The Risks to Online Business from Banking Failures
With summer in full swing, we hope that those of you in the northern hemisphere are keeping cool and enjoying some well earned rest and recuperation.
While we have a feature freeze in place at IXOPAY until the middle of August, there are still a number of updates to announce covering both existing adapters and the platform itself - you can find a summary at the end of this newsletter, as per usual.
We?are pleased to be able to announce a new partnership this month. IXOPAY has partnered with TrustPay, who provide both global and regional payment services as well as additional financial services for merchants. More information is available in the?official announcement?on our website.
Following the recent collapse of Silicon Valley and the ensuing turmoil faced by some merchants as a result, we have taken a look at how merchants can insulate themselves from the risk of future upheaval in the banking and financial markets. The next crisis will undoubtedly come, and the fallout can case a long shadow, with Wirecard still periodically making the news many years on. Diversification goes a long way to protecting merchants from the fallout of a particular bank or provider going out of business, and IXOPAY has diversification baked in as a feature. You can read more on this subject in this month's expert article.
Our payment glossary also continues to grow. The latest term added is "Load balancing", as voted for by the participants of our?LinkedIn?poll.?Thanks to everyone who voted, and don't forget to let us know if there are any terms you would like us to cover in the future.
Highlights
IXOPAY has partnered with TrustPay . TrustPay offers a large range of both regional and global payment services, as well as additional financial services, such as merchant bank accounts.?This strategic partnership will enable merchants to leverage the benefits of the IXOPAY payment orchestration platform while tapping in to TrustPay's extensive portfolio of payment methods.
A few months ago, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank highlighted the risks that online platforms are exposed to if they are reliant on a particular finanical institute or payments processor. A few years back, the collapse of Wirecard left many online merchants high and dry and scrambling to find an alternative payments provider at short notice. Payment orchestration can help online merchants mitigate these risks and insulate them from the worst consequences of banking failures and future financial crises. Read more in our latest article.
Smart transaction routing is at the heart of payment orchestration. IXOPAY’s Routing Engine offers various routing rules, including rules for load balancing. Using load balancing, you can route a specific share of transactions to different payment providers, e.g. 50% to provider A and 25% each to providers B and C.
This has various use cases, ranging from risk management to A/B testing. Find out more in our latest glossary entry.
Adapters
Extensions
Support for refunds and partial refunds has been added for Payconiq by Bancontact Mobile.
Payouts via credit card can now be made on both of checkout.com’s platforms.?
The check that data has been entered in mandatory fields in EMPGenesis has been removed, as these mandatory fields can be disabled for the merchant by the PSP.
Straight2Bank
Support has been added for refund transactions.?The settlement report has been extended to include the GST (Goods and Service Tax) amount and charge amount.
Pagination support has been added when retrieving the list of banks from Volt.
Payouts can now be made to credit cards using the Worldpay adapter.
An SFTP host and SFTP private key with optional passphrase can now be used instead of a password.
IXOPAY in 60 Seconds
One of the challenges of a multi-acquirer setup is dealing with the different formats and granularity of reconciliation and settlement data provided by payment providers. This information needs to be verified and, once verified, shared with additional systems in the merchant's IT landscape. Needing to manually process and transform this data into a format that is compatible with external systems presents additional overheads for merchants that only grows with the number of payment providers.
IXOPAY consolidates this process within a single platform. Settlement and reconciliation data from payment service providers is collated within the IXOPAY platform, where it can be compared to the transaction data to ensure the two match. Any conflicts - missing transactions, rounding errors or issues with currency conversions - are made visible in IXOPAY and flagged accordingly. Notifications can be sent automatically in the case of conflicts, allowing administrators to step in and either correct the records or mark them for further processing.
IXOPAY can output reports in a unified format that is suitable for import into third-party systems, providing a bridge between the disparate formats used by payment service providers and a merchant's IT systems. A single format can be defined for all payment providers that transforms data on transactions into one suitable for the target system.