A growing number of domestic schemes and regional payments initiatives are working to establish a tailored, unified solution for their respective geographical areas.
The aim is for these single solutions to enable multiple use cases, leverage centralized fraud-scoring and prevention to improve security and, of course, align with the required payment regulations.
A dedicated certification framework has a lot to offer. It can cut through interoperability issues and friction between domestic and proprietary payments.
Additionally, it helps ensure brand consistency, and the necessary infrastructural alignment of acquirers and issuers with the payment system.
Standardization also drives cost efficiencies by establishing control over interchange fees and sharing card and terminal payment application costs. Certification can help regional payment initiatives keep costs low.
Certifications streamline simplify and accelerate the rollout of each independent card and payment terminal application. New, compliant products can hit the market as fast as possible.
And finally, standardization supports banks and fintechs with regulatory and legal compliance burdens, as well as helping to manage increasingly complex governance issues.
As new payment channels and new authentication methods such as biometrics and tokenization bring new levels of security to payments, certification can streamline and share the innovation through the common standards it defines. This, in turn, drives down the development cost, enabling new players to focus on innovative implementation, rather than commonly defined baselines.
With the benefits of setting up a certification body so clear, the question is where to start. Collaborating with an expert partner who can simplify the process from start to finish and help stakeholders avoid the mistakes of the past is one option.
