What is a payment platform?

The payments industry is jam-packed with innovative and truly enriching services. 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. Payment processors support a finite number of gateways, for example.

Payment platform definition

Payment platforms are simplifying the process of connecting to multiple third-parties and technologies. Various payment processors or PSPs already offer their clients a gateway service and merchant account- such is the case of PayPal and Stripe. A payment platform is therefore a platform that offers more than one payment service, so that merchants only have to liaise with one company rather than multiple ones.

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.

Advantages of payment platforms

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.

Payment platform tools

Payment platforms typically include a gateway, processor and merchant account. Besides these main technologies, they offer some of the following tools:

• Security and Compliance

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 and Reporting

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.

• Reconciliation reports

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. Some platforms also offer automated reconciliation, which can save companies a lot of time and resources, as well as reduce the margin of error from manual reconciliation.

Payment platforms can be really useful to simplify and optimise your payment system. However, 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. That’s when Imburse comes.

Imburse- your payments marketplace

Imburse offer 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.

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. With our solution, 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.