A white label product or service is a third-party commodity that you can offer to your customers under your own brand and logo. If your company wants to provide some additional value, but does not have the necessary resources to implement it, you can resort to the respective white label product. Although it is actually provided by some third partly, in the eyes of your customers (and, possibly, competitors), you will be the provider. Nowadays, white labeling concept is common for many industries and spheres, including the electronic payments world. White label payment solutions in this area include white label payment gateway options, white label payment facilitator model, white label merchant services, and white label payment processing solutions.
For instance, if you want to become a payment facilitator, but are not ready to face all the necessary requirements and upfront costs all at once, you can start with a white label PayFac option. Or if you want to become a payment gateway provider for your respective customers, you do not necessarily have to start building a payment gateway solution from scratch. Instead, it makes sense for you to use a white label payment gateway product.
The key benefits of a white label payment solution
The advantage of a white label payment solution is that you do not have to spend time and resources on developing a similar solution in-house from scratch. As a result, you can focus on your core products and services, improvement of customer experience, and attraction of new clients.
The third-party, that is, the actual payment solution provider, handles most of the business and technical issues, related to the solution. These issues include integrations, certifications, payment security, fraud prevention, management of chargebacks and refunds, and other white label services, depending on your specific business model.
The trick with a white label solution is that you do not really own it. In the general case, the payment solution provider controls most of the process, and you (i.e. the user) control only the customer interface (at most). However, even such limited-control option works perfectly fine for small-to-medium-size merchants and startups.
White label payment solution for startups, SME, and large companies
A common way to start accepting electronic payments for a startup is to operate through a large merchant service provider or a PayFac. The most well-known examples include such merchant services dinosaurs as PayPal, Stripe, and Square. If a merchant service provider offers a white label payment solution to its respective customers (say, sub-merchants), it can become a serious image-booster for them.
A startup or a small-size business, usually, has more or less common set of needs. These needs are met by standardized service packages offered by large third-party payment solution providers.
So, a traditional third-party white label payment solution is fine until the need for serious modifications arises.
Medium and, especially, large-sized (enterprise-level) companies tend to diversify their revenue sources and customer bases. So, they have some specific needs, such as support for particular geographies, currencies, payment types, as well as integrations with particular acquiring and processing platforms. Not every payment solution provider is willing to modify its white label product or service to meet all these diverse needs.
In order to get more control over the white label payment solution (i.e., to be able to modify), the company management might decide to either switch to a new provider or take the currently used white label product in-house for customization. The latter option is not always available. Moreover, more control means more responsibility (i.e. responsibility for payment security, integrations, certifications, and features you want to control and modify).
Flexibility of white label payment solutions
Flexibility is a fundamental principle of the Paymentech industry. So, present-day payment software companies are striving to develop robust and flexible payment solutions. While long-established large providers stick to standardized offerings, these companies develop solutions, that are highly customizable and come in different flavors.
For example, UniPay Gateway payment solution by United Thinkers is available in both hosted and licensed versions. If you are a startup company, your processing volumes are not very large, and the feature set you need is more or less standard, hosted version might be the best option for you. However, as your volumes grow and your needs become more sophisticated, you can take the whole solution in-house as a licensed product with open source code. Thus, you will get a white label payment solution with unlimited potential for customizability. And your first payment solution will be the only one you will ever need.
Conclusion
A white label payment solution is an image-booster and a resource-saver for all categories of entities: from startups to SME to large companies. However, the degrees of freedom, offered by white label solutions, may vary across different categories of businesses. Customizable and robust white label payment solutions exemplify the current trend at the market.
Feel free to consult our payment experts at unipaygateway.com to learn, which white label payment solution flavor works best for your specific business model.
