MBN Payment Systems: Building an omni-commerce hubDublin, Ireland-based...

MBN Payment Systems: Building an omni-commerce hubDublin, Ireland-based...: Building an omni-commerce hub D ublin, Ireland-based Alpha Payments Cloud launched an enterprise-level payments industry app hub in May 2...

Building an omni-commerce hub

Dublin, Ireland-based Alpha Payments Cloud launched an enterprise-level payments industry app hub in May 2013 with $12 million in funding to seed the cloud-based platform. Since then, the company has expanded across Asia, Europe and the United States. The AlphaHub was designed to connect merchants, banks, and payment products and vendors via a single interface and offers users the flexibility to select, switch and combine products as needed.

"We are positioning ourselves to be the Android of the payments industry," said Oliver Rajic, Chief Executive Officer at APC and former First Data Corp. executive. "We are removing barriers of entry like upfront costs, providing access to global distribution channels and boosting time to market for all parties."

APC Digital Marketing Coordinator Ronan McDonnell described Rajic's vision for the future as a payments industry where everything is a lot easier to integrate and much less fragmented. "He had this idea, similar to an app store, where you could turn on and off whatever products you wanted just through one connection, without having to build all these outward integrations into whatever product you want," McDonnell stated.

Catering to channel partners

APC builds the systems for its channel partners based on personal preferences and vertical markets served. "ISOs can tailor the solutions that are presented to their merchants," McDonnell said. "APC works with our channel partners to align the product library with the particular needs of their merchant base."

He added that the product library includes transaction, risk solution and commerce providers from across the globe. Categories encompass dynamic currency conversion, alternative payments, payment processors and gateways, ID and address verification, fraud screening, tokenization, sales tax and chargeback management, billing, shopping cart connectors, and loyalty solutions, among others.

Within each category, price points and system features vary. "You can customize which fraud tool to use by cost, by country, by card type, by merchant type, and you can use this to create a waterfall set of rules that will improve authorization rates and fraud detection rates at the same time," McDonnell said, noting that if one payment option should fail, an alternate option can be programmed to allow legitimate customers to complete transactions.

McDonnell further noted the ease with which integration is achieved after an ISO selects its desired product features. "We build an integration from our system to theirs, so we have loaded their API [application programming interface] essentially onto our system," he said. "The merchant can then come in, they have access to a suite of products, they choose the ones they want, and the products that are in use then are paid as if they were selling the product directly."

Addressing merchant pain points

With growing complexity in omni-channel commerce, resolving merchant stressors presents a tremendous opportunity for ISOs. "We are increasingly seeing a demand from merchants to align their payment strategy and integrations with their fraud and risk strategy," McDonnell said. "Merchants are looking to access different solutions in an easy-to-use manner so they can apply the right solution to the right problem rather than a one-size-fits-all approach."

For example, McDonnell pointed out that AlphaHub's back-end system allows merchants to set up the processes they desire. "Maybe you're selling products that are a bit more expensive, so you want better risk tools and you want to be able to take alternative currencies or alternative methods of payment," McDonnell said.

Having a single back-end connection also simplifies reporting. "You're not going to have to take your fraud analysis, your risk analysis, all that and cross reference," McDonnell said. "It's all going to be in one place … so you're going to be able to get some really good data out of our system."

He noted that primary targets for AlphaHub are midsize to large merchants who seek to consolidate different integrations or want easy access to new products as they expand business globally. And there is only one global merchant agreement to sign.

Updated: Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Add smart TV payments to the omni-channel experience

Anew opportunity is forming for the payments industry in the burgeoning market for multifunction, Internet-connected smart TVs. It's a market driven by consumers who watch less and less network and cable TV and instead stream content online, whether on a desktop, a tablet computer or, more commonly now, a smart TV. Leveraging payment functionality online via smart TVs may thus be the next big delivery channel for payment providers.

Boston-based market research firm Strategy Analytics said in its Smart TV Forecast that 76 million smart TVs were shipped globally in 2013, up by 55 percent from 2012. Western Europe is the biggest market so far for smart TVs, according to the research. By 2017, Strategy Analytics said, virtually all mid- to high-end TVs will ship with some form of Internet capability.

However, the "smart" capabilities of connected TVs are being underutilized by consumers; Strategy Analytics reported that only about 50 percent of smart TV owners in the United States and Europe utilize that online functionality. "[S]o vendors must continue to add compelling applications and services to entice consumers to utilize their platforms," said Strategy Analytics Analyst Eric Smith.

Pay-by-clicker

One such vendor is Paymentwall Inc., a global e-commerce service provider headquartered in San Francisco. The firm is an aggregator of online solutions, including an international payment gateway, a mobile carrier billing platform and an alternative prepaid platform. Paymentwall has offices in nine countries, including China, Germany, Turkey and Brazil.

Paymentwall Chief Executive Officer Honor Gunday said the company has integrated all its features into a smart TV application, PW Smart TV, which facilitates payments for the online streaming of movies and other content. The solution is geared toward developers who build applications for smart TVs.

Gunday said that, in the last few years, at least 5,000 applications have been written for smart TVs from around 3,000 developers worldwide. The problem is monetizing those applications. "These developers who produce these applications on many TV platforms have to find a way to monetize the users, monetize the content, monetize the services that they provide. And they do this on their own," Gunday said. "But what Paymentwall enables them to do right now is integrate Paymentwall on any TV so they can process a payment."

Paymentwall's user interface (UI) allows consumers to choose content and pay for it by entering a credit card number, for example, using the numeric keys on the TV's remote control. "They don't have to type addresses," Gunday said. "They don't have to type in other details. Once that's done, our system tokenizes the credit card details [and] saves it in our vault."

The entry of the card number is a one-time action for consumers, Gunday added. "Our system is smart enough to recognize all the users using the TV once we store and tokenize the card details," he said. "They don't have to keep inputting the card details when they are using a credit card."

Paymentwall also allows consumers to intitate transactions with secondary mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. "Most people, statistically speaking, always have a cell phone when they are sitting on their couch in the living room," Gunday said. "They can pay on the mobile device and our system communicates directly with the TV and executes the payment on the phone, but indicates the fact that its executed through the TV via an API [application protocol interface]."

A demo of PW Smart TV is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWhQ0VDEL_Q&feature=youtu.be .

Smart fridges, too?

Gunday said smart TV payments are akin to the traditional pay-per-view model, with consumers accessing content on TVs by paying pay-per-view providers, typically via phone. But the big difference in the smart TV realm is the flexibility of integrating payments from many providers on one multifaceted platform, according to Gunday.

The potential payment volume flowing through smart TVs is hard to quantify in this early stage in the market's development. However, consumers in the developed world still like to watch TV; Americans love it, to the tune of 8 hours per day, Gunday said, with consumers in Turkey coming in second at a daily average of 5 hours.

The demographic shift away from traditional TV watching by younger generations of consumers (and toward accessing content via mobile devices) will not dampen the smart TV market, at least for the next 10 years, according to Gunday.

Indeed, TVs are a staple of living rooms around the world and remain a strong focal point for communal gatherings to watch sporting events and movies, for instance. Additionally, smart TVs have become the hub of entertainment centers, where gaming consoles and other devices can be connected and content enjoyed on the larger screens that TVs provide.

Gunday noted that the card brands have put smart TV payments in the card-not-present category, which comes with a higher interchange rate because of the increased risk of fraud on those transactions. PW Smart TV does not employ standard customer authentication protocols, such as the 3D Secure technology developed by the card brands, because it would complicate the user interface.

"Otherwise they would have extra pop-ups happening inside the UI," Gunday said. "And once you eliminate that you are more prone to risk and chargebacks."

Instead, Paymentwall has developed its own proprietary authentication technology that leverages consumers' Wi-Fi networks to which smart TVs are connected. "The geo location and device ID of the smart TV and so on verify that it is the user that we think it is," Gunday said.

Regardless of the hurdles facing smart TV payments, it is clear the omni-channel user experience will one day advance beyond smart TVs to smart refrigerators and smart kitchens, too.

Gunday said electronics giant Samsung contacted Paymentwall to investigate adding payment functionality to one of its refrigerator lines so that consumers could purchase such goods as milk and eggs from UIs built into the units. Gunday said such a potential application is still well into the future, but achievable.