Easy Fundraising Ideas for Businesses

Raising money for your business is a time-consuming and daunting task. According to Alan Safahi, it is the most challenging task for entrepreneurs. In today’s article, we will give you some valuable and easy fundraising ideas for your business by Alan Safahi Orinda, an experienced entrepreneur and founder of a successful startup company in San Francisco. Read on!

Crowdfunding

Safahi says crowdfunding is an easy and quick way to raise funds with no up-front costs. Pitching your business through different online platforms is a practical marketing solution, allowing media to pay your business attention.

So, ask potential customers and people to fund your company. In return, offer discounts and exclusive support to your prospective customers. There are many platforms that you can use to get funds.

These include “Go Get Funding,” “Kickstarter,” and “Indiegogo.” Alan Safahi says these are excellent resources to start your crowdfunding campaign. Safahi’s research shows that Kickstarter is a perfect platform with over 22,000 projects and raised a total of $529 in recent years. Similarly, Indiegogo has achieved a goal of a 1,000% increase in funds raised for the last two years.

Ask for Local Help

If you want to launch and run a startup company, you can ask for some local help. Safahi recommends checking with your state, county, or municipal economic development organizations for funding your company.

According to Alan Safahi, Small Business Administration (SBA) offers startup development centers across the United States to connect business owners or entrepreneurs with investors. The SBA has made substantial efforts to help companies succeed and increase their economies.

So, you can contact these agencies to get loans, grants, and other financial resources, depending on your company’s location and the business type you want to start. So, it is an excellent way to raise funds for your startup.

Karaoke Night

In addition to asking for some local help and running your crowdfunding campaign, there are several other ways to raise funds. For example, you can create a karaoke night event. Most people won’t resist a fantastic karaoke night because they love getting behind the microphone and singing their favorite songs.

So, you can organize a karaoke competition for a fee within your company to raise funds. Not only is karaoke night easy to arrange and organize, but it also enables you to offer other things to the participants, such as food and drink, to generate extra funds.

Bowling Tournament

Alan Safahi says that fundraising events work when they are engaging and entertain people. Bowling is a fun and entertaining activity for most people and a sure-fire way to raise funds for your company.

It is crucial to ask people to donate money to your startup or company before signing up for the bowling tournament. You must also offer a prize for the tournament’s winner and runner-up to have an enthralling competition and engage the participants.

Corporate Dinner

Alan Safahi Orinda recommends organizing a corporate dinner to let members of the corporate world enjoy indoor or outdoor dining. Hosting a corporate dinner is an excellent way to generate funds for your business.

Make sure you ask the participants or attendees to pay the ticket price to enjoy the dinner. You can also initiate auctions and raffles at your corporate dinner to generate additional funds for your company. Some other fundraising ideas for for-profit businesses are:

● Sports day event

● Company concert

● Casino night

● Bake sale

● Arm wrestling competition

● Darts competition

Final Words

Alan Safahi advises entrepreneurs and business owners to focus on fundraising because, without it, not a single company can develop a business strategy and streamline its operations. Not only does an effective fundraising strategy reduce financial risks, but it also helps you generate additional funds for your company. 

Originally Posted: https://vocal.media/journal/easy-fundraising-ideas-for-businesses

How Pops are Helping Smaller Trades

 Traders in the Forex field know that the forex market is a place with no emotions. It can be merciless to both big or smaller traders. Dealing with the market includes dealing with anxiety, emotional and intellectual constraints. Yet, bigger companies still have advantages over the smaller ones as they can afford minor losses on the surface level compared to new companies. Smaller companies also find it challenging to establish a good relationship with banks emphasis Alan Safahi. With that said, whether you are a small individual trader or market players, all are at high risk of losses.

How bigger traders have the upper hand in the market?

So, what sets the small FX traders and the more prominent market players apart? Nothing, other than the financial aspect. However, big traders also use human resources for trading and transaction; hence they can make mistakes out of greed, anxiety, and exhaustion. Although everyone in the forex market experiences emotional and psychological constraints, bigger traders suffer less than others.

Two notable features that work in favor of the trading giants are money and information sources. The financial aspect and information sources are the two major weapons used in the FX market against newer traders. Think of it, when you have these important aspects in your hand, you are likely to succeed in the game more than the others. That’s where these traders are doing right!

Financial aspects — The people in the field, for example, the portfolio managers, are being paid monthly with a handsome commission. Therefore, winning or losing doesn’t affect their income. So, they are definitely not in emotional constricts, unlike smaller individual traders. Also, the traders that work in banks or any other financial institutions have nothing to fear about losses because the money they invest is not theirs’, so they invest a large sum of funding with greater ease.

Information sources — Believe it or not, most of these larger traders have access to insider information, leading them to take a safe yet proactive approach regarding the forex market. They know what they can expect from the trade position and how likely it will change direction. This results in almost accurate speculation on how the market should move, giving these traders mental satisfaction.

Global trading and latency

Trading in the Forex market includes processing orders on a global scale. The market receives different currencies globally back and forth, which are then reassessed using the market data from major hubs like U.S, London, Singapore, Australia, etc. As a result, the data collecting process can give birth to an inherent latency. Latency is a term used to define the delay between an order request and the order’s execution. For a greater chance of profitability, lower latency is required. That’s because it can take a lot of time analyzing the market, communicating with the broker for order execution, and executing the order; further delay means slipping away from the transactional timing, resulting in price reduction. These latencies can be present in internet connections, various exchange servers, brokerage servers, hardware, and software. The slower process results in increased latency, which alters not only the market decisions but also the global transaction value.

To further understand how latencies can affect the trades, I am quoting the CEO and co-founder of Singapore-based forex platform Spark System, Wong JooSeng’s statement below.

“To send an order to buy or sell from Singapore to London or New York takes about 180 milliseconds. Then, you need to know whether the order was successfully done or not, and the time taken to receive a reply is another 180 milliseconds.”

“It becomes very difficult to transact,” he further added. “By the time you see a buying price here and try to execute that, parties in London and New York that are much closer and have a much quicker execution time would have the advantage, while everyone based here would be at a disadvantage.”

You see, even a latency of just 180 milliseconds can pose a threat to the traders. Hence, the concept of minimum latency is vital to gain a competitive advantage. Speaking of latency, do you know what other aspect gets affected by latency? Latency affects smaller traders because the transaction of money gets incredibly slower. This happens when traders are only limited to one payment method. Multiple payment methods thus help to solve this issue. If one payment route is laggy, you can try the other.

Why should smaller traders choose POP?

Payment orchestration platforms, like Zed Network, offer multifold transaction routes for traders. They support wire transfers, direct bank deposits, credit card transactions, mobile wallet deposits, and much more. They also support cash pick-ups and delivery in multiple currencies. Not only that, POPs use intelligent transaction routing for higher approval rates and lower costs. By using a transaction fail-over process, they avoid lost revenue and reduce declined transactions.

Final Thoughts

The forex market has its own strengths and weaknesses. Payment orchestrating platforms indeed is a revolution that happened for the market; however, it can’t address all the concerns. To maximize the efficiency of a level playing field, the market needs a plethora of information, awareness, and lesser latency, Alan Safahi says. With that said, we are hopeful that POPs will be a powerful tool to level the FX playing field so that no smaller traders in the forex market lose the competition and suffer.

Originally Posted: https://zed.network/how-pops-are-helping-smaller-traders/

Why You Need Payment Orchestration For Your Business

With the new decade well on its way, e-commerce has safely established itself as the primary way people buy things. In 2020, the US recorded 10.8 billion dollars in sales on Cyber Monday alone according to Forbes, a 15% jump from the previous year. 

Because online customers look for convenience when shopping, card-not-present transactions have become widespread which drives more sales for online businesses. 

As an online merchant, your main goal is to provide a smooth buying experience for your customers, and a vital part of that is creating a seamless payment flow. 

People often forget that payment issues are one of the biggest reasons cart abandonment numbers can go up for a business. Providing your customers an excellent online shopping experience goes a long way toward building a successful business, and that’s why you need to create a payment stack. 

According to Zed Founder and entrepreneur Alan Safahi, your payment stack should work seamlessly with the entire website to ensure the customer journey is as pleasant as possible. That way, you can guarantee future business. 

You have to be able to check payment for fraud, authorize the payment, and then complete it while notifying the customer, and you have to be able to do this within a fraction of a second. 

The website should also be able to store card information for customers who want to use the same card for future purchases, and for all of these things, you need a payment orchestration layer. 

So you might be wondering what payment orchestration is and how it can help your business, right? Well, here in the following passages, we will talk about all there is to know about it. 

Hopefully, by the end, you will know what it is and the payment orchestration pros and cons, and why it’s a must-have integration for your business. So let’s get into it!

What Is Payment Orchestration Platform (POP)?

A payment orchestration platform helps you consolidate all your payment technology in one stack to create an efficient process without using an in-house payments team. 

ZED Network provides payment orchestration solutions to businesses that need an efficient payment platform with all the advantages of the largest merchant without the need for a bloated payments team. 

Every successful merchant needs a payment platform that allows for fast check-out. The entire process where the card is verified, authorized, charged, and the customer notified about the order going through needs to be within a few seconds. 

Your website needs a payment gateway to properly check a consumer’s card for fraud, check regulatory requirements, and plenty of other factors. 

Another aspect your payment platform should be able to accommodate to check the status of the card. All these factors play a vital part in the success and decline rates of your business. 

In the old days, ‘ e-commerce businesses could get away with one payment gateway solution for their business, but that’s not the case anymore. With new-age customer behaviors utilizing one payment gateway is not a possibility anymore. 

An efficient payment platform is something you need now, and it will help you reduce declines, improve latency, and maximize gateway availability. 

According to Safahi, using the right POP, you will be able to better manage your payment flows. It will help you consolidate multiple payment gateways, third-party payment services, and fraud tools into one view. 

A POP will especially come in handy if you are a business that handles orders from all over the world. Now that you know what a POP is, let’s start talking about why creating it in-house can hurt your business.

Down Side Of Developing A Payment Solution In-House

If you are a small to medium-sized business and don’t have a payment gateway development team in-house, then your decision to build a payment platform might be a bad one. Here are some of the cons of trying to develop a payment orchestration layer:

• Building a payment platform is a developmental burden for your dev team. You will have many internal projects for your team, and adding more will hamper the flow of development. If you are not using developers who are experts in developing payment platforms, it might even hinder your business. 

• Building the payment platform in-house will result in uncentralized and incompatible analytics. As a business, you need a lot of data, especially from the sales you make. Insights like total volume, number of payments, average ticket size, percentage of refunds, acceptance rates, ETC are essential. So you have to work with trusted PSPs (Payment Service Providers) will help you grow faster.

• Often with an in-house option, you won’t always be able to match the standard data formats. Using a POP that follows industry standards will help you manage administrative work overload. You will be able to flag outstanding transactions and overcharges for efficient payment solutions quickly.

• When building a payment platform yourself, you will be overloaded with integrating and managing communications between different payment processors, payment facilitators, and gateways. Creating the right payment platform takes time, and it might exhaust your time from focusing on other aspects of your business. 

• When setting up your business, there will be a lot of development work to be done. From Billing, ERP; CRM; to ERP, there are plenty of things you will need to do. When you are creating your own payment platform development, it might hamper your timeframe to bring the business to the market. 

Now that you know the cons of building your payment orchestration layer let’s talk about the pros of having a professional service provider’s custom payment solution. 

Pros Of Utilizing A POP

A POP helps bring many things in one place through a single API. Companies like ZED Network provide custom payment orchestration services. 

We integrate with all the right partners including Payment Service Providers, Acquirers, Processors, Gateways, Networks, and Security Vendors in one single platform. 

Here is what a custom payment orchestration platform helps you with:

• You have access to advanced big data analytics in one single dashboard to help you optimize your business. 

• It allows you to ensure automatic reconciliation. With the right POP, you will be able to reconcile transactional statements automatically. 

• It’s based on previously agreed rules the distinct payment providers set on inconsistencies in processing fees and payout schedules.

• Offers dynamic routing. Meaning you will be able to ensure a perfectly optimized solution. The Payment orchestration platform will help you with the acceptance and processing rates.

• You can easily ensure perfect risk management with high-end risk assessment solutions with custom payment orchestration layers.

• It allows you to take control of tokenizing cards. With you in control of Dynamic Routing capabilities, you can control each payment provider to perform tokenization independently, ensuring payment flow efficiency.

Now that you know the pros of having a custom payment orchestration layer let’s start talking about the benefits. In the following passages, you will find out how a custom payment orchestration layer helps your business.

Benefits Of A Payment Orchestration Platform

Regardless of your business’s size, a payment orchestration platform goes a long way into ensuring operational efficiency. While a smooth checkout experience is a fantastic benefit, a custom payment orchestration layer is a few other things. 

A good POP will let you salvage lost sales. Often businesses lose sales when transactions are declined. With the right payment orchestration layer, you will be able to monitor your decline rates, which will help you improve. 

You have to be able to manage multiple currencies with many payment gateways within your stack. Investing your time and money in acquiring customer attention is your business’s purpose, but losing customers due to transaction failures will be detrimental to your business. 

You have to build the average customer lifetime value, and knowing the reason behind your decline rates will allow you to improve your sales numbers.

Another thing that the right payment orchestration layer will be able to help you out with risk management. Custom payment orchestration layers have exceptional fraud prevention and detection tools that optimize your payment flow. 

Digital fraud is a big problem for online businesses, so working with the right team for your payment orchestration layer is imperative for creating a safe business environment for your customers. 

Work With The Right POP

So there you go; these are the reasons why you need a payment orchestration layer for your business. Creating a payment platform on your own isn’t a viable option as it would mean you will be allocating your valuable time and resources away from other developments. 

Working with the right POP is the way to go if you want to create an efficient payment flow. So take your time, do some research, and find the right team to develop your payment platform. 

If you have any questions regarding building an optimized payment orchestration layer, then feel free to get in touch with our developers. We will be more than happy to help you with all your queries. 

If you have any questions regarding payment gateway solutions, you can also put them in the comments below or hit us up on our socials. 

So that’s it for now. We will come back with something new soon for you. Until then, see ya!

Originally Posted: https://zed.network/payment-orchestration-for-business/

Payment Orchestration Platforms Help Businesses

Growing and scaling a global business is a daunting task. It can get really difficult to keep up with customer demands, the advancement of technology, economic progression in diverse geographic locations with varying customer demands, economics, regulations and risks.

What many companies and merchants overlook is the difficulties of launching and managing a multinational and diverse payment infrastructure.

Alan Safahi: These businesses tend to simply improvise and create an ad hoc payment system without long-term planning because it is not a fundamental part of a business’s core competence. In time, however, these businesses discover that a comprehensive payment orchestration process is required to successfully manage the operations and sustenance in the market.

The process is complex, and that’s why you require payment orchestration platforms to connect with banks and other payment services. The payment orchestration providers work hand in hand with new or established businesses in making a successful transaction flow. They now offer several payment tools that innovative and easy to use. These tools are taking off huge burdens of payment challenges from a merchant, freeing them from pains. In a nutshell, a payment setup has become more accessible for businesses and merchants. Let’s dive in deeper to understand the benefits of a payment orchestration platform.

It’s cost-efficient

If you have been in business for a while now, you may know that developing an in-house payment platform comes with a price. Many large brands invest a substantial sum of money in an in-house payment processing engine. While the investment is fruitful, not everyone is expected to handle that kind of expenditure. For building an in-house payment platform, you need to include aspects like implementing payment routing, providing customer services, minimizing costs that come with transactions, handling security concerns, monitoring, and reporting. All these can not only cost a fortune but demands human resources as well. Hence working with a payment orchestration platform (POP) allows a business to cut the expense required to build a payment setup and transactional costs. POP also reduces the operational and maintenance cost as it will enable effortless management for payment institutions from one place.

Collaborating with the payment market and institutions

The management of the payment market requires forging connections with various institutional operation components. For a smooth unification of the process, payment orchestration platforms help by acting as a technology layer with payment connections and infrastructures. The payment setup provides the ability to test various payment methods while simplifying the value chain.

Lets merchants take lesser payment stress

The payment platforms grant merchants the accessibility to developing their business without integrating payment infrastructure management. This helps you make strategies regarding your business prospect leaving all the complex payment processing action to the payment orchestration platforms. A POP manages payments and ensures all the technologies and tools are available to your business when you need them. POP will also help merchants improve their business and introduce new approaches and plans to execute an even more successful business.

Offers optimized payment system

Your business’ payment system needs to be optimized to achieve successful transactions. The POP helps you attain a strong payment route by offering a visually addictive checkout page, intuitive layouts, smooth customer experience, adaptability of payment systems for customers, and many more innovative features. Their payment routing allows flexible transactional flow using the best path for different regions. This ensures higher payment acceptance rates at a reasonable charge. POP doesn’t only enable transactional benefits but also offers reduced operational efforts, flexibility in payment methods, and easy access to modernized technologies for merchants’ convenience.

Allows a one-time integration environment

Even though many business giants integrate fast market entry to make their eCommerce platform a success, novel businesses and merchants struggle with incorporating local payment methods into their payment processes. POP thus allows a one-time integration environment for initial testing of the methods and providers before going live in a region. POPs also help to form connections across the world for business expansion by strategizing and weighing out differences.

Ensures uncomplicated customer experience

No matter how successful your business is or how many products you have in your inventories, what matters is how well your customer can relate to you. To increase your business’ relativity, you need to offer “the best” experience for your customer. And you do that by delivering fast and secure payment processing to your clients. A POP thus extends out a hassle-free payment approach by limiting the checkout steps, supplying a secure payment page, allowing tokenization capabilities for shoppers, and ensuring multi-fold fraud protections.

Final thoughts

Alan Safahi: When considering taking your business to the next level, a payment orchestration platform imposes many advantages. These advantages establish a successful transactional route for local and global customers and help to deduct high costs in the future that might affect the business.

Originally Posted: https://safahi.com/6-ways-payment-orchestration-platforms-help-businesses-9609a555aee2

Habits of Highly Successful FX Traders

Hey! Do you want to operate in the financial markets? Do you want to know what FX (FOREX) is all about? Well, you are in the right place. 

We will talk about the intricacies of FOREX and tell you about some of the habits that successful FOREX traders have. Our goal is to make sure you learn all about the practices that contributed to creating tremendous wealth for FOREX traders and their investors. 

Your actions and approach matters, as well as a FOREX trading plan that you will have to execute impeccably to find any success on the markets advice Alan Safahi. 

However, before we get into the habits of successful FOREX traders globally, let’s talk about what FOREX is. 

What Is FOREX?

FOREX stands for foreign exchange. It’s a decentralized global market for trading currencies. FOREX is one of the biggest markets in the world, where trillions of dollars are traded amongst traders from all over the world each day. 

FOREX trades are usually conducted between international banks, hedge funds, commercial companies, central banks, retail FX brokers, and investors. 

Successful traders create strategies that showcase a comprehensive understanding of the factors impacting currency exchange rates. 

While there is no ultimate FOREX trading plan, there are ways you can trade that will ensure you create a foreign exchange forecasting plan that works well for you. 

There are five factors you need to have comprehensive knowledge about, and they are:

• Economic growth
• Geopolitics or political stability
• Monetary policy
• Imports and exports
• Interest rates

You have to make sure you have a detailed understanding of all the events, micro factors, and macro factors. The more in-depth your knowledge, the clearer and more accurate your prediction will be. 

You may have come across many sites that offer free FOREX predictions, but you should avoid them at all costs if you don’t want to lose your money. 

If you want to create a successful FOREX trading plan, make sure you maintain an FX calendar that tracks all the economic announcements, forecasts, and other vital information. 

Now that you know what FOREX is let’s talk about seven everyday habits of highly successful FOREX traders.

Proper Money Management

If you want to be a successful FOREX trader, you need to know how to manage your money and how much money you can risk. 

Knowing when to stop investing in a lost cause and when to take the profit and cash out are all vital skills you need to be successful. 

Your approach to money management might be different from other FX traders, but then the end goal is the same. So make sure you do enough research and gain ample skills to ensure proper money management.

Do Not Get Emotional With Your Trades

The FOREX marketplace is a ruthless place. You cannot be emotionally invested in your trades if you want to be a successful FX trader. Make sure you treat the winners and losers in your trade portfolio the same way. 

The more you can do this, the better it will be for you because you will see the numbers and impact more clearly. 

If your emotional state is a bit down because of the FOREX market, then take a break. Remember, you don’t want a cloudy judgment when making trades on the foreign exchange.

Find Your Winners & Stick To Them

If you are thinking about getting into FOREX trading and you’ve done some research, then it may seem like the most successful FOREX traders are right all the time. 

However, that’s never really the case. Finding the right choice for your FOREX portfolio is harder than it looks. Even a 50% success rate is considered a massive success amongst traders. When you do find your winners, then stick with them and hone in your FX trade strategies. 

Cutting Your Losses Before It’s Too Late

FOREX is a highly competitive market that can work efficiently against you as well as for you. You have to be vigilant and monitor all the aspects if you want to be successful when trading in the foreign exchange market. 

Make sure you monitor all the winners and cut your losses before you end up losing a lot of money. Do not wait for it to turn around; if you wait too long, you may never recover what you lost. Cut your losses early and live to fight another day.

Repeating What Works

Successful FOREX traders know what works and create a plan with those. One of the ways FX traders sustain their growth and profit is by repeating their forex trading plan. 

The market does change frequently, but certain things stay true regardless of the situation. You may have to tweak your FX trading plan now and then due to new developments, but it will remain more or less unchanged, and you should keep repeating the things that worked for you until they don’t.

Knowing When To Scale And When To Lay Back

Your position in the market depends on how you are performing. Whenever you are in a winning position, you should sensibly try and increase your position in the market without overextending yourself. 

Now, the opposite goes when you are losing in the foreign exchange market. If you gain losses, make sure you start cutting back on your exposure to ensure you remain operational. 

When scaling up or scaling back, you need the right sort of payment orchestration solution to ensure your operation remains efficient, and that’s where ZED Network can help you. 

We are a Payment Orchestration Platform (POP) perfect for FX traders, FinTech companies and financial service companies who deal with FOREX. So if you want a comprehensive payment orchestration solution, you can talk to one of our experts. 

Finding Your Bread & Butter

The FOREX market is vast, and if you want to be a successful FX trader, you need to find your unique cutting edge. Working on your niche will help you gain an advantage over other traders. 

You should find your niche, and when you find it, you will see that crafting a successful FOREX trading plan will become that much easier. 

Whether you are focusing on a single currency pair or going over hundreds of charts to find a high-probability, low-risk trade, or something else entirely, the choice is yours, and you have to find your niche if you want to succeed. 

POPs Can Help You Be A Successful FX Trader

So there you have it. Those are the seven habits of highly successful FOREX traders that you should know about. 

These are the first steps shared by Alan Safahi to mastering FOREX, and you should follow them fully for maximum impact on your bottom line. Along with that, you will need a comprehensive payment orchestration platform that will ensure all the transactions go through seamlessly and safely. 

Make sure you do your research when building your career as a FOREX trader and if you have any questions regarding payment orchestration, then feel free to drop them in the comments below or hit us up on our socials. 

Our experts will answer every question you have without hesitation. If you want to talk about a payment orchestration solution, you can contact our professional staff. 

And that’s about it for now. We will come back with something new for you soon. Until then, see ya!

Originally Posted: https://zed.network/habits-of-highly-successfull-forex-traders/

Building A Payment Processing Platform

The online economy is booming, and the need for payment processing platforms is at an all-time high. It makes processing payments simpler and handles all the bureaucracy that comes with online payments from one entity to another. There are plenty of reasons why businesses need a payment platform. It can range anything from reducing payment service fees, startups looking into offering a gateway in an underserved region to companies looking to move on from a white-label service that cannot provide the support they need.

Now, if you are thinking about building an online payment processing platform for yourself but still cannot make up your mind on whether you should or not, then you are at the right place. This article will answer some critical questions that will help you understand why you need to build your very own payment processing platform. We here at the Zed Network specialize in providing comprehensive payment orchestration services to a wide range of industries that include Fintech, Legal Tech, Crypto brokerage firms, FX brokerage firms, MTOs, and other multinational companies. So we know all there is to know about payments, global and international.

Not only that but Zed Founder and entrepreneur Alan Safahi has over 30 years of experience in the information technology, telecommunications, and financial services industries. Along with Safahi, our team consists of highly specialized individuals who are industry veterans and that’s why we acquired a unique perspective on what makes startups successful. When working with Zed, we have constantly come across entrepreneurs who doubt their need for a comprehensive payment processing platform. One of the most common discoveries we made is that many of them didn't fully understand the size and scope of building a payment gateway from scratch.

The Zed Network team often had to clear misconceptions about the steps involved with creating and running your payment gateway. We realized that these questions are widespread, and many entrepreneurs are looking for answers. In the following passages, you will find the answers to the questions you have and help you understand all the things about building a payment processing platform. So without further delay, let's begin!

Where To Start?

Now, you may think that the first thing you need to do is talk to developers and tech service providers, but that's not what you need. To start the process of building a payment platform, you need to develop business relationships with either a payment processor or an acquiring bank.

Why Do You Need A Payment Processing Platform?

If you are thinking about offering a payment gateway as a service, then you need to connect it to a payment processor. It can be a merchant service or an acquiring bank, and these entities will move the transaction through the payment network. The payment processor will provide you with all the technical information you need to integrate your gateway with their system. Now, depending on your needs, you may even need to partner and integrate with several processors.

Why Do You Need An Acquiring Bank?

If you are looking to get a payment gateway of your own, you'll need a payment processor and an acquiring bank. Merchants usually have a merchant account to accept digital payments, which are provided by acquiring banks. The acquiring bank or the financial institute works on processing credit or debit card payments on behalf of a merchant. Your acquiring bank is assuming all the risks for your business.

That's why the bank or the financial institute will need specific financial commitments due to chargebacks, refunds, ACH returns, and potential fraud. You have to remember that acquiring banks are different from commercial banks that offer offers checking and savings accounts. However, commercial banks can have an acquiring division, but not all commercial banks can underwrite merchant accounts.

What Are The Technical Specs Requirements?

When you choose a payment processor, they will provide you with all the specifications necessary to integrate your payment gateway with their system and the overall payment network. Depending on your requirements and accepting many different payment types, you may need to get additional specifications from other acquirers or processors. These specs will help you make an informed decision on the technology you will need.

What Do You Need For Cross-Border Payment?

If you have a multi-national operation and need cross-border payment processing, you will need to partner with a specific processor that operates in multiple locations or partnerships with numerous processors. Local regulations on the regions you want to work in will also weigh on the choice of technology for your payment gateway. Local laws and standards can be a nuisance when growing your business in a region. That's why working with a payment processor that has a comprehensive understanding of cross-border financial rules and regulations is a must.

What's The Cost Of Building A Payment Gateway?

The average cost from our experience to create a payment gateway minimum viable product (MVP) is between 200 thousand to 250 thousand dollars. However, the pricing is dependent on the functionality you wish to incorporate into your gateway. The minimum viable product for a payment gateway will get you set up to accept credit and debit card payments.

How Long Will It Take To Build A Payment Gateway?

According to Safahi, It takes years to build a payment gateway from scratch, and that's why companies usually use payment gateway service providers. Most payment gateway services can provide customized solutions according to your needs. Many processors or acquirers may take months or even years to decide to integrate with your payment gateway, and until then, it won't be viable for market use. On average, you can chalk up the time to create an MVP payment gateway to a minimum of six months. However, it will likely fluctuate depending on the specifics of your request.

Do You Save Money In The Long Term If You Build A Payment Gateway From Scratch?

Well, that depends on the volume of transactions your gateway sees. If it's large enough then maybe you will save money. Many think that if they host a payment gateway solution of their own, they can eliminate credit card processing fees that they are paying to their processor. Well, that's completely wrong. Providers like Visa and Mastercard will always charge card network usage and/or processing fees.

The only way to eliminate interchange and settlement costs you will need direct integrations with card network providers. This is only viable if your company has revenues in billions. While you can bring down the surcharges with your payment gateway, that too depends on whether or not your revenue can offset the investment in building the payment gateway. There is also a wide range of charges that comes with owning and operating a payment gateway.

The additional cost of paying for servers and gateway product maintenance is just some you cannot avoid amongst many others. Now, suppose it's eliminating third-party gateway-related fees and offsets the annual price of gateway maintenance, PCI DSS audit, certifications, and other myriad costs. In that case, we recommend you take up building a payment gateway. Otherwise, it won't be worth the trouble.

What About Security?

Security is vital to boost customer confidence, and a secure payment gateway with a fraud detection system will help you avoid chargebacks and other problems resulting from fraudulent purchases. So, what security measures do you have to ensure? Well, let's check them out! Simply partnering with a processor and getting technical specifications for integration is just the beginning.

PCI DSS

PCI DSS. Any business that holds cardholder information must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard or PCI DSS. It's a list of practices that companies use to improve the security of card transactions and protect cardholder information from theft. Remember, the fallout from a security breach isn't limited to losing computer data.

It can lead to many problems like loss of customer confidence, loss of future sales, or the threat of legal action. It can even lead to fines per PCI DSS non-compliance and losing their merchant account if they have one. So, what level of PCI DSS do you need to comply with? Well, that depends on which level you fall under. There are four levels of PCI DSS compliance, and deciding what you need to comply with is a bit tricky. So let's break it down a little bit more:

Collection: Where will the cardholder information be collected. Will it be on the customer's browser, the merchant's server, or the payment gateway server?

Storage: Whether the card data will be stored on the merchant's servers or the payment gateway's servers.

Transmission: How is the data transmitted to the gateway?

Processing: How is the data processed? Is it processed by the merchant or by the payment gateway?

Now, several technologies you can use to ensure the security of customer information and protect the data against cyberattacks. However, taking up one or a combination of these services won't constitute PCI DSS compliance. It's a multi-faceted set of standards that cover a range of topics and disciplines. You can find more about PCI DSS on the PCI Security Standards Council's website. But to help you out, let me tell you about the technologies that can help you build a payment gateway.

EMV

The EuroPay, Mastercard, and Visa or EMV is the global standard for credit and debit payments based on chip card technology. All chip card transactions contain dozens of information exchanged between the card, POS terminal, and the acquiring bank or processor's host. Now, EMV doesn't replace PCI, but it was created to defend against the fraudulent use of cards in a store. However, if you want to accept any credit card transactions, then you have to prove you can handle EMV transactions.

EMV 3-D Secure

The EMV three-domain secure or EMV 3DS is a messaging protocol that allows consumers to authenticate themselves when making card-not-present (CNP) e-commerce and m-commerce purchases. It works as an additional security layer that helps prevent unauthorized CNP transactions, protecting merchants from fraud. The 3DS has three domains. They are the merchant/acquirer domain, issuer domain, and interoperability domain. It's the perfect technology that streamlines the user experience by improving communication 'in the background' between the issuing bank, the acquirer, and the merchant.

Tokenization

It's a process that protects sensitive data by replacing it with a token and is a measure that's used to prevent credit card fraud. With tokenization, the cardholder's primary account number is replaced with the token then it's passed through the various networks needed to process the payment. The best part is that the actual bank details are never exposed as stored in a secure token vault. While it doesn't ensure merchant PCI compliance, it is considered the best practice and helps reduce PCI DSS scope.

P2PE

Peer-to-peer encryption, or P2PE, is a system that organizations use to create a secure communication between devices. It protects transmitted sensitive information from exposure to intermediate devices on the same network. The best part is that it's usually used as a compliance solution for PCI DSS.

So that's about it for the security aspect of a payment gateway. As you can see, there is a wide range of compliance and regulations you need to ensure consumer security. These are considered vital parts of building a payment gateway.

Work With A Payment Processing Platform

So that's about it. These are the usual questions I have faced when working with many Fintech, legal tech companies, and FX brokerage firms. Hopefully, now you know what you need to build a payment gateway. If you are looking for steps on building it, then you can check out the steps on building an ideal payment gateway where I explain in detail what you need to build a payment gateway.

However, if you are a company that doesn't have revenues in the billions, we suggest you work with an online payment orchestration and processing service like Zed Network. We here at Zed specialize in providing highly efficient payment orchestration layers for all sorts of companies, even companies with multi-national payment processing needs.

So if you are looking for the perfect payment orchestration solution, then contact us. If you have any questions regarding payment gateway or payment processing, drop them in the comments below or send them in on our socials, and we will answer them all. And that's about all I have for you now. Make sure you check out the steps of building a payment gateway or some of my other articles. I will come back with something new for you soon. Until then, see ya!

Originally Posted: https://vocal.media/journal/answers-questions-on-building-a-payment-processing-platform

Reasons Companies Need B2B Payment Strategies

According to Alan Safahi’s research, consumers spend more with cashless or contactless payment options in 2021. Alan Safahi is a leading entrepreneur, advisor, and founder of a San Francisco-based Start-up Company who has done tremendous research on B2B payment strategies for businesses. Safahi says there was over $4.1 trillion in digital transactions in 2019.

Digital payment methods, including the incorporation of B2B strategies, have accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Alan Safahi Orinda’s research shows that virtual card spend will grow to $355 billion in 2021 and 2022, which was $136 billion in 2017. In 2013, the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of B2B payments was $5.83 trillion.

However, it reached $12.2 trillion in 2019. Over 1.31 billion people will use mobile payment applications by 2023. These stats show the significance of B2B payment strategies for businesses. In today’s article, we will mention five reasons companies need B2B payment strategies. Read on!

1. Improved Cash Flow:

B2B payment strategies offer an integrated automated virtual solution to improve your company’s cash flow. With B2B payments, you can cut your payment cycle by 50%. For instance, you will receive a clear statement and bill after every transaction.

When you pay your suppliers on time, you can take advantage of a longer payment period and increase your profit. Therefore, B2B payments offer improved cash flow and a free credit line than standard bank transfers.

2. Automation and Ease:

According to Alan Safahi Orinda, manual work leads to increased stress, making it challenging for companies to run multiple processes for paperwork and checks. On the other hand, B2B payments decrease the number of vendors significantly while allowing you to run multiple processes for paperwork and checks smoothly.

Not only do B2B payments save your accounting department a lot of time, but they also enable your employees to spend more time on strategic and value-added initiatives to streamline and grow your business. Because all expenses are typically settled centrally, a B2B payment strategy eliminates error-prone individual settlements.

3. Better Control:

A B2B payment strategy, such as virtual cards, allows for easy, simple, fast, and reliable online card generation. You can lodge these cards with your suppliers to settle all expenses centrally with a streamlined summary in one single statement.

That way, you can see a bigger and detailed picture through proper analytics and back-end reporting. Safahi says better financial control is directly proportional to streamlined business operations, leading to business growth and increased ROIs.

4. Better Rates Negotiation:

A B2B payment strategy enables you to engage with your business suppliers and negotiate better rates. When you analyze the bigger picture, patterns, and data, you can deal with your suppliers in a better way. Bear in mind that you must incorporate a suitable B2B strategy that aligns with your business.

For example, a B2B strategy is essential for the procurement department. According to Alan Safahi, if a business wants to generate maximum value, it must focus on a mutually beneficial value proposition. If you are a buyer, you will see a reduction in days payable outstanding (DPO), meaning you will pay earlier to get better supply rates.

5. Secure Transactions:

B2B payment solutions lead to secure transactions and reduce fraudulent activities. Safahi says digital B2B payment strategies make it faster to issue, process, and receive payment, leading to secure business cash flow.

The latest technology innovations will make B2B payments safer, smarter, and more secure, leading to seamless and efficient payment processing. Safahi’s research shows that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in address frauds worldwide in the near future, making B2B payments more secure.

Final Words

Alan Safahi advises companies to incorporate B2B payment strategies to achieve convenience and accessibility. You can self-service and pay invoices at any time with digital payments. Lastly, digital transactions are safer and more secure than traditional methods because they have secure gateways and streamlined processes, making it challenging for hackers and criminals to breach. 

Originally Posted: https://vocal.media/journal/5-reasons-companies-need-b2-b-payment-strategies