Top Four Things to Look for in a Payment Gateway Company

During the past few years, payment gateways have taken off, making online payments for products and services the favored payment method for consumers when making a purchase. Reoccurring payment companies such as Stitch Fix and Barkbox have driven the payments industry to another level, too.

A gateway partner can offer a complete payment solution, instead of customers having to set up and run all the software, hardware, connections, and security themselves. Although there are many different companies that offer gateway services, companies really need to make an informed decision on what they need and what kind of partner they want to work with.

We took some time to sit down with Sean Callahan, director sales for Payway to talk about some critical criteria to consider when choosing your gateway partner.

There are four things Sean said that are must haves when you look at what a partner can provide and deliver for you and your business…1. Ease of Integration, 2. Ease of Migration, 3. Security and 4. Industry Knowledge. Here are the details. Sean, take it away…

1. Ease of integration
Look for ease of integration when you are checking out partners. If a customer already is using your technology, then there is already an interface that has been written – and that’s a benefit for getting things up and running quickly. If we work with a company that isn’t already a customer, then we will work with them in setting up the integration – which includes working with their developers for the right documentation and the proper development environment to work in.

We make our gateway easy to integrate to for our customers. If they’ve already written to our API, then there is no development work needed on their side. But, there is testing that needs to take place to make sure sending and receiving of transactions and information works and that the communication pathways are correct. We’ll create a test environment to mirror the customer’s environment and once we feel comfortable the pathways are correct, the customer will go live!

Usually a minimum of one week of testing is required, because we want to test not only the gateway, but other aspects of the solution, for instance, merchant services. We want to make sure all of the funds go to the proper place. Sometimes testing can take up to three or four months, depending on how granular a customer wants and needs to get before they go live.

2. Ease of migration:
If a customer is moving their gateway from one provider to another, we would have to take the data or the information from that other gateway and bring it over into our system, this includes all account information such as customer names, address, credit card numbers, expirations, and so on. It also means making sure the timing of the movement from one place to another works for the customer and the customers’ customer too. We try to make the migration as easy and seamless as possible for everyone involved. When we look at a migration, we need to also understand if the customer’s system is running on older software. If this is the case, then a traditional migration won’t work for the customer, and we will need to find alternative methods to migrate a customer over to working with a new gateway. Because we have been doing this for many years, this is an easy process for a company like Payway.

3. Security:
This is a very important element of selecting a gateway partner. Customers should make sure the gateway they are using is certified and is PCI compliant. The gateway should be validated and secure and the partner should be listed as a P2PE provider, too.

We announced that Payway had met the certification requirements set forth by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standard Council’s (SSC) and is now a PCI Validated P2PE solution—helping customers keep their data safe and further preventing credit card breaches. P2PE is one of the best methods a merchant can use to protect their customers, themselves and prevent a credit card breach.

While P2PE has been around for many years, only PCI Validated P2PE technologies have been tested to the rigorous standards and should be trusted to reduce risk and PCI DSS scope at a merchant. With Payway’s P2PE solution we can keep our customer’s data safe while also reducing the cardholder data environment, which lessens the scope of PCI assessments, so customer spend less time, resources and budget on audits and more on getting business done.

4. Industry Knowledge:
An understanding of how the systems work and the ability to be able to communicate with customers is critical in a partner. We have decades of experience processing digital payments and got our start by processing subscription payments for some of the largest newspaper groups in the country. We have been doing this for clients for over 30 years and it is the reason so many industries trust us to process subscription payments of all types. Experience in this industry matters.

In fact, we were recently recognized by the CNP 2019 Awards for Best Call Center Solution: Customer Choice and Best Recurring/Subscription Billing Solution: Customer Choice. We have a reputation of reliability and authenticity – and that’s what you want in a partner.