How to choose the best cross-border payment provider

Find the right partner to help you expand international pay-ins and payouts.

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.

What’s important and what kind of partner are you?

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:

1. Coverage and capabilities
2. Technology stack
3. Value-added services
4. Knowledge and support

1. Coverage and capabilities

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?

How Inpay has it covered…

• GLOBAL – Inpay is everywhere you want to be. We’ve built a network with banks and financial institutions in more than 200 countries to make sending international payments as simple and efficient as a local bank transfer.
• FAST – The Inpay solution is real-time, 24/7 in countries with instant payment infrastructure (e.g. UK, India and Turkey) as well as across the 36 SEPA countries via the instant SEPA solution.

2. Technology stack

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.

How Inpay stacks up…

• EASY – Inpay offers a single point of integration to access all services, which reduces costs and decreases operational complexity. Choose to connect via API, SWIFT, file upload or customised methods.
• CUSTOMISABLE – Our white label solution is built to be integrated into existing UX/UI. Customise Inpay’s international payment solution to fit your needs and branding, or use our branding and UI, if you prefer.

3. Value-added services

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.

How Inpay adds value…

• COMPLIANT – Inpay is Danish FSA regulated and compliant in other jurisdictions, conducting recognised anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing procedures. Our internal security protocols meet and exceed the strict SWIFT standards.
• TRANSPARENT – The Inpay customer portal provides a simple user interface to view all your payments in one place, which helps with reconciliation but also improves decisioning and speeds up issue resolution.

4. Knowledge and support

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.

How Inpay assists…

• KNOWLEDGABLE – Inpay only employs experts. Whether it’s product, technical, market or compliance, we have the in-house experts always available to support our customers.
• PROACTIVE – With Inpay, you have a dedicated account manager and customer service representative, who organises quarterly business reviews to offer new business ideas and updates on local requirements and trends.