Your Software Platform’s White-Label Payment Solution: Stax Connect
Banks and the finance industry have a reputation for being conservative in their approach to technology, and apart from a few disruptive startup banks and brokerage outfits, it’s a justified description.
A slip up in the way that financial technology is used can cost millions, if not billions. That’s why many financial institution’s IT assets could pass as a catalog. Tried and tested platforms and procedures that work will only ever change slowly — and any other organization interacting with banks or financial companies must follow their lead.
In a digital environment dominated by APIs and data exchange, that can be increasingly frustrating. For software development companies especially, some of the more archaic practices can prevent the type of agility in their platforms that are differentiators in competitive verticals. Taking payments in person or online via the web or apps is a must-have for businesses and therefore a deal-breaker for many projects but setting up the required infrastructure can be cripplingly slow and byzantine for developers.
There are plenty of ready-made solutions out there on the market for individual businesses to start taking payments, many of them now household names with large advertising budgets. But these are expensive, especially when used at scale or — for software shops with multiple products — in numerous instances.
To get around this significant cost barrier, many organizations invest in developing at least partially self-written solutions. Reputable payment gateways publish API specs, and there are ready-made risk analysis and insurance products that create some level of surety for developers. General concerns like PCI-DSS compliance and card detail retention can be solved, and there are solutions for the tokenization of personally identifiable information and handling chargeback procedures.
Now, there is an investment to be made here in time and resources, plus the inherent risk of fraud and falling foul of governance and statutory regulations — all of which are massively compounded if there is an international trade element or overseas use for the end product.
At Tech HQ, we’ve been looking at the fintech industry niches that are connected to payment and reconciliation technology. Like the online-only startup banks competing alongside the old-school institutions, disruptive organizations offer new, digitally-native solutions to some of these problems that development teams come up against.
Many of the traditional stumbling blocks to providing electronic payments at scale (and for multiple app instances) are immediately taken care of by Stax, a provider with a specific platform designed for development teams that wish to sell on payment facilities in various forms. Stax Connect provides ready-made relationships with banks, and the large numbers of transactions that Stax handles over its various offerings mean it leverages the best for its customers. Without this traffic volume, rates for payment gateways and monetary exchange would be beyond most organizations. Plus, the same breadth of offering — it offers individual merchants e-commerce facilities and ePOS, for example.
Stax Connect also manages the details of electronic transactions that cause problems in edge-cases: expiring cards, re-charging cards, part payments, chargebacks, and PCI-DSS-compliant data retention. There’s also a great deal of protection from fraud — electronic KYC is a problematic capability to deploy well at low cost, but Stax Connect users can get their clients up and running, signing up validated customers across multiple territories quickly and easily.
With intermediaries in electronic commerce of any type, there are fees to be paid and reconciliations to be made. Stax Connect lets software houses monetize their offerings of payment implementations, with the capability paid for by a fraction of a percent levy on each transaction. That fee is split between Stax and the development shop. Settlements of all monies between the parties can be controlled, scheduled, or made manually — the service is about as transparent as financial security allows.
What sets the Stax Connect capabilities apart is the support and advice on tap from the Stax company. As a long-time player in this market and with broad experience in all aspects of digital retail, it offers advice on maximizing the platform, and accelerates revenues by advising on new payment integrations and can even supply readymade sales & marketing programs. That help and direction can be invaluable in developing extra revenue streams from monetizing platforms in ways that may not have been envisaged by pure-play developers and operations experts.
The platform ties in neatly with martech, various CRMs, social media, and so on, meaning developers or their customers can leverage these channels. For many software houses, it offers real extra value for clients because of the out-of-the-box capabilities and extensive feature-set of Stax Connect.
Fintech is rapidly changing whole sectors of the finance industry, but in each area, there is the recurring theme of data exchange via secure APIs. The mindset of developers increasingly is one of integration and interchange of information: it comes as no surprise that it takes a software development company like Stax to provide a service for fellow development outfits and their clients.
In a future article we’ll be looking in more detail the extensive benefits that Stax Connect offers, but as a platform with multiple capabilities designed to drive growth and increase revenues, it’s an offering you will want to learn more about: get in touch with the Stax Connect team today and schedule a demo.
