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Over the last couple of years, the Indian payments industry has witnessed an increased level of disruption. Many new value-delivery services have been introduced, payment innovations have been welcomed, and a gateway has been opened for discoveries.
However, with these innovations come many complexities. Banks, payment service providers, and other financial institutions need to keep pace and ensure they offer the best and most handy services to their customers. One way to deal with this is by outsourcing a part of the payment technology. This is when the need for Payments as a Service emerged.
Interestingly, the global revenue of the Payments as a Service (PaaS) industry isexpected to showcase an annual CAGR of 23.7%.
In this blog, we will shed light on what Payments as a Service is, its features and benefits, some related use cases, and can banks and PaaS providers work together.
Let’s get started.
What Is Payments as a Service?
Payments as a Service or PaaS allows banks and non bank financial institutions (FIs) to leverage cloud based platforms to modernise their banking solutions. This helps them expand their services quickly without incurring high upfront investment.
Through PaaS, organisations can:
- manage higher transaction volumes more quickly and at a lower cost
- Easily monetise payments
- Offer instant payment solutions to customers and enhance customer experience
- Leverage a flat fee with no transactional costs
- Increase business revenues and market share
- Be compliances-ready
- Eliminate financial risks, and time-consuming integration and certification demands
Since PaaS is backed by powerful and smart APIs, it also is easy to integrate, test, and deploy in just a couple of days as opposed to integrating a payment solution which can take months.
What Are The Features Of Payments as a Service?
Payments-as-a-Service provides many value-additions in a way that surpasses the boundaries of traditional payment systems in terms of both scalability and functionality.
Listed below are 4 features that set PaaS apart from legacy payment systems.
Value Of One Service Provider
PaaS eliminates the need for users to integrate multiple platforms or service providers to keep their business running smoothly. With PaaS, there’s only one platform, one integration, and one billing service.
Moreso, owing to its nature, PaaS offers an adaptive solution that’s set to adhere to varying business needs, market changes, and other unknown variables that may come along the path.
Flexible Technology
The Fintech industry is constantly innovating existing technologies to simplify complex payment processes and make them more user-friendly. PaaS makes it possible. With its adaptive flexibility, Payments as a Service is helping companies significantly reduce their operational cost, take their products to market much faster than usual, and improve a buyer’s journey.
Full-service Support
Almost a decade ago, customer support was more inclined towards reactive inbound support. However, with PaaS, they’re now focusing on offering more proactive services.
Offering proactive services, especially in a complex ecosystem of the payments industry, means anticipating a customer’s needs and actively reaching out to them with a potential solution. This helps an entity offer a better customer experience by addressing customer concerns proactively and even converting them into loyal customers despite some hiccups.
From integration support to account management and any other generic or technical concern, PaaS enables entities to offer full-service support to customers.
Better Coordinated Payment Ecosystem
Payments as a Service is not just benefitting its users, but rather all the stakeholders involved throughout the process. Solutions developed by financial institutions, payment processors, card networks, and merchants are directly leveraging PaaS, of course, including the end user – the customer.
To give you an example, when a merchant works with a payment provider also offering PaaS services, they get access to all of the payment provider’s features. These may include their tie-up with various financial institutions, card networks, wallet service providers, and more. This means the merchant doesn’t need to separately integrate with all of them but rather feed on the existing relationship. Such an open ecosystem, backed by PaaS technology, serves as a win-win situation for everyone involved in the play.
What Are The Benefits Associated With Payments as a Service?
Payments as a Service offers multiple benefits to all financial institutions, including banks across the entire payment value chain.
Let’s take a look at some key benefits associated with PaaS.
Cost Optimisation
Since Payments as a Service providers own both the hardware and software, the technology effectively reduces costs for a financial institution or a payment offering entity. This ideally includes reduced technology optimisation and management cost.
PaaS providers offer various pricing models, which not only add flexibility but enable entities to choose a plan of their choice and pay accordingly. A smaller institution can opt for a pay-per-user model. Meanwhile, a larger institution can select a subscription-based, fixed fee model, or as their needs allow.
Resource Optimisation
With PaaS, entities do not have to hire resources to develop a product or functionality. This means saved costs in terms of resource hiring and management.
Faster Functionality Roll-outs
Developing or optimising functionalities in-house can be highly time and resource-consuming. It also, many times, defers the purpose due to late entry into the market.
However, with PaaS, entities can leverage the existing, more mature products and roll out new functionalities faster than ever to the market. The technology helps entities gain the first-come edge and mark their dominance.
Better Reliability And Scalability
Payments as a Service offers better scalability as it’s a cloud-based platform designed to perform well, especially during high load hours. Further, its horizontal scaling provides a seamless response to changes and enables better and higher availability throughout the course of action.
Improved Compliance Management
Just like many other critical services, Payments as a Service providers also provide compliance support to their users. These include ISO 27001 certification, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) certification, compliance with data security standards, and many RBI mandates.
IT-related Benefits
With PaaS, entities can also leverage many IT-related benefits. Some of these are as follows.
- Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by almost 40%
- Eliminate the use of legacy infrastructure and bring innovations
- Manage transaction volume spikes with utmost ease
- Improve the productivity of the staff with better infrastructure in place
- Experience higher levels of resilience, uptime, and security
Can Payments as a Service And Banks Work Together?
Over time, financial institutions, including banks have realised the very importance of Payments as a Service. It’s quicker to adopt with better features and functionalities and helps reduce many overhead expenses.
Banks always adhered to keeping their services controlled internally owing to the nature of their services. Certainly, migrating their operations to cloud-based software offered by a third party was unthinkable.
However, after the introduction of many new regulations, the opinion of banks has drastically changed.
Banks agree that they need more mature services that help promote performance through scalability and security while reducing transaction costs to process high volumes of payments. And, Payments as a Service just fits their case.
Banks are now using PaaS to their advantage. The top three reasons why banks want to adopt PaaS are,
- Ability to offer flexible capacity
- Faster provisioning
- Reduced ownership costs
Besides these, banks that are willing to adopt and invest in PaaS solutions can also benefit in three distinct ways.
- Reduced Operational Costs
- Improved Performance And Scalability
- Early-adopter’s Edge
What Are Some Use Cases Related to Payments as a Service?
PaaS offerings can be divided into two segments – product implementation and operational services.
Product Implementation Services
1. Issuing Switch
This component offers an end-to-end application service that ideally ranges from onboarding customers to recording all transaction details. It helps complete transactions on both an online and offline basis. The issuing switch can further perform complete transactions – from sending payment alerts to converting currencies as well as processing and settling funds in real time, within seconds.
To give you an example, let’s consider a banking technology partner onboarded 10 cooperative banks on its UPI platform. The end customers of these cooperative banks will now have the leverage to link their bank account to any payment service provider (PSP) app and make payments using any UPI app.
2. Acquiring Switch/App
This component enables banks and other financial institutions to acquire merchants or aggregators. Here, the merchant or aggregator is onboarded on the bank’s switch with maximum value and minimum touchpoints.
Once onboard, the switch interface offers a credential or a token to the merchant. This token helps the merchant to integrate its API/SDK with the bank and offer services to the end customer.
An example of this component could be QR codes. Banks today, are offering QR code solutions to merchants on an acquiring switch that’s hosted at the service provider’s end.
3. Enhancements/regulatory Circular Implementations
The service provider will build the necessary solutions and implement new requirements to enhance or meet any regulatory circulars.
Operational Services
1. Reconciliation And Settlement
In general, three types of reconciliation services are extended by PaaS providers to banks or financial institutions.
- switch report
- core banking solution [CBS] report
- network report
Each of these has its benefits that users can leverage.
2. Dispute Management
With dispute management services, entities can manage all types of disputes by applying standard business rules. This means
- Transparent merchant recovery
- Quick reconciliations
- Manage dispute queues/dashboards
3. Transaction Monitoring
The PaaS support team offers services to fix any production issues, bugs, or problems arising in general to ensure smooth usage.
4. Merchant Acquiring Support
This helps acquirers manage their business processes and enable smooth payment acceptance for their merchants. The services offered to user Merchant Acquiring Support include,
- Onboarding of merchants
- Transaction settlements
- Fraud management
- Dashboard reporting and reconciliation
5. Customer Complaint Management
This module helps users provide customers with a seamless dashboard to log in their complaints and even update them through various channels of communication once their issue is resolved.
6. Analytics And Statistics
This PaaS module enables the user to get daily, monthly, or yearly MIS reports and even look at trends or highlights which may help them improve their business processes.
7. User Management And Security
This element enables entities to manage user access to ensure the utmost safety and security of their data at all times and levels.
To Wrap Up…
With Payments as a Service, financial institutions including banks have an option to offer cutting -edge products and services to their customers and even save high on unnecessary expenses.
PaaS providers allow entities to move to a more flexible, scalable, and agile payments model – offering best-in-class products via a cloud-based third-party platform. This new service technology is forcing entities to leave behind their legacy systems and adopt a more proactive and lucrative payments ecosystem that not only benefits them but the end users as well.
