Four Essential and Emerging Payment Features: Why Flexible Solutions Improve Your User Experience

How many times have you heard “it’s on our roadmap” when you’ve asked your payment provider about new tech or a feature you’re looking for?

Many vertical SaaS companies are looking for a simplified payment experience. You sign up with a provider and they take care of the rest, enabling the standard options they’ve packaged up using their own tech and services from other specialized companies.

But technology — and customer expectations — change quickly. And no two verticals are alike.

What if your customers would benefit from accepting mobile wallet payments online? Or you’ve discovered that you could create a simpler, more reliable customer experience if you used network tokenization? Visa even offers discounted interchange for using their network tokens with certain card types.

For many SaaS providers, the key to a successful payment offering is staying flexible and adapting to those expectations.

Because no one wants to put up roadblocks to accepting payments. When customers encounter a smooth user experience that makes it easy for them to spend, everyone else in the value chain benefits from the revenue and the customer satisfaction that comes from that.

Related Webinar Recap:  Why Flexibility in Payment Solutions Enhances User Experience for ISVs

And with all the solutions the payments industry has to offer, a truly tailored payment experience is easily within reach.

In this post, we’ll share some of the most commonly requested (or anxiously anticipated) features and tech advancements that you can use to enhance your own users’ experience.

Hosted pages & embedded fields

Handling sensitive data is an important aspect of payment processing. A payments industry body called the PCI Security Standards Council has created standards that anyone handling transaction and card data must follow to keep the payment system secure.

Steering clear of these standards’ scope by letting payment companies handle the data is a priority for many SaaS providers. It saves money and avoids the worry of being compromised.

That’s where hosted payment pages come in. These are third-party pages that securely manage the transaction process from beginning to end, so you don’t have to worry about handling any sensitive data. When the end user enters the payment process, they’re directed from your own experience to this page.

Hosted payment pages are widely available, but they are not all the same.

You may want to create an experience with the payment process that’s consistent with your brand and the rest of your user interface. For this, you’ll need a hosted page that allows you to use CSS and other options to truly match your look and feel — rather than an option that means simply pasting your logo onto a generic page.

There’s also an even better way to integrate the payment process into your user experience: embedded fields.

With this solution, users aren’t directed to another page for payments. Instead, you can embed the fields that handle the sensitive data, such as card number, expiration date, and CVV, into your own form.

That enables you to stay out of PCI scope while still controlling the user interface where the payment is happening.

Network tokenization

Tokenization — replacing card information in the system with a nonsensitive token that’s useless to criminals — is a great way to improve the customer’s payment experience. It’s especially useful for SaaS companies that commonly handle cards on file, whether it’s for recurring payments for verticals like gyms and wellness studios or for patients paying their portion of medical bills.

Tokenization is commonly offered by many different payment providers. It’s important to be aware that the company that creates the token typically owns the tokens. Meaning: as long as you’re with that provider, you can use those tokens.

But if you decide you want to move to a different provider, you’re unlikely to be able to take those tokens with you without significant expense or headache.

And if you can’t take them with you, you’ll have to retokenize your merchants’ cards.  Which means they’ll have to reach out to their customers to ask for card information again. This is a large effort with the potential for losing customers who don’t want to submit their information again.

Network tokenization, on the other hand, is tokenization at the card network level. Card networks like Visa, Mastercard and Discover generate the tokens, which can then be used across processors and gateways, allowing you more portability and flexibility.

Related Podcast: Revolv3 | A Full Circle Conversation on Tokenization, Orchestration, and Innovation

But the most important benefit of network tokenization is the instant update of card information. With network tokens, the credentials always stay current — no reaching out to customers about expired or lost cards, saving time and money for the merchant while increasing authorization rates.

And, because network tokens are an effective way to prevent fraud, Visa offers reduced interchange rates on transactions that use them.

Mobile wallets & other payment methods

An important priority for many vertical SaaS companies is meeting their merchants’ customers where they are. Often, this means going beyond simply accepting Visa and Mastercard swipes to accepting mobile wallets and other payment methods as well.

Most payment providers can enable merchants to take contactless payments in person. This will enable mobile wallet payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

But if your merchants need to collect payments online, they will likely want to enable mobile wallets and other alternative payment methods. The ability to accept these payments in a card-not-present environment is far less common.

Terminals & hardware

Point-of-sale hardware has changed since the old days of knuckle-busting card machines. But accepting payments in person today still requires some kind of hardware or terminal to collect the card information.

This is a space that’s rapidly changing. A few companies are starting to offer a way to process card-present transactions without any kind of terminal.

The new capability, often called “tap to glass,” uses the near-field communication technology within Android or iOS devices to process payments.

For example, you could set up a customer-facing tablet at a medical clinic. The office could send a transaction to the tablet that would prompt the patient for a $100 payment. They could then tap their device or their card directly on the tablet — no need for extra hardware.

This capability is not yet widely available, but it’s on its way. And like so many innovations before it, it will change the game completely.

Gateways and their role in creating your payment experience

These and other specialized features are a significant part of creating the user experience you want. So how do you get them?

As we noted in the introduction, payment providers create offerings using their own tech and services from third parties. Your payment provider is connecting you not just to their own system but to an ecosystem of different players. These include companies like card networks, banks, processors and gateways.

Gateways are a particularly important part of the payment process. They sit between the merchant and the processor to package up the data for each transaction and send it along to the processor for processing.

But they do far more than that. Gateways often specialize in different types of transactions and appeal to different segments of the market. They are typically the companies that enable the capabilities we’ve listed above and many others.

Many payment providers that work with vertical SaaS providers prioritize simplicity. They create a standardized package of options to enable basic payment acceptance. To do this, they likely partner with a single preferred gateway.

If you’re looking to keep it simple, the standard solution may be just what you need. But that kind of arrangement comes with its limitations. You’re locked into whatever the provider has enabled. If they don’t yet have what you’re looking for, you wait. That is, if they plan to enable it at all.

Why flexibility matters

Having a flexible payment solution allows you to cherry-pick the features and functionality that enable a customized buyer experience. You can create the most elegant process and experience, no matter how niche your market or services are.

Consumers’ payment preferences and habits evolve quickly. Five years ago, contactless hadn’t gained any traction. No one tapped their cards at the point of sale, if the merchant even offered it. Now the ability to tap is everywhere.

As consumers evolve, they expect their experience — and their service providers — to keep up. You can’t do that if you’re constrained by your tech.

The Infinicept approach to tailored solutions

Infinicept doesn’t lock you into a one-size-fits-all payment offering. We’ll still handle the heavy lifting. But we’ll do it your way, by working with our partners to put together a solution that meets your needs.

Contact the experts at Infinicept to learn more about your options.