Advice
Find the right partner to help you expand international pay-ins and payouts.
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| 1 | Coverage and capabilities | ↓ |
| 2 | Technology stack | ↓ |
| 3 | Value-added services | ↓ |
| 4 | Knowledge and support | ↓ |
When choosing a payment provider, the last thing you want is buyer’s remorse. Getting part-way into a business relationship and realizing you’ve made a mistake. Or learning there’s a better option out there yet you’re locked in.
With that in mind, we offer some advice when selecting a cross-border payments provider.
First, understand that any payments partnership is a two-sided relationship. Your business should be clear about its strategic aims and direction. This will help determine what questions to ask during a request for proposal (RFP) process. Plus, how to weight the answers.
Second, you’ll need to consider what type of client and partner you are. Partnership chemistry is essential. And your business contributes at least 50% towards making this success.
That being said, consider the following four areas when evaluating potential cross-border payment providers:
This section is about what a provider can offer you and your customers.
Understand the geographic reach of potential partners. From which countries can you make pay-ins and payouts? Clearly, any partner should be able to cover your existing payment corridors, plus power your expansion into new ones.
You could ask potential partners to list their feature set and describe their functionality. However, it may be more helpful to share details about your plans, needs and challenges. Include future aspirations and as much data around projections and expansion plans as you can. This will enable providers to personalise their presentation in a way that makes sense to your business, and help you assess best fit.
Consider not only what coverage and capabilities a provider has today, but also how they plan to develop their platform. What’s their road map, and how can you partner to create things together?
This section is about how quick and easy it is to customise, launch and integrate with your provider.
Understand how a potential partner has built their technology as well as how they update and develop their tech stack. Not only will this shed light on things like their architecture and development process but also integration options and scalability.
How do you connect to your partner, receive platform updates and develop your offer? Evaluate the quality and quantity of documentation available on the partner’s platform, plus the degree to which you can test ideas in a sandbox.
Most providers are happy to make documentation and sandbox access available to your developers to test during an RFP. Plus provide details on the uptime performance and scalability of their technology.
This section is about what else is available from a provider to enhance your experience and that of your end-customers.
There’s more to payments than simply switching packets of data. Find out what value-added services a prospective partner can offer, particularly around fraud detection and risk management, analytics and reporting.
Be specific about what’s important to your business. Tailor the questions you ask accordingly. For example, if anti-financial crime is important, ask about capabilities to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and fraud.
When it comes to information and insights, partners must give access to data but also make it easy to integrate into internal systems, so it can be mined for insights. Consider the depth and granularity of data available, how it is delivered, any out-of-the-box reporting capabilities, and how data can be customised for personalised reports.
This section is about how a provider helps you maintain and improve your offering.
Understand what your partner can offer around market insight, industry trends, navigating compliance, implementation best practice and more to make the collaboration a success.
Find out what type of support is available during set-up and on an ongoing basis. For example, what are the service level agreements for responding to queries and issues? Where are the customer care team based, and what are their hours of operation?
Consider whether you have dedicated account management support and what format this typically takes. Also, what arrangements are in place for regular strategic and project-based reviews? This is important for building and sustaining a mutually beneficial relationship.
Inpay makes sending international payments to a network of more than 200 countries as simple and efficient as a local bank transfer. All our services are managed via a single integration, reducing your costs and speeding up cross-border payouts.
Contact us at [email protected] to find out how we could help you accelerate your business growth.
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Advice
We live in a global economy where the ability to make international transactions is essential to businesses and consumers alike, as well as the banks and other financial institutions that serve them. Yet, when cross-border payment systems are so important for financial inclusion and growth, why are there still so many challenges to their efficiency?
Advice
Today, a domestic bank transfers can almost be instant. But why is it not the same for overseas transactions? Here, we’ll explore how long international bank transfers normally take, and outline how innovative banks are collaborating with fintechs to speed up the process.
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