The payments industry is made up of a wide range of innovative services, including multiple types of payment systems. Besides being quite an overwhelming task to individually select your partners and technologies, companies also have to ensure that all of these technologies are compatible. For example, payment processors support a finite number of gateways.
Payment platforms simplify the process of connecting to multiple third-parties and technologies. Various payment processors or PSPs already offer their clients a payment gateway service and merchant account- such is the case of PayPal and Stripe. These online payment gateways, different from payments platforms, focus on transferring payment data from the payer to payee or recipient’s bank account.
A payment platform offers more than one payment service, so that merchants only have to liaise with one company rather than multiple.
The only downside to connecting to a payment platform that offers both processor, gateway, and merchant account is that, naturally, merchants have to stick with what the company offers. Each payment gateway, processor, and merchant bank has unique pricing plans and additional features. Therefore, merchants may be better off partnering with different companies depending on their needs.
By offering a bundle of essential payment technologies, FinTechs are reducing the merchant’s work of having to select different technologies and then having to connect to them separately.
Single integrations are a huge burden for any company, particularly for traditional ones whose IT systems are incompatible with modern technologies. Aside from the paperwork involved, these integrations take months to be completed.
FinTechs companies have noticed this problem, so we see a lot of payment providers expanding their services and offering an increasing number of payment tools. Payment platforms can also improve your company’s own internal operations. They help you to better manage transactions, monitor data, ensure compliance with security standards, and keep track of fees, no matter what fee structure is in place.
Payment platforms typically include a gateway, processor and merchant account. Besides these main technologies, they offer some of the following tools:
Security is a top priority for any company, particularly financial companies. Payment platforms often offer high security tools such as Strong Customer Authentication, along with machine learning and AI-based security technology. They should also be compliant with all financial regulations, including PSD2 and PCI DSS.
Data monitoring becomes easier if you have all the data organised and compiled into one platform. Faster reconciliation and real-time reporting allows companies to get instant insights into payment trends, customer behaviour and their own business performance.
Payment platforms can provide merchants with reconciliation reports via a digital spreadsheet, so they can more easily identify problems in reconciliation, understand the causes of it, and add outstanding invoices to record the payments against. This makes processing payments much more efficient.
Some platforms also offer automated reconciliation, which can save companies a lot of time and resources, as well as avoiding extra costs, and reducing the margin of error from manual reconciliation.
Payment platforms can be really useful to simplify and optimise your payment system. However, for multiple payment options, you may want to connect to more than one platform or simply use different technologies and providers to best accommodate your company’s growth plans. In which case, you still have to do multiple integrations to each platform, and possibly wait months until the integration is complete. This is where Imburse can help.
Imburse is not an ecommerce platform, but a payment solution built specifically for the insurance industry.
We provide a wide range of payment methods and geographies to deliver a smoother customer experience for claims payouts and premium collections.
Our platform offers integration-free connectivity to all payment services and technologies worldwide, including payment platforms like Stripe and PayPal. By making a single integration to Imburse, you can easily and quickly connect with any payment platform you want. Moreover, you can do so in a cost-effective and quick timeframe, so there is no time wasted.
Large insurers can benefit from Imburse in the following ways:
The freedom to adapt to your business’s needs and what your customers want is now an imperative. Our platform lets you deploy all of the latest payment technologies and partner with innovative providers so you can scale your business to other countries.
Customers often want new payment methods, and online payments is especially popular. With the Imburse platform, you have access to all the tools you need to provide the best payment experience to your customers and fully enhance your internal operations, from auto-reconciliation to smart routing.
Get in touch with us if you are interested in knowing more about what Imburse can do for your business. Our team is happy to guide you through Imburse’s functionalities and provide you with a free demo.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the 8th of July 2021 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.
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