collaboration with FSS enables us to leverage its globally trusted Payment Gateway and work with a partner who understands our business. As the pace of growth accelerates in the coming months, FSS will help us to innovate and scale at speed in order to fully capitalize on market opportunities.”

FSS Payment Gateway supports core payment processing and makes it easy for merchants to update their payment platforms by providing out-of-the-box integration capabilities. In addition, FSS is bringing a range of payment acceptance options for small and medium merchants including Link-based payments Invoice-based Payments and Pay Buttons. Built-in risk monitoring and fraud detection capabilities including support for 3DS 2.0 authentication reduces chargebacks and lowers fraud rates.

FSS Merchant, simplifies operations by consolidating critical merchant functions onto a single platform. This includes merchant onboarding, risk management, accounting and settlement across POS, Internet, and mobile channels. The solution offers acquiring acquirers the flexibility to adopt a progressive approach and integrate with a single channel and seamlessly add-on channels to meet evolving business demands.

With FSS unique SaaS model, Fair Play benefits from high scalability, security and compliance, seamless upgrades, and round-the-clock monitoring and maintenance to deliver an assured quality of service to merchants.

About FSS
Financial Software and Systems (FSS) is a leader in payments technology and transaction processing. The company offers an integrated portfolio of software products, hosted payment services and software solutions built over 27+ years of experience. FSS, end-to-end payments products suite, powers retail delivery channels including ATM, POS, Internet and Mobile as well as critical back-end functions including cards management, reconciliation, settlement, merchant management and device monitoring. Headquartered in Chennai, India, FSS services leading global banks, financial institutions, processors, central regulators and governments across North America, UK/Europe, ME/Africa and APAC and has 2,500 experts on-board. For more information visit www.fsstech.com

For media related info (Europe), please contact:

Louise Herbert

+32 476 81 13 92

louiseherbert@fsstech.com

For media related info (India), please contact:

Rajalekshme. R

9500088290
rajalekshmer@fss.co.in

About FairPlay Pay S. R. O.

Fair Play was founded in 2016 by a team of professionals from such spheres as banking, investment, digital encryption and finance and licensed by the Czech National Bank in 2017. It grew up as a FinTech start-up, aiming to bring a new level of corporate financial services for European merchants. As it has already found a solid ground in the market of SEPA transfers, the company is aiming to explore the market of internet acquiring with its high-end services. Fair Play is a Principal Member of Mastercard and using the technology of FSS it is ready to provide European merchants with quality financial products at reasonable prices. For more information about the company and its products visit: www.fpay.cz

For Media related info, please contact:

Danila Filippov

+420 724777874

d.filippov@fpay.cz