Business and technical phases of a payment facilitation project
Many companies are considering the prospect of becoming a payment facilitator as the most beneficial development of their business model. Just like any other project, related to merchant services industry, a payment facilitation project consists of a business phase and a technical phase. Business phase is about finding an acquiring partner. Technical phase is about finding a technical platform. However, once you’ve found an acquiring\processing partner, you have to clarify several important aspects before proceeding to the technical phase. Particularly, you have to get the information on how merchant onboarding and merchant underwriting are going to be performed. That is, how a merchant account is issued to a merchant and how a merchant identification number is assigned (individually, in batches, or a unified MID for all sub-merchants). If you need to handle a lot of EMV card-present transactions for your sub-merchants, then you also have to find suitable payment terminal solutions and clarify whether they are supported by the processor’s system, and how to go trough EMV certification with your chosen acquirer\processor. Besides that, it you need to carefully address reporting and connectivity issues (i.e. which reports and connection channels you are going to need when working with a particular acquire).
If you are serious about launching a payment facilitation project or becoming a merchant services provider of any other kind, then you have to keep all the listed aspects in mind before starting any actual development and integration works. Read more about launching a payment facilitation project in our respective article on Paylosophy.