E-commerce merchants in North America seeking a global audience now have access to Payoneer technology that provides a single channel to multiple payment and fraud-prevention providers and payment methods.
Payoneer has integrated its payment orchestration platform into its core services, a year after obtaining the cloud-based technology through the acquisition of
New York-based Payoneer was looking to expand its B2B payment platform to include consumer-to-business payments acceptance through the payments orchestration platform (POP), which allows merchants to add different vendors for consumer payment acceptance, B2B bill payments, tax remittance, risk management and other features.
Unlike a payments technology dashboard for users, the POP is invisible to the end user. Payoneer operates it to help e-commerce businesses create "just the right region-specific mix of payment methods," said Keren Levy, chief operating officer at Payoneer.
"This way, no matter where the customers are, they will always see exactly the payment methods that are preferred in their respective countries and regions," Levy said. "This offers the best customer experience and an increased conversion rate."
Such an arrangement is vital for Payoneer's target merchants in e-commerce, social media, digital gaming and financial services by simplifying the payment process and managing it through a single API.
"A POP gives businesses access to a host of best-of-breed payment providers, methods and risk providers worldwide for merchants to efficiently and quickly realize their expansion and payment strategy," Levy said. The only task for merchants is to connect to the POP interface and add payment methods they feel fit their needs, she added.
Even though a POP generally would not deal with actual currency conversions, Payoneer operates as a licensed and regulated company in multiple jurisdictions, allowing it to act as a regulated settlement hub and hold funds in 60 different currencies.
Orchestrating the payment process is "hardly a new idea," said Tim Sloane, director of emerging technologies advisory services for Boston-based Mercator Advisory Group. But, unlike Payoneer's various capabilities, the problem has always been that orchestration engines operate at specific, and different, levels, Sloane noted.
"Some platforms simply route the transactions, while others enable routes to change, based on transaction content," Sloane said. "Others track global network payment value, while still others track all transaction types and different values, such as closed loop rewards, incentive points and others. Some even track and settle fees associated with each transaction."
Dallas-based OLS Payments, a unit of InComm, is an example of a company that has offered a form of payment orchestration the past few years, essentially offering clients a way to add acceptance of various payment forms and loyalty or customer-behavior analysis tools. In addition, like many providers in the digital age, the company touts easy connections to any other system or platform and pushes the concept of making complex transaction processing much easier.
Payoneer's Levy views POP as a new concept in payments, one she predicts will become a norm soon as more businesses seek a complex level of payment acceptance today and in the future. "With more and more businesses realizing its potential, we expect it to reach its tipping point in two to three years," she said.
The platform gives merchants access to the Payoneer network of more than 100 partners consisting of global, regional and local payment and risk providers. It includes features such as smart routing, common tokens, retry logic, consolidated reconciliation files and PSD2 optimization for payments throughout Europe.
"This adds more value on top of more common integration capabilities embedded in a POP with multiple payment service providers, and therefore helps merchants to optimize foreign exchange rates as well," Payoneer's Levy said.
The POP allows Payoneer to potentially expand to other verticals in which a global business needs to accept payments internationally. That would include marketplaces, retail businesses, e-learning companies, or streaming services.
