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I N T E L L I G E N T PAY M E N T S
PAYMENT FOCUS
In the money
As payment processing continues to rapidly evolve, Conor Quirke of Intelligent Payments examines where this subset of the industry is heading
of the accompanying bandwagon have grown up around the domestic acquiring banks and gateways in particular. Through the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and the Payment Services Directive legislation, the EU, together with the driving forces of competition, are now eliminating those 'domestic barriers'. In Europe, there is no reason why merchants, particularly internet based merchants, cannot get good cross border acquiring services, including payment gateway, multicurrency, fraud management, multiple payment method support and reporting from one provider at a low cost. New providers have an advantage over existing players of the industry. They are not encumbered with legacy systems and they have a better understanding of what e-commerce and m-commerce merchants demand; namely a 'one-stop shop' for all payments. They can jump to the front of the queue when it comes to functionality and product.
Electronic payments remains in its infancy. Credit cards only started to become commonplace in the 1970s and payments over the internet were for computers geeks up to the end of the 1990s. However, hanging on the coat tails of the internet explosion, online payments have spurned a new phenomenon; payment gateways, specialist acquirers, fraud tool companies, currency specialists and payment and security consultants have all emerged to take their slice of this growing industry. But you have to ask yourself: do we need so many disparate parties providing services to the same merchants? Operators want their payments handled securely, with minimum fraud, facilitating the payment methods their customers have chosen, and they want to be paid on time and for the least cost. They also want reliability and to be able to reconcile and understand all of this with simple adequate reporting. They want to concentrate on growing their businesses, not on being in the payments business. Payments are, or should be, a hygiene factor. Shouldn’t operators be able to get this from one source without employing lots of different companies? After all, it is the merchant who pays for all of these services and the more companies employed the more replication and the less efficiencies they get, driving the cost and overhead upwards. Of course, it is for historical reasons that the situation is as it is. Merchant acquiring was, up until recently, the domain of domestic banks serving domestic markets. All
New providers have an advantage over existing players of the industry
Old and new However, the traditional players have scale, some of them huge, making the marginal cost of processing a transaction practically zero. They are equipping themselves for the future through acquisitions of payment gateways and specialist service providers, hoping to bolt on the new technologies and functionality onto their legacy platforms. Over the next decade, there will be successful newcomers as well as successful legacy players. However, without doubt those merchant acquirers and payment providers that are successful will be able to offer the full gambit of payment instruments under one contract to merchants across Europe and do so at ever decreasing costs to the merchants. Myriad Payments is a one source solution provider of online payment processing services with specialist skills in the gaming industry. As part of the award-winning Intelligent Payments Group, it provides holistic payment, VIP and fraud management solutions built to enhance improvement and customer experience. Processing more than 60 different payment types in more than 180 countries, Merchants can improve territorial performance by leveraging from local culture online payment experience, automated know-your-customer tailored solutions, sophisticated fraud reduction, advanced data analytics, bespoke real time reporting, and least cost routing. Myriad Payments is also PCI (DSS Level 1) certi?cated and full support is provided to help operators achieve compliance.
CONOR QUIRKE
Conor Quirke is managing director of (Gibraltar) Intelligent Payments Group. Prior to this, he was a partner in ITPS providing consulting services and investment to firms in the Payments Industry. Previous roles include being a cofounder and sales & marketing director of OmniPay and leading AIB Merchant Services International Acquiring Division.
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