Building a successful payment infrastructure is foundational to the success of your business. Whether you’re a B2B manufacturer, a large national distributor, an e-commerce company, or anything in between, you need efficient, reliable technologies that let you quickly process orders, reconcile your transactions, and get paid.
It can be tempting – especially in the early stages of building your business – to implement any solution that lets you get started quickly. However, as you grow, you’ll find the need for a purpose-built system that supports the unique ways you work today – and the ways you plan to scale your business in the future.
What is a Payment Infrastructure?
Your payment infrastructure is – in short – whatever collection of hardware, software, and processes that let you accept payments, reconcile transactions, and move funds into your corporate bank account. It can include everything from your payment terminals and e-commerce gateways to your ERP system and even your merchant account.
A modern payment infrastructure needs to be efficient, secure, and flexible. When designed correctly, it minimizes friction in your workflows, reduces manual data entry, ensures faster reconciliation, and allows your internal teams to operate at full efficiency. Easy enough…right?
Matching Your Current Model—And Supporting Future Growth
When building a payment infrastructure, the most important thing is to consider how you do business now, as well as how that may evolve in the future. Start with a complete evaluation of how you currently accept payments:
- Are you processing exclusively through an e-commerce platform?
- Do you operate brick-and-mortar stores with physical terminals or POS devices?
- Are phone orders processed by internal agents—or do you outsource them to a call center?
- Do you accept payments during field visits or at trade shows?
For the sake of efficiency, one omni-channel platform should support all these options. Even if they aren’t currently part of your business model, you should keep the door open for launching a website, introducing recurring subscriptions, or otherwise growing your business on your existing infrastructure. Starting with a system you can’t scale will inevitably lead to a costly overhaul at some point in the future.
Similarly, you need to account for unique business processes, such keeping cards on file for returning customers, scheduling recurring payments, or delaying settlements on made-to-order products. A flexible transaction processing engine lets you manage these processes without trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
Meeting Your Customers’ Payment Preferences
In that same vein, you need to accept all the payment methods that your customers want to use today, while remaining open to new technologies in the future. Today, that may look like a simple setup for accepting credit and debit cards. However, it may also eventually expand to supporting ACH payments for large corporate customers, accepting mobile payments, or sending payment links to a customer’s email address for them to pay on their own time.
Security and Compliance: Built In, Not Bolted On
When you’re managing customers’ credit card data, PCI compliance is a non-negotiable. But dealing with the entire burden on your own can be an ongoing headache – especially if you’ve got a small IT team that wears multiple hats. That’s why it can be a major benefit to choose a payment processing partner that builds security into their hardware and software. While you’ll still want to work with a Qualified Security Assessor to make sure you’re meeting all of your obligations as a merchant, you can often offload much – if not all – of the compliance burden to a Level 1 Service Provider. They build compliance into their hardware and software and complete the complicated annual audits; you get to rely on that foundation to reduce your own obligations.
With Curbstone, for instance, credit card terminals are pre-configured before they’re shipped out. For the merchant, they’re essentially “plug-and-play”; this can save hours – if not days – of work for an organization that operates several payment stations across multiple stores.
Of course, your due diligence process needs to involve asking vendors how they secure your data, rather than just taking their word for it. From a technical perspective, you should be processing, storing, or transmitting as little data on your own infrastructure as possible. (Tokenization is an excellent method of accomplishing this.) Not only do you reduce your PCI scope, but you also limit the amount of data that’s present in your environment if a breach were to occur.
An Additional Note on Risk Reduction
As you build out your payment infrastructure, you don’t just have to think about ways to protect your business from cyber threats; you also have to think about ways to protect your business from fraudulent transactions (and the resulting financial hit.) Consider, for instance, how much information you want to verify during online checkout. Should you run a full address match or just the zip code? Too strict of a policy can lead to a higher rate of declined transactions (and lost sales), but too lenient of a policy can lead to a higher rate of chargebacks. Determine the right balance based on your risk tolerance – then make sure your infrastructure can support the strategy you want to put in place.
Seamless Integration with Business Systems
A successful payments infrastructure isn’t bolted on to the other technologies you use to run your business; it’s integrated into your existing workflows.
Start by identifying what other technologies your team uses during your order-to-cash workflow. Does it begin in an ERP or an order entry application? If so, manually switching to a separate payment system to charge a customer’s credit card partway through that process wastes time and invites errors. Instead, building transaction processing into that system lets your team stay in their native environment.
Understanding Fees and Finding Cost Efficiencies
Payment processing fees can be confusing – not to mention expensive if left unchecked. (We won’t go into too extensive details here, but for a deeper look, check out our Merchant’s Guide to Swipe Fees and our comparison of interchange plus pricing vs. flat-rate pricing.)
That said, when you’re building a payments infrastructure, don’t just account for up-front hardware purchases or software subscriptions. Cost out interchange fees and downgrades; monthly service charges, support contracts, and other potential expenses to assess the total impact on your bottom line.
If you’re working on a modernization project and not setting up your infrastructure from scratch, don’t overlook the opportunity to audit your most recent fee statement. If it’s been 12+ months since you signed your merchant agreement, you might be overpaying; this gives you an excellent opportunity to make sure you’re still getting the most competitive rates.
Other Key Considerations
A few last things you’ll want to take into account as you build your payments infrastructure:
- Are you building your foundation on reliable systems? Uptime needs to target 5-nines. Anything less runs the risk of major disruptions to your sales and revenue.
- How easy will training be? More importantly – will the system be easy enough for your staff to reliably and consistently use over time? What frustrates them now about their current situation – and are there any ways to avoid those frustrations with minor modifications?
- How and where can you get support? If a key part of your infrastructure goes down in the middle of the night, who’s there to get it back up and running? What if you’re not entirely sure if the problem lies with your hardware, software, processor, or bank? Will you have a place to turn for clear answers?
Start Building an Integrated Payments Infrastructure with Curbstone
A modern payment infrastructure should do more than process transactions – it should support your operations, protect your data, and position you for growth.
Whether you’re looking to simplify PCI compliance, unify payment processing across all channels, or integrate with your IBM i-based applications, Curbstone can help. Contact us now to start the conversation about improving payments at your business.
