Hint: It’s slightly different for everyone, depending on your needs and what will best help you grow.Payment processing exists for one reason: to make payments easy and effective. But with so many options available, how do you help choose which is best for your platform? It comes down to a simple question –&nbsp;what are your business objectives?Sounds simple, but there are a lot of factors involved. With billions of payments processed and years of experience backed by insights gleaned as a J.P. Morgan company, we’ve put together a few starting points to help you find the right solution –&nbsp;for both today and tomorrow.<h2>If Revenue Expansion Is Most Important</h2>We get it. The bottom line… well, it’s the bottom line. You want to achieve better monetization with payment processing. A good start is to look at processing fees. But as you do, be sure to start with an understanding of how many payments you receive on a monthly or yearly basis, as well as the types of payments you accept. Fees can vary based on these factors. For example, some providers will charge you extra if you are on a fixed plan but do not meet a monthly quota. Also, be sure to ask about set-up fees. Every provider has them, and they can be an excellent way to compare potential partners. A great payments provider will offer a blended rate that gives you full transparency and allows you to calculate your margin with simple business metrics.<h2>If Seamless Integration Is a Concern</h2>A great payment processor will make integration easy, without taking months of development. And do so in a way that enables the roll out of new products and enhancements without going back to square one with software integrations. From technical help to walking alongside you through upgrades, the right partner will be there. So when talking with a potential provider, be sure that you’ve done a deep dive into every software that you are using right now, as well as ones that you’re considering for the future, to be sure that your bases are covered.<h2>If User Experience Is Top of Mind</h2>Like integrations, user experience requires a bit of research. Because payments are a two-way street, you want your business to be protected, but you also want to maintain a great relationship.&nbsp;For the merchants who use your platform, user experience starts with easy and seamless onboarding and integration. Each merchant is taking a chance on your platform, seeing it as a worthwhile investment of both time and money –&nbsp;so starting off on the right foot is essential. At its best, set up is a one-click (or few-click) process; if that’s not realistic, it should at the very least cut down the time it takes to onboard from days to minutes.But the user experience for your merchants’ customers should also be simple and seamless. After all, they want to look good and make it easy for their customers through a friction-free checkout experience. Your payment processor should leverage custom capabilities and granular control of terminal settings, so merchants can offer a consistent experience, whether in-store, in-app, or online.<h2>If Risk Management Is an Issue</h2>If your platform runs a high risk of fraud or payer disputes, then it’s important to find a processor who helps ensure that as your revenues grow, your risk doesn’t grow along with it.&nbsp;As you’re finding new merchants and onboarding them as quickly as possible, your risk can grow. Same with the number of auto-approved transactions that you accept. A good payments program will improve the user experience of your platform, while blocking potentially fraudulent transactions. Some processors do this by limiting how quickly cash is dispersed, holding a portion of the merchant’s money in reserve. But even better risk management protects you while allowing your merchants to access their money.<h2>Is Your Provider a Long-Term Partner?</h2>Choose a partner who is invested in your success for the long haul. One who has the breadth of services and experience to scale with you as you grow and stand beside you during challenging times.This means a partner who is committed to transparency, and who continually invests in research and development to help companies like yours. It also means having a provider who understands that while payments are critical to your success, so is giving you open access to transaction data – enabling you to analyze and mine trends in order to know where to invest resources, or even to unearth potential marketing opportunities.&nbsp;Also be sure to find a partner who is available to you when concerns or questions arise. Some services have limited customer support, requiring you to fill out a service ticket, slowing down solutions during crisis situations. In those times, live technical support within standard business hours can be worth its weight in gold. In fact, it’s ideal to find a partner that offers personalized support with a dedicated Relationship Manager who is not only responsive, but works on every request with your platform in mind.<h2>If Diversified Channels Are Key</h2>Your goal is getting payments up and running as quickly as possible, from as many sources as that are appropriate for your platform. It’s important to consider what kind of payments you are willing to accept (e.g. credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay) as well as through what kind of channels (e.g. web, app, on site). If you’re looking for an omni-channel solution, find a provider that can enable your merchants to offer a consistent experience across in-store, in-app, and online sales with simple integration and centralized terminal management.<h2>All of the Above</h2>Of course, all of the above are important to your success. You want to save money, accept payments through all of the right channels, have a seamless integration process, and create a great experience for your merchants and their customers. And perhaps above all, to team up with a partner with the tools and processes that simplify access to payments, so you can shape the business and life that you want.At WePay by J.P. Morgan, we bring all of the above to the table. And because we are part of the J.P. Morgan global network, which processes more than 5,000 transactions every second, you can be sure that we bring all of the above with security, reliability, and speed.If you’d like to learn more about the business and technical benefits of working with us, contact us at <a href="mailto:sales@wepay.com" target="_self">sales@wepay.com</a>.

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One Question to Ask When Evaluating Payment Processors

A scalable payments solution, based on a robust API, can be far more than a moneymaker. It can provide valuable data that helps cut business costs, drive strategic decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and even give your marketing a boost.<h2>Improve Customer Satisfaction</h2>With a truly comprehensive payments API, you have the ability to tailor the look and feel of the payment entire user experience, for your merchants and their customers. You can also test which approaches work best, survey users, and ask for feedback in order to make improvements.This is not simply a question of looking great. Truth is, it’s all about boosting conversion and customer retention. According to <a href="https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-onboarding-customer-journey" target="_self">Appcues</a>, getting users to engage with an interface&nbsp;is the most important part of retention. And unfortunately, 75% of users churn within one week, if the interface is poor. That said – on the other hand – <a href="https://truelist.co/blog/ux-statistics/" target="_self">studies show</a> that a good user interface can increase conversion rates by up to 200%.<h2>Show Me the Monetization</h2>The right payments API offers you a simple and transparent buy rate while giving you control of merchant pricing. In other words, it offers a usage-based model, where you are only charged based on activity, and rates that include everything you need: processing, settlement, compliance, chargeback, and fraud liability.A powerful payments API will also allow you and your merchants to accept more ways to get paid, which can boost the volume of transactions on your platform. According to<a href="https://www.columnfivemedia.com/work/infographic-no-cart-left-behind-why-shoppers-arent-following-through-on-online-purchases/" target="_blank"> research published </a>by Comscore.com and Entrepreneur.com, 56% of consumers expect to have more than one payment option at checkout – whether it’s the credit card that gives them the best rewards, or tech-savvy methods like Apple Pay.<h2>The Power of Data Is in How You Use It</h2>When your company uses an API for payments, it’s simple to collect data on average merchant transaction size, preferred payment method, or any other quantifiable information that can be aggregated from transactions. Gathering and mining this data pays big dividends.First of all, it can help you lower costs and make strategic business decisions. You might be putting resources behind a payment pathway that very few customers use. Shifting these resources to higher-traffic payment options is strategically smart.Second, this data can be used to help your marketing efforts be highly targeted, and thus more effective. Based on past behaviors of merchants and buyers, you can create email campaigns and other messaging opportunities that speak to where they are, as well as where they want to be.<h2>Risk Management and Protection</h2>You might be exposing your platform to serious risks from scammers and other criminals who want to defraud your company. Only the best payments APIs include rock-solid risk management and loss protection systems. At WePay, because we are part of the J.P. Morgan family of companies, we even take on the liability, preventing losses for your platform.Then we go farther, identifying collusion fraud, merchant fraud, merchant risk, and risk of non-compliance to prevent your exposure to these threats. When regulatory overhead is handled by the company providing the payments API, the costs of compliance – and the potentially huge fines for not complying – are minimized as well.<h2>Your Success Is Our Success</h2>Using the right API for payments can have a meaningful impact on your company’s bottom line. A robust API that supports multiple payment methods and provides risk management can help boost profitability and the future success of your business.At WePay, we work to be your one-stop shop for maximizing payments and can help you achieve monetization quickly and easily. And because J.P. Morgan processes more than 50% of all card-not-present transactions in the U.S., we will continue to offer competitive pricing.If you want to learn more about the business and technical benefits of using a payments API, contact us at <a href="mailto:sales@wepay.com" target="_self">sales@wepay.com</a>.

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How the Right Payments API Impacts Your Bottom Line

There has been a lot of talk about diversity and inclusion (D&I) this year, especially within the tech industry. In the past, the industry has been under scrutiny and seemingly unwilling to address these issues head-on. In fact, this <a href="https://www.computerworld.com/article/3574917/the-state-of-ethnic-minorities-in-us-tech-2020.html" target="_self">Computerworld article</a> quotes a 2019 <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/five-years-tech-diversity-reports-little-progress/" target="_self">Wired survey</a>, that estimated that the combined Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous population at Silicon Valley firms averages 5%.At WePay, we have always been proud of the fintech culture we’ve built. As leaders, we know that culture stems from us. We invest a great deal of time and effort on the leaders we bring in and the message we’re sending to our employees.This year, we’ve doubled down on our commitment to our D&I initiatives by bringing more women and people of color through our doors – from developer teams to senior management.<h2>Expanding our hiring tactics</h2>Talent exists among diverse populations and requires looking outside ‘traditional hiring practices.’ At WePay, we challenge ourselves to identify new ways to attract and retain underrepresented talent from channels not targeted in the past, like partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We’ve also been partnering with code academies like All Star Code and Women Who Code to identify and hire a class of diverse candidates so we give people with non-traditional backgrounds a chance. Opportunity is not always created equally, even if the talent is there.Our engineering recruitment process starts with a coding test to decrease bias early on. Additionally, everyone at WePay who conducts engineering candidate interviews must be certified to do so to ensure these interviews are fair. This includes having someone else monitor a few interviews before an interviewer receives sign-off to interview independently. We also ensure a diverse interview panel for candidates who make it through the test phase.As a result, we have doubled our 2020 goal for Black and Latinx new hires. We have also achieved at least 50% diversity in our 2020 Summer Intern candidate pool.<h2>Women of WePay</h2>Mentoring women is also important to our culture. Women of WePay is employee-run group where our women leaders mentor other women across the organization from across divisions. This commitment extends from WePay to our parent company, JPMorgan Chase. Almost half of Jamie Dimon’s direct reports are women. That stat is inspiring, especially when learning more about JPMC’s <a href="https://www.jpmorganchase.com/impact/people/women-on-the-move" target="_self">Women on the Move</a>. We’ve been actively involved in Women on the Move, which is the firm’s commitment to providing women with opportunities to succeed in their professional and personal lives. The program’s key objectives are to expand women-run businesses, improve women’s financial health, and advance women’s career growth. Through these efforts, we are on our way to securing an equal future for our female employees.We take great pride in the amazing fintech culture we have built, but recognize that our work is never really done. We’re continuing our commitment to our D&I initiatives next year. Check out our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers/" target="_self">current openings</a> to join us today!

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How WePay Created its FinTech Culture

Chase for Business has announced a new business banking account called <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201021005225/en/Chase-Launches-Business-Complete-Banking-with-All-the-Essentials-Built-In">Business Complete Banking</a> with a new feature, QuickAccept. QuickAccept allows a business owner to take card payments in minutes, without opening a separate merchant account, and have funds available the same day at no additional cost.&nbsp;Most banks have historically kept business checking accounts and merchant accounts siloed because they operate within separate divisions or entities. Customers are forced to open two different accounts within the very same bank - meaning separate pricing, signup, logins, reporting, customer service, etc. Additionally, the merchant account set-up process can take almost 12 business days before the business owner is able to accept payments, despite already being a bank client. Given this, many small businesses didn’t see the benefit of opening a merchant account at their bank and decided to open it elsewhere.&nbsp;Listening to customers’ pain points, Chase seized the opportunity to break down that barrier.&nbsp; Chase’s merchant services and banking divisions committed to work more closely together to bridge the gap and they utilized WePay’s APIs to do so.The vision was simple, how could Chase enable the customer to have only one banking account? How could Chase make accepting credit card payments be seamlessly integrated into a small business’ bank account?&nbsp;<h2>Chase built QuickAccept on WePay’s APIs</h2>Through our APIs, WePay has been enabling ISVs and SaaS platforms (POS providers, e-commerce platforms, invoicing platforms, etc.) to seamlessly integrate payment processing into their product offerings. We strongly believe <a href="https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2017/wepay-makes-a-case-for-white-label-payments-smb/">payment processing is a feature, not a product</a>.&nbsp;Using the same powerful WePay APIs, the Chase Digital Platform team seamlessly integrated payments processing into the Chase Mobile App and created the built-in feature known as QuickAccept. Small businesses now can have business banking and credit card acceptance in one account - almost immediately. They will also experience a fully integrated solution that includes compliance, acceptance, processing, reporting, risk management and payouts.&nbsp;<h2>What this all means for ISVs</h2>We hear from merchants all the time that they do not want more features and complexity - they just want the solutions they have to work together better. WePay’s robust APIs empowers our platform partners to easily integrate payment processing into their core solutions.&nbsp;The announcement of Business Complete Banking and QuickAccept exemplifies the power that comes from combining a leading bank, JPMorgan Chase, and WePay’s payments technology together. In addition, WePay and Chase have been offering <a href="https://blog.wepay.com/payment-processing/announcing-same-day-deposits/">Same-Day Deposits</a> for some time to businesses with a Chase account and whose software platforms use WePay to power payments.WePay and Chase are moving beyond just integrated payments into integrated banking. Because Chase and WePay are in a unique position to put these financial pieces together and connect them with technology, we expect to continue to offer innovative solutions like QuickAccept that drive towards this goal.<h2>How to find out more about QuickAccept and the WePay API</h2>To find out more about the WePay API and how you can build your own payments solution into your software, visit our <a href="https://dev.wepay.com/docs/">API documentation</a> and our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/">main website</a>. You can also find out more about <a href="https://www.chase.com/business/online-banking/quickaccept">QuickAccept</a> and <a href="https://www.chase.com/business/businesscompletebanking">Chase Business Complete Banking</a> from Chase.

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QuickAccept launch highlights how Chase is building on WePay APIs

A ton has happened this year around the world – it’s been a rollercoaster – especially for small businesses. This global pandemic has affected different markets in various ways. For instance, we’ve seen <a href="https://www.grocerydive.com/news/grocery-sales-soar-as-pandemic-crushes-overall-consumer-spending/576147/" target="_self">grocery stores</a> actually doing better compared to restaurants and event businesses that are really feeling the pain.&nbsp;It has been heartbreaking to watch small businesses be turned upside down, many of them even forced to close their doors permanently. But it has also been really inspirational watching them reinvent themselves and embrace this change.Their ingenuity and resiliency is helping them survive through all kinds of challenges like COVID-19. Recently, we sat down with our friends <a href="https://www.touchbistro.com/" target="_self">TouchBistro</a>’s Alex Barrotti, <a href="https://www.webconnex.com/" target="_self">Webconnex</a>’s John Russell, and <a href="https://www.vagaro.com/" target="_self">Vagaro</a>’s Fred Helou to hear their personal observations of managing through the pandemic and what their customers have been doing to pivot their business strategies.In <a href="https://vimeo.com/444686797" target="_self">this conversation</a>, we learned about:<ul><li>TouchBistro adding the support of online ordering, curbside pickup, safety measures for outside dining, and managing food delivery</li><li>Webconnex launching new virtual event functionalities to help their customers transition from all in-person events to virtual</li><li>Vagaro providing resources to reopening, physical changes, and safety measures to its customers for contactless payments, virtual check-in capabilities, revamped floor plans, and other necessary business changes</li></ul>We also discussed the findings from our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/offers/state-of-small-business-payments/?utm_medium=press-release&utm_source=bnwire&utm_campaign=sosmbp-wp" target="_self">State of Small Business Payments 2020 </a>survey. What we discovered was that even though small business owners have increased their technology spend in the past two years, 39% say they still spend five hours or more per week dealing with payment pain points.&nbsp;In fact, John from Webconnex pointed out that the stat that 61% surveyed have increased their technology spend is really interesting because that’s what they’ve seen in their business. More and more of their customers and potential customers are forced to adopt new technology to survive.&nbsp;What the data shows is clear: small businesses have an appetite to embrace the power of integrated payments. This one finding highlights a huge opportunity for ISVs and platform businesses to deepen integrated payments with either our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/" target="_self" aria-label="Link">Link</a> or <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self" aria-label="Clear">Clear</a> products. This is especially true in the rapidly growing hybrid online/in-person models that have become popular (curbside pickup for both retail and restaurants for example).These survey findings help us learn a bit more about what small businesses are thinking about payments, banks, and technology. Other key highlights from the survey include:Payments systems have challenges<ul><li>25% of respondents experienced cash flow problems&nbsp;</li><li>18% lost $5,000+ in the past year due to slow payments</li></ul>Small businesses want a trusted partner in their payments technology to address payment pain points<ul><li>77% of companies with more than $1 million of annual revenue would consider working with a solution from a bank and ISV</li><li>28% are likely to change their payment system in the next year</li></ul>We surveyed 1,000 U.S. small business owners in February 2020. Download the <a href="https://go.wepay.com/offers/state-of-small-business-payments/?utm_medium=press-release&utm_source=bnwire&utm_campaign=sosmbp-wp" target="_self">full report</a> to learn more.<img alt="infographic" asset_uid="bltc8a95583ee03625c" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltc8a95583ee03625c/62bd480851ea2f1f08bd10da/WePay-state-of-smb-payments-2020-infographic-1.png" height="auto"/>

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SMB Owners Share Their Payment Pain Points in WePay’s State of Small Business Payments 2020 Survey

The COVID-19 epidemic has created new kinds of e-commerce payment security issues for platforms and merchants. In all forms of commerce, there are always malicious third-party actors looking for new victims. Their latest approach is to take advantage of people desperately looking for PPE and other supplies or rushing to find a quick cure-all. Plus the epidemic has also led to unpredictable supply-chain delays and unintended consequences.<h2>E-commerce payment security: Growing risks</h2>At WePay, we have seen a spike in support calls around issues concerning PPE and other essential items related to the crisis. We handle risk issues around payments for the platforms we support and are seeing a big rise in queries for these items.&nbsp;The FBI has twice <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-warns-health-care-professionals-of-increased-potential-for-fraudulent-sales-of-covid-19-related-medical-equipment">issued warnings</a> about <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-warns-of-emerging-health-care-fraud-schemes-related-to-covid-19-pandemic">potential fraud</a> around PPE fulfillment. The FTC has <a href="https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2020/02/coronavirus-scammers-follow-headlines">done the same</a> with a focus on consumers and <a href="https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2020/03/ftc-coronavirus-scams-part-2">fake charities</a>.Besides fraudulent suppliers, there are unintended delays that are leading to serious problems with fulfillment on certain merchandise. For example, merchants selling PPE, especially masks, are typically using a drop-shipment model. They get a commitment of supply and fulfillment from the manufacturer, sell the product online and then rely on the manufacturer to fulfill the order. A similar model is to collect multiple smaller orders and put them together into a bigger order to the manufacturer, then break that shipment down and pass the product along. In the current environment, there are numerous risks including fraud, delays and misunderstandings along with supply chain uncertainties.&nbsp;<h2>An evolving challenge</h2>In addition, the issues and areas of concern are evolving rapidly as everyone adapts to changes in the crisis, potential re-opening, and an ongoing change in the way everyone does business. These changes will continue for the foreseeable future, so we all need to work together and adapt to keep consumers, businesses, platforms, and ISVs safe.<h2>E-commerce payment security: what WePay is doing&nbsp;</h2>Because of these risks, many e-commerce sites and payment processors (including WePay) are instituting a higher level of scrutiny and checks to lower the level of risk for our customers. However, this does bring additional delays in evaluating transactions. The goal is to carefully approve all appropriate transactions as fast as possible and put a hold on those that have a higher risk of fraudulent activity.WePay's Trust and Safety team is continuing to optimize our review processes to ensure we identify any merchants selling PPE or COVID-19 related supplies. This higher level of scrutiny may involve direct email outreaches where our team requests specific information regarding the merchant's business to ensure we can verify their legitimacy.We recommend following the guidance of the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html">CDC</a> and <a href="https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019">WHO</a>. There are no current vaccines or cures for COVID-19, and any merchants claiming to sell such items should be avoided. Increased risk of fraud will likely continue in other areas surrounding&nbsp; the COVID-19 crisis, as vaccines and treatments are tested and become available.&nbsp;<h2>What businesses can do</h2>As with all transactions, it is always important to research the background of business partners and suppliers thoroughly, investigate details and terms for transactions, and follow up on all potential issues to ensure that transactions are safe and secure. Some questions and best practices to be mindful of in transactions for merchants, platforms and even consumers include:<ul><li>How long has the merchant been operating? Are they brand new and appear to have set up shop just in time to take advantage of increased needs for PPE and other supplies?&nbsp;</li><li>Check the age of the website. If the business is on Facebook, pages now show the date the page was created. <a href="https://opencorporates.com/">OpenCorporates</a> is another free, open-source tool that anyone can use to see when a business was formed. Try searching Google for potential bad reviews or complaints against the merchant.</li><li>Is the business soliciting you directly? If someone is reaching out to you directly by email, phone, or another means online, be extra cautious and ask yourself why they're taking extra time for outreach to prospective buyers. This is an uncommon e-commerce approach.&nbsp;</li><li>If a transaction seems like an unbeatable deal it might be too good to be true; especially watch out for 419-type scams. This scam is where copies of documents that can establish identity, or a small advance fee is requested in exchange for something else (money or material goods).</li><li>Be wary of unusual payment methods being requested such as bitcoin, gift cards, or wire transfers.</li><li>Avoid interacting with anyone claiming to be with a government agency, no matter what they ask you to provide and reach out to the agency directly via another method.</li></ul>Other general security and safety precautions to take include:<ul><li>Maintain email safety - make sure that you are protecting your business and employees from exposure to email attacks like phishing</li><li>Revisit password and other security. Go over your basic security procedures and protocols to make sure you aren’t exposed and have a plan in place for a response if you discover a problem.</li><li>Maintain web security. Make sure your business and staff understand and follow safe web practices. Watch for fake websites. Make sure that any sites asking for credentials are using valid security certificates. Do not allow employees to use public computers or WiFi connections. Implement ad-blocking, script-blocking and other solutions to prevent malicious attacks. Make sure everyone signs out of and shuts down systems when not in use.</li><li>Maintain devices and make sure that anti-malware scans and checks are performed regularly.</li></ul>By being extra careful we can all navigate through these issues and risks together.

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If it looks too good to be true...

WePay had a chance to talk to Dave Charest, Director of Content Marketing for Constant Contact, one of our long-standing customers, about what they do, how they help customers and how payments fits into that.&nbsp;WePay: Can you tell us about ConstantContact - what it does and for whom, how it came to be, what makes it so special?Dave Charest: For more than 20 years Constant Contact has been serving small businesses, first with email marketing and now with a complete online marketing platform that includes a website builder, logo creator, e-commerce capabilities, and of course, payments processing. I’d say what makes us so special is that we don’t expect our customers to do it alone. Our team of marketing advisors knows marketing inside and out, with expertise in specific industries like real estate and fitness, and they provide our customers with practical advice through every step of the marketing process. &nbsp;Our customer service team has won countless awards and I can’t begin to convey how important their expertise and insights have been to our customers’ success.&nbsp;WePay: Can you give us an example of how a customer has benefited?DC: Leading up to this past holiday season, our team had the pleasure of working with a customer, Dawn Noble. She owns <a href="https://www.laprov.com">La Provence</a>, a store that imports beautiful household gift items from France. She has a loyal following, but Dawn was looking to expand her client base in time to capture more business during the all-important holiday season.&nbsp;Dawn had been successfully using Constant Contact for email marketing, but she was using an old website that was not mobile responsive, nor was it designed to handle robust e-commerce. With help from our marketing advisors, she migrated her old website to Constant Contact’s new website builder platform and the results were transformative. Not only does her new mobile-friendly <a href="https://www.laprov.com/">website</a> look fresh, but it’s also easy for customers to navigate, find what they’re looking for, and make a purchase.&nbsp;The results show what a well-designed website can do for a small business. Now 70% of La Provence traffic comes from mobile devices, which is a big deal. Prior to the new website, online revenue accounted for about 8% of Dawn’s overall business. In December 2019, La Provence’s online sales increased by 25% YoY. Dawn also saw an 18% increase in her YoY in-store sales. It’s successes like these that get the Constant Contact team so excited about how we’re helping small businesses.&nbsp;WePay: Can you tell us about the experience and results of working with WePay? What in particular is WePay helping you with?DC: Our product has been integrated with WePay for years. It is an easy and seamless way for our customers to collect payments for donations and events from within our product. The WePay team has been a pleasure to work with, always ready to troubleshoot an issue or brainstorm on new ways to work together.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;WePay:&nbsp; What inspires you?DC: Small business owners. Before I started working for Constant Contact, I had my own business and quickly realized that, although I was good at what I did, I was horrible at running the business side of things. And so I’m always inspired by those who make it work. I’m constantly grateful for the opportunity to help them with their marketing efforts.&nbsp;Given the turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever to offer small businesses, not just the right tools, but also the kind of one-on-one support that will help them through. And that’s what the entire Constant Contact team focuses on doing.&nbsp;If you would like to find out more about the kind of help WePay is giving to Constant Contact with payments, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/">click here.</a>

Constant Contact Computer

In Constant Contact...

Our new Card Present Solutions feature gives ISVs and software platforms the ability to add in-person payments as well as online payments. The feature is offered with both our Link and Clear products to seamlessly deliver online and in-person payments to customers. The product includes the choice of pre-certified card readers, comprehensive developer resources and APIs, and centralized terminal management. These new features extend our best-in-class contactless payment solution and are in line with our mission to constantly extend our payments functionality.The goal is to give ISVs and platforms the ability to integrate with minimal effort and be up and running quickly with pre-certified options so that PCI compliance, EMV certification, and regulatory requirements are simplified. Minimal resources are needed to bring an in-person payment operation live.<h2>Our card present solution for in-person payments</h2>The solution has pre-certified hardware available with terminals and mobile card readers that accept NFC, chip and mag stripe cards as well as Apple and Google Pay. The software supports simple integrations via a single SDK with a RESTful API, support for iOS and Android, and flexible end-to-end terminal management.Some of the benefits that you will get by using our Card Present Solutions product include:<ul><li>Simple Integration - pre-certified hardware, reduced PCI compliance scope, no EMV certification needed and lower operational resources mean minimal effort for customers.</li><li>Great user experience - flexible fulfillment options, API-based centralized terminal management and unified onboarding, payments, payouts, and reporting mean a frictionless experience for your customers.</li><li>Revenue Growth - low card present pricing of 2.6% +$0.10* and full control of merchant pricing give you control of monetization. Chase pre-negotiated device pricing and control of pricing to customers adds another monetization option.</li></ul>*Above pricing is inclusive of processing, settlement, compliance, risk management and chargeback/loss protection. Custom pricing available for platforms processing over $750K TPV or with unique business models.WePay’s Card Present Solutions is available now in the US. It integrates with WePay’s existing online products, Link, Clear and Core. The solution has been thoroughly tested with a range of partners in the restaurant and ecommerce spaces and is ready for you to integrate.&nbsp;You can find out more about <a href="https://go.wepay.com/card-present-solutions/">WePay Card Present Solutions here</a>.&nbsp;You can find out more about <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/">Link here</a>.You can find out more about <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/">Clear here</a>.You can find out more about <a href="https://go.wepay.com/core/">Core here</a>.

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WePay Card Present Solutions adds next-generation in-person payments capabilities to our products

<h2>We've highlighted below some ways in which WePay and our parent company Chase are helping our communities.&nbsp;</h2><img alt="helping communities" asset_uid="blt504509ca25bc8311" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt504509ca25bc8311/62bd481f0ef6a47c1d38a33b/WePay-COVID-19-Info-For-Partners.png" height="auto"/><a href="https://go.wepay.com/getting-started" target="_self">Contact WePay to learn how we can help you.</a>

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Our Commitment to You in Uncertain Times

Although the world has steadily moved towards ecommerce and newer contactless technologies and smartphone-based apps like Apple and Google Pay, the reality is that card present is the foundation of payments technology, going all the way back to the days of physically imprinting numbers on carbon copy receipts. And even though the COVID-19 pandemic will likely continue to accelerate this change, card present is still the majority transaction channel for card payments.With several options on the market, it is critical that platforms choose the right integrated card present provider. This article looks at the factors to consider in choosing your next card present solution.<h2>What is a Card Present transaction?</h2>A card present transaction is one in which customers swipe, dip or tap credit/debit cards at physical storefronts. As a result, in person transactions are almost always classified as card present transactions, even if the card itself isn’t physically present. For example, Apple Pay transactions are considered card present even though the card is loaded on a device and the card may not be physically present. For many merchants and platforms, card present is a necessity because their business model involves in-person transactions, but for others it is an addition or extension to an online model.<h2>What are the additional benefits of offering a Card Present Solution?</h2>For a business that is currently online only, the benefits are obviously centered on adding in-person payments. But there are benefits that can accrue to other businesses. Today the buyer journey across various sales channels is merging. It is important to offer a consistent experience across in-person or online sales channels while considering the other benefits below.Lower-processing fee: With the physical presence of a credit card and its owner during a transaction, fraud risk is low and in most cases the fees for these transactions are also reduced, commensurate with the lower risk.Activate payments across sales channels (in-person or online): Card present solutions extend existing card not present business by allowing for more opportunities. For example, an event business that sells tickets online can extend to in-person, by adding a card present solution at the door. The reverse is also true: A restaurant can add curbside pick-up service via online ordering using an online or card not present solution.Convenient and faster checkout experience: Consumers are looking for faster checkout experiences with minimal interaction. Card present solutions, specifically contactless, enable speedy checkouts, saving your merchants and their consumers time; not to mention the ability to engage in a transaction without contacting another device and risk transmitting germs.<h2>What do you need to know to make smart card present decisions?</h2>Integration and control of merchant experience: How thoroughly and well you can integrate the payment solution into your own software via APIs is an important factor. For example, can the solution easily handle complicated tipping situations? You might want to have tipping disabled or set at a lower default for a curbside pickup option, but enabled at a higher default rate or as mandatory for a fine dining situation. The flexibility to tie into your own software in detail and across a wide variety of circumstances will greatly improve your success with your payment solution.Flexible fulfillment options: You may want to have full control over device and terminal fulfillment and manage the distribution of devices to your customers yourself, or you might want a fully turnkey fulfillment solution that handles all the details and manages shipping, etc. with little to no input from you.Ease of use: This is a consideration beyond just the hardware, but also of the controlling software and how well the card present solution integrates with the other software and hardware systems that may already be in place. For many verticals, such as retail or restaurants, ease-of-use can be of prime importance; there may be little time to train staff and high turnover in staffing means that the need for more or less training can have a significant impactComprehensiveness of supported payment types: You will want a solution that can handle most common payment types including NFC, chip, magnetic stripe, contactless or mobile wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. To learn more about different technologies, refer to the glossary at the end of this post.Reliability: It is important that hardware, software and network systems, both local and to the payment gateway and banks, all remain operational. Downtime can be incredibly costly for many businesses.Security: Although EMV and NFC are much more secure than previous technologies, legacy magnetic stripe is still used in large volume - and is relatively easy to counterfeit since the tech needed to copy magnetic stripe cards is widely available. It is also very easy for fraudsters to get card data via skimmers. EMV prevents this from happening by encrypting and dynamically updating credentials so that counterfeiting is costly and ineffective.Resilience and failover management: Another challenge for card present solutions is failover. In the case of a hardware, software, or communications failure to successfully transfer card data, what solution is there? An obvious example is dropping back to magnetic stripe if a chip reader fails. But procedures need to be automatic and, even better, adaptive by reminding both parties to follow any changed security or information gathering. Typical solutions involve using store and forward functionality where the card data is stored locally until a secure connection is re-established and then transmitting the transaction at that point. Another option is to fall back to manual data collection which is then reconciled at the end of the day either by manual data entry or over the phone. Consumers are less happy about these solutions since they leave card data in a less secure form temporarily but they are commonly used solutions.Chargeback liability: Processors consider card present transactions less risky. You can still be on the hook for chargebacks with card present transactions, but your chances of chargeback liability with a card not present transaction may be higher. The EMV liability shift of October 2015 dictated what happens with certain types of liability for EMV chip cards. In simplest terms, if your business doesn’t have an EMV capable credit card reader and you accept a chip card by swiping it through a magstripe reader, you’re liable for fraud that occurs. If you use a chip reader, fraud liability stays with the processor or bank. Carefully negotiating transaction pricing and considering all-inclusive pricing can be valuable.Pricing: There are two components to Card Present Solutions pricing. One is hardware pricing and the other is per transaction processing fee. You will want to know about hardware pricing for items like terminals and card readers, as well as for communication, networking and interfacing equipment. Various vendors charge flat fees, monthly rental fees and may or may not include maintenance contracts and upgrade contracts as options.<h2>Where next?</h2>Integrating both card present and card not present is referred to commonly as omnichannel payments. But true integration is much more than just omnichannel. It involves integrating into back-end solutions, and into ISV platforms and software seamlessly via <a href="https://dev.wepay.com/" target="_self">APIs</a>. It involves supporting as many aspects of the rest of the business as possible including reporting, supply chain, marketing and more. It means supporting the much faster times for starting a business and accepting payments that are now needed by modern business. And it needs to demonstrate security and robustness.There are huge opportunities for omnichannel solutions and better integration of card present solutions into the complex systems that all forms of merchants use today, from restaurants to invoicing and billing to ecommerce and many other areas. The market is shifting towards omnichannel and towards <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/" target="_self">integration</a> as new players and fintechs enter the space and as existing players partner together to deliver better solutions. <a href="https://go.wepay.com/" target="_self">WePay</a>, along with Chase Merchant Services, is ideally positioned to deliver on this kind of integration and <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">put card present and card not present solutions together seamlessly</a>.You can find out more about card present and <a href="https://go.wepay.com/card-present-solutions/" target="_self">WePay's Card Present Solutions here</a>.<h2>Glossary</h2>Payment typesEMV –&nbsp; EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) or chip cards securely manage end-to-end encrypted cardholder data and carry security credentials to thwart hackers from skimming and replicating the card data. Currently, all cards have both the chip and the magnetic stripe for backwards compatibility. These cards can be physically inserted or "dipped" into a reader, and a more advanced version is contactless and can be read over a short distance with Near Field Communications (NFC) technology.NFC –&nbsp; NFC (near field communication) is a technology that allows two devices—like a mobile phone and a payments terminal—to talk to each other when they’re close together. As a result, NFC is the technology that enables contactless payments. Examples of this are the use of Google Pay and Apple Pay at grocery stores, or tap to pay solutions at coffee shops. NFC mobile payments are dynamically encrypted, so they are one of the most secure ways to make a payment. Terminals (POS) –&nbsp; A payment terminal, also known as a Point of Sale (POS) terminal, credit card terminal, EFTPOS terminal, is a device which interfaces with payment cards to initiate transactions. The terminal typically consists of a secure keypad for entering PIN, a screen, a means of capturing information from payment cards and a network connection to access the payment network for authorization. Payment terminals are usually connected to POS systems so that payment amounts and confirmation of payment can be transferred automatically to the merchant’s retail management system. Terminals can also be used in stand alone mode, where the merchant keys the amount into the terminal before the customer presents their card and PIN or other identifying information.Mobile card readers –&nbsp; Mobile card readers that turn smartphones into payment devices are a rapidly growing category. They have made credit card payment devices much more accessible to smaller merchants, are low-cost and open new payment opportunities.Apple and Android Pay and other smartphone payments solutions –&nbsp; These payment solutions are effectively ‘cardless’ card present payments. They act like card present because all the card information is stored on the smartphone and transactions pass the same information as if they were card present. One smartphone can actually support multiple cards and the user can switch between them. It is important for card present solutions to support these payment methods because they are growing rapidly. Both technologies can also be used in card not present transactions although their usefulness to consumers is more limited in those scenarios.

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How to choose an in-person payment system

Businesses everywhere have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Event management platforms and organizers were one of the earliest and hardest hit industries. 
We spoke with Ashley Mellott, Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff at Webconnex, who shared how the company has moved quickly to help its team and customers.&nbsp;<h2>Can you give us a quick overview of Webconnex, what the company does and who your customers are?</h2>
<a href="https://www.webconnex.com/" target="_self">Webconnex</a> is the maker of the world's most flexible fundraising and event management software. We process over $2M transactions per day for our customers; serving over 40,000 organizations world-wide with a team of only 40 people.&nbsp;
By design, we make sure our customers’ brand is front and center, not ours. We’ve worked with some of the world’s most well known brands like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Spotify&nbsp;–&nbsp;and our belief is that we know we’ve done our job well when people experience our registration, donation, or ticketing platform without knowing we exist.&nbsp;<h2>How has the current COVID-19 crisis affected your business?</h2>
Our business largely depends on people signing up for live events hosted by our customers. In the face of this crisis, our primary goals have been two fold: One, keep our team intact. Two, be flexible and support our customers in new and creative ways.&nbsp;
In an effort to keep our team intact, we have gone to great lengths to cut every possible expense in order to preserve paychecks. We have also been working hard and burning the midnight oil to build new technology to meet the needs of our customers.
Our customers put their heart and soul into hosting amazing events and running impactful nonprofits. They have been hit hard and, because of financial insecurity, donations are beginning to see a drop.&nbsp;<h2>What technology changes has Webconnex made to support your customers?</h2>
Our team worked around the clock to make sure our customers didn’t need to cancel their in-person event by getting <a href="https://www.webconnex.com/blog/virtual-events/" target="_self">our new virtual events functionality</a> built and released quickly. The new solution allows any type of organization to accept payments and registrations, while having a path for monetizing digital content.
Even events planned for summer and early fall are impacted. We have found that event promoters are hesitant to promote events they are uncertain will take place. Likewise, many attendees are unwilling to buy tickets for fear they won’t receive a refund if the event is cancelled. We developed a new feature to address these anxieties and provide a worry-free registration experience. The new feature, due out next week, is called Pre-Registration. It allows attendees to register and put a card on file to be charged in the future once the event is confirmed. If the event is cancelled, they simply won’t be charged. It seems to be a great win-win for both the event promoter and attendee.&nbsp;
Another tool we developed for our church customers is the ability to embed their livestream directly into their donation page. Churches are now virtually hosting their services, so we developed a way for those tuning in from home to give back while they are watching the service. It is a fantastic pairing, as the viewer/donor doesn’t have to leave the livestream to find the donation page.
Event organizers, fitness trainers, teachers, doctors alike can use this functionality to livestream, or give immediate access to pre-recorded videos and downloadable content. Our software allows them to limit access to only those who sign up and/or pay to view it.&nbsp;
Here are a few great use cases on our platform and sister platforms&nbsp;–&nbsp;regfox.com and ticketspice.com&nbsp;–&nbsp;that we have found with virtual events:&nbsp;<ul><li>Conferences, workshops and any broad array of event types: They can custom brand their pages, set specific dates content is available or have it listed as on-demand.</li><li>Fitness Classes: Now trainers don’t have to lose touch with their customer base. They can schedule and host livestream workouts or even sell workout plans.</li><li>Live-Stream: So many musicians, magicians and other entertainers can bring their talent online.</li><li><a href="https://www.regfox.com/telemedicine/" target="_self">Telemedicine</a>: This gives a path for doctors to easily pivot to online scheduling and conduct video appointments.&nbsp;</li></ul><h2>What advice would you give a business that handles events and ticketing to survive in the current climate and how might payments factor into that?</h2>
Our main strategy has been to be transparent and communicate often, think long-term but make short-term decisions and move quickly.&nbsp;
Moving quickly has been key. It doesn’t necessarily mean cancelling&nbsp;–&nbsp;there are ways to keep business flowing. For event organizers this could be charting into new and sometimes uncomfortable territories such as taking your event online, learning about livestreaming, hosting a webinar, sending transparent communications, etc.
We’ve seen a number of events ask if any of their registrants wish to donate their registration fees to help the event survive and registrants have been incredibly gracious.&nbsp;<h2>How should event and ticketing businesses think about their operations going forward?</h2>
We believe difficult times can also provide incredible opportunities. For event promoters, there are very interesting aspects of hosting a virtual event. They no longer have to pay for venue or rental fees. There is far less coordinating as far as volunteers, parking, food/beverages, entrances/exits, bathrooms, etc. There are creative ways to demonstrate value in featuring sponsors, vendors, etc.
For organizations like gyms, yoga studios, and boxing venues they can still maintain a fun and close connection with their community through livestreams and online competitions. We’re all thinking outside the box to answer questions like: What are my customer’s current challenges? How can I be relevant during this time? Who do I want my organization to be on the other side of this pandemic?<h2>Are there specific customers that come to mind who quickly adapted to virtual events? Any success stories?</h2>
We’ve had a bunch of customers take advantage of the new virtual events technology. Here are just a few who have been successful at taking their event online:<ul><li>Digital Drive-In: <a href="http://digitaldriveinaz.com/" target="_self">http://digitaldriveinaz.com/</a></li><li>Q Ideas: <a href="https://qideas.org/events/" target="_self">https://qideas.org/events/</a></li><li>Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council: <a href="https://www.sustainablepurchasing.org/summit20/" target="_self">https://www.sustainablepurchasing.org/summit20/</a></li><li>Praxis: <a href="https://summit.praxislabs.org/" target="_self">https://summit.praxislabs.org/</a></li></ul><h2>What are some things that have helped you cope? Or things you’ve heard your colleagues done?</h2>
As a company we have been committed to communicating often and communicating transparently with our team. We’ve hosted company-wide weekly, sometimes daily, Town Halls via Zoom, to talk openly and honestly with one another on any topic.
We have a Slack channel called “goodnews” to post customer praise, fun new signups, something great that has happened with kids or family, etc. It has been really energizing as a way for us to maintain focus but be thankful for the good things that are going on in midst of the current state of the country.————–<h3>Additional resources for running virtual and online events</h3>
<a href="https://www.webconnex.com/blog/virtual-events/" target="_self">Webconnex tools and advice for virtual events</a>
<a href="https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2020/03/pivot-live-stream-virtual-event-fast-business.html" target="_self">Salesforce on pivoting to live streaming virtual events</a>
<a href="https://www.inc.com/guides/201104/how-to-host-virtual-events.html" target="_self">Inc magazine guide on hosting virtual events</a>
<a href="https://helloseven.co/how-to-host-a-virtual-event/" target="_self">Hello Seven on how to host a virtual event</a>
<a href="https://www.socialtables.com/blog/event-planning/virtual-event-planning/" target="_self">Social Tables on virtual event planning</a>
<a href="https://www.freeman.com/insights/the-dos-and-donts-of-hosting-a-successful-virtual-event" target="_self">Freeman do’s and don’ts of virtual event planning</a>
<a href="https://resources.marketo.com/p0i00T10eH0U0tUDVB0AJB1" target="_self">Marketo webinar on virtual events</a>
<a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/run-successful-virtual-conference" target="_self">Hubspot on running successful virtual conferences</a>

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How to pivot in a time of change. Webconnex shows how to enable virtual events.

Tracking payment transactions, as they flow through our systems at huge volume, is one of the most important tasks that WePay’s systems have to handle. Not only do we have to correctly enact any transaction, we also have to be able to prove we did it, and provide evidence that all the right events occurred along the way&nbsp;–&nbsp;for every single one of the millions of transactions that we process.Doing this correctly and reconciling all the tracking systems so that they are in synch and accurately reflect reality at the tremendous scale at which WePay operates is the responsibility of our engineering organization and they recently posted a blog post demonstrating just how well they do this. <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/balancing-the-books-at-scale" target="_self">Balancing the Books at Scale</a> is a post by Asa Witt, one of our Senior Software Engineers, that discusses the basics of our operation and how we are able to safely handle our customer’s transactions.

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How WePay reconciles transactions accurately at scale

One of the biggest payments trends in 2019 was the push from tech companies to offer traditional banking services to their customers. Google announced its plan to offer checking accounts, further expanding its financial and payments offerings. Apple enabled consumers to apply for their recently released Apple Card straight from their iPhone, and Uber <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/28/uber-announces-deeper-push-into-financial-services-with-uber-money.html" target="_self">debuted its Uber Money division</a> whose first initiative was seamlessly settling funds to drivers via mobile bank accounts.While these companies captured the attention of the media in 2019, <a href="https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-is-every-startup-a-bank-these-days/" target="_self">the trend of integrated banking</a> has seeped down to even the most niche software platforms, as the benefits are universal for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies of all sizes and industries.&nbsp;SaaS platforms are uniquely positioned to deliver these banking products compared to traditional brick-and-mortar retail banks. Their distinct advantages closely align to SaaS platforms’ goals; including monetizing transactions, providing a seamless user experience, and enhancing platform stickiness by deepening their relationship with merchants.<h2>Why integrated payments?</h2>As SaaS platforms capture an increasing share of their target market, they are seeking new frontiers to continue their growth. With integrated payments - a subset of integrated banking that automates the capture, settlement, and reconciliation experiences within an application - these platforms can immediately monetize their transactions, adding <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/adeyemiajao/2019/03/06/in-small-tams-payments-unlock-giant-opportunities/#224ddcb14e7d" target="_self">another layer of revenue</a> to complement their core service fee.While revenues on individual transactions are tiny, this additional layer effortlessly scales as the platform and its user base grows, creating a major impact on overall revenue and expanding their market opportunity.After Shopify extended its revenue mix to include payments, for example, it became the fastest-growing portion of its portfolio. Merchant Solutions now accounts for 61% of its total revenue, growing 63% to $210.3 million while subscription services - its core business - only makes up 31% of revenue.Bolstering the bottom line through payments is only the beginning for integrated banking.Integrated payments make it possible for platforms to track data on thousands of business transactions. The platform can enhance its overall customer experience with this data by making personalized, informed financial offerings to their SMB customers, including loans, credit cards, cash advances, and even <a href="https://go.wepay.com/offers/achieving-faster-payouts/" target="_self">faster deposits to their bank accounts</a>. These products ease common SMB pain points <a href="https://go.wepay.com/offers/achieving-faster-payouts/" target="_self">that can threaten their livelihood</a>.For example, a contractor is likely to experience a cash flow shortage when he pays a subcontractor prior to receiving payment from his client. But with the data collected from integrated payments, the software platform he uses to run his business can save his business. Using data and his business’s financial history, the contractor’s software platform can predict his cash flow constraint ahead of time and offer an in-app cash advance when he needs it, saving his business and retaining a customer!<h2>Leading the charge to a complete integrated banking experience</h2>Adding integrated banking functionality is an easy choice for SaaS platforms, but the implementation is more difficult than many might expect. Engineering complexity, banking regulation, and the <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-target-four-of-the-biggest-tech-companies-in-us-and-their-stocks-are-getting-slammed-2019-06-03" target="_self">government’s increasingly watchful eye over BigTech</a> has made providing these services to SMBs complicated.It has posed a difficult strategic question for platform executives: should they heavily invest time, capital, and resources into building a new line of business with the hope of providing a comprehensive solution for their SMBs? Or should they focus those same resources on strengthening their core functionality in their vertical?Throughout our history, WePay has striven to solve this dilemma. We have offered easy integrations to platforms for years, but in 2019, we doubled down on our mission by completing integration with JPMorgan Chase. Now we are able to provide even greater value to our partners and their merchants.SaaS platforms can continue to use our APIs to monetize their payments and customize an enhanced user experience, but now that we are a part of the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/how-jp-morgan-chase-became-the-largest-bank-in-the-us.html" target="_self">largest bank in the United States</a>, our partners have direct access to Chase’s broader product suite.As part of a full service consumer, commercial, and wholesale bank, we can launch industry leading products like <a href="https://go.wepay.com/news/press-release-same-day-deposits-chase/" target="_self">Same-Day Deposits</a> and Weekend and Holiday Deposits at no additional cost. Launched in 2019, we offer SMBs same-day access to their cash at no additional cost while similar products require a fee up to 1.5% per deposit. Having visibility into both ends of a transaction mitigates risk and leads to direct cost savings for small businesses.Last year, we also debuted products that allow SMBs to digitally open a Chase business bank account directly on a partner’s website. Like our contractor example, this initiative gives small businesses the tools they need to grow their business within the software platform they use to manage their business. This unique value positions WePay at the forefront of integrated banking, where innovative functionality is simply combining Chase’s legacy of SMB services and business banking products with WePay’s fintech expertise.Our newly launched suite of products - <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/" target="_self" aria-label="Link">Link</a>, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self" aria-label="Clear">Clear</a>, and <a href="https://go.wepay.com/core/" target="_self" aria-label="Core">Core</a> - reflects this. WePay makes it easy for any platform, regardless of size, resource constraints, or strategic appetite, to turn payments and banking into a profitable line of business that grows as they continue to scale. Whether they want to quickly monetize payments, have their own white label payments brand, or become a full-fledged payment facilitator themselves, we have a solution that fits their needs.<h2>Looking forward to 2020 and beyond</h2>2019 laid the foundation for the future of integrated banking, and we fully expect its evolution in SaaS platforms to continue to take shape in 2020 and beyond.Despite growing concerns of regulation and government intervention in the fintech industry, WePay’s ability to offer in-app financial services remains strong. Our payments expertise and the distribution of JPMorgan Chase give us a unique opportunity to help SaaS platforms achieve their revenue goals, enhance the SMB experience, and focus on advancing their software’s core functionality.WePay believes that what made a bank successful in the past, won’t make it successful in the 21st century. In the same manner, what has previously made SaaS companies flourish, won’t continue to drive their growth in the years to come. WePay is dedicated to being a catalyst for SaaS platforms’ future prosperity, first through payments then with comprehensive integrated banking.

New Year 2020

2019: WePay’s Year in Integrated Banking

WePay is committed to having a diverse and inclusive workplace. One demonstration of that commitment is our sponsorship of interested employees to attend the <a href="https://experience.afrotech.com/">Afrotech conference</a>.&nbsp;Afrotech was created to celebrate black excellence in an industry where we are unrepresented and yet also drive innovation. The conference has been running for a few years now, and in this fourth year has grown 3x. This year the conference’s growth was accompanied by a move to the Oakland Convention Center. That meant 10,000 black technologists in Oakland, CA - the local outreach hub for Wakanda (you've seen the movie), a hot spot of culture for young professionals in the Bay, and a history-ich city amidst the seat of technical innovation that is Silicon Valley.&nbsp;As a first time attendee, I was psyched to register for the weekend. I’d heard so much about the conference itself, as well as the brunches, happy hours, and the myriad of nightlife events surrounding it. My WePay colleagues who’d attended in past years were kind enough to provide some guidance to those of us who were attending as newbies -&nbsp; both to local WePayers and our JPMorgan & Chase team members who were visiting from the east coast. We all knew industry peers from other parts of the country, and were all poised to share personal insights and career resources. The excitement was tangible; we needed to know what conference experience to expect and how to optimize for the sessions and socializing.&nbsp;The event itself was ripe full of experiences and accomplishments from other black techies. There were learning tracks which held scheduled sessions covering topics on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Engineering & Design so that I could better understand just what others are doing to bridge the gap in technology, including tips around design and implementation of ideas, building the next generation, and community outreach. In addition to that, 100+ partners had set up booths to demonstrate their business missions, technology and professional opportunities.&nbsp;It was an amazing opportunity to celebrate the growth of a clearly underrepresented group in technology. It was also one that reinforced belonging for many of us. It fueled the energy of the attendants and the social aspects of the conference. In addition to expanding my network, I left with a greater sense of pride. The value of seeing such an expansive community of Black technologists was invigorating, and the conference was alive with connection and collaboration. There was representation from different industries, geographies, and functional areas. The level of talent, idea exchange, and relationship building would have been hard to find anywhere else.&nbsp;

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Reflections on AfroTech 2019

WePay as a company is committed to bringing more women into tech and one of the ways to bring more women in tech is to create more women leaders and entrepreneurs. WePay is proud to sponsor the Grace Hopper Celebration’s <a href="https://ghc.anitab.org/2019-anitab-org-pitcher/" target="_self">PitcHER competition</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;–&nbsp;which spotlights women entrepreneurs who are leading early-stage technology startups that have a positive impact on society and empower women or children. We also send a contingent of employees every year to attend the celebration and bring back lessons and approaches that they and we can use to work toward tech gender equity.This year’s <a href="https://ghc.anitab.org/" target="_self">GHC</a> started by sharing a mission to reach 50/50 tech gender equity by 2025. To fulfill this mission, Brenda Darden Wilkerson, President and CEO of AnitaB.org, encouraged us all to join in on the 50/50 commitment by coming up with #WeWill or #IWill statements to change the direction of the tech industry.<img alt="tech industry"asset_uid="blt6717460be488ce27" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt6717460be488ce27/62bd48955fd9ea1bf6c8c63a/GHC-TechEquity.png" height="auto"/>Some of the inspiring statements that we heard during the 3 days from different speakers were:“We will own who we are”“We will think big and be transformative”“We will surround ourselves with people who cheer us on”“We will ignite the genius in every child”“We will not apologize for our opinions”“We will take our power and channel it to a commitment”<img alt="commitment channel" asset_uid="blte80fcf89be842649" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blte80fcf89be842649/62bd486551ea2f1f08bd10de/GHC-IWill.png" height="auto"/>We were so&nbsp; inspired by the theme that some of our WePay engineers who attended the conference this year decided to commit with their own #IWill statements and share their thoughts, experiences and learnings from GHC 2019.<img alt="group2" asset_uid="bltd01e14a6d5f86678" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltd01e14a6d5f86678/62bd486eac0d056ef2e93b3f/group2.jpg" height="auto"/><h2>Shay Lin, Senior Software Engineer</h2>“I will speak up for diversity in tech.”Arriving at Orange County Convention Center, seeing the center and surrounding hotels literally packed with women and long lines at women’s restrooms, I felt uplifted and almost overwhelmed by the positive energy. I couldn’t help but wonder: “do we still need to promote Women In Tech seeing so many of us today?” Four days later, I can say affirmatively, YES. GHC19 shed light on issues like Design Inclusivity and Gender/Race/Geo Diversity in Technology which echo with me strongly.&nbsp; As a woman engineer from China, I felt more compelled than ever to step up, not just for myself, but to encourage younger generations from my background.At the Design Inclusivity in AI panel, Sophia Velastegui, General Manager of Product in AI from Microsoft, discussed how “smart” thermostats developed by male engineers failed women consumers at the first market launch because the training data and test cases were largely unbalanced towards the body temperature of an average man. The crowd burst into laughter&nbsp;–&nbsp;the conference room was freezing and many were wearing down jackets. The same imbalance applies to hearing devices, Poppy Crum, Chief Scientist from Dolby pointed out. The panel went on to discuss more gaps in diversity, including racial and geographically underrepresented groups.At the Student of Vision Abie Award Panel, Mehul Smriti Raje spoke about her motivation to start her career. There were so few women creators in STEM fields that, “growing up in India and aspiring to be a technologist, my role model was Bill Gates.”&nbsp; The unbalanced gender ratio throughout her academic journey to become a computer scientist, has made collaboration difficult, and left her facing issues like anxiety and low self confidence. “Lead by example and join hands with male allies,'' she said, “I have learned the best way to promote my organization and influence others is to lead a life by the way you believe in.”I’m looking forward to a world where we have Bill Gates’s of all diversities, and knowing we are a long way from that, I will strive to lead, help and speak up. My favorite words from the Closing Keynote, “courage is not something you have, courage is something you practice, courage is something you share with others.” This was said by Dr. Vivienne Ming, Theoretical Neuroscientist, Technologist and Entrepreneur, Founder of Socos Labs.<h2>Sarah Kaplan, Software Engineer</h2>“I will advocate for accessibility”As an engineer on the WePay UI/UX team, I was most interested in sessions about web accessibility. In one of these sessions, Ed Summers, a software engineer who is blind and serves as an accessibility specialist at SAS, demonstrated the SAS Graphics Accelerator, which transforms graphs and other data visualizations into alternate formats so that users with visual impairments can access and explore the data. In addition to representing data with text descriptions and tables that could be read by a screen reader, Summers demonstrated a feature called interactive sonification&nbsp;–&nbsp;the data from a graph was represented through music where the tempo and pitch of the music matched the curve of the line in the graph. Listening to this presentation, I realized that I assume certain content is inherently visual. Summers emphasized the importance of separating the structure of information from the presentation of information. A graph is a visual presentation of data, but the important information is about the structure of the data, which can be represented in many non-visual formats.I was also struck by the way that Summers defined disability. He referenced a World Health Organization definition of disability, explaining that “disability arises based on the interaction between a person and their environment.” Summers emphasized that people do not have disabilities, rather we create disabilities when we design and build things that are not accessible. A person who uses a wheelchair does not have a disability; a disability arises when that person tries to access a building that does not have a wheelchair ramp. A person who is visually impaired does not have a disability; a disability arises when that person needs to use a website that doesn’t work with a screen reader. This talk made me think about my responsibility as an engineer on the UI/UX team to keep accessibility at the forefront of my mind.<h2>Vibha Dharmendra Bhambhani, Software Engineer</h2>“I will support endeavors and help innovate in application of tech for betterment of human life.”One of the events I attended this year was PitcHER. The organizers ended up selecting 11 teams instead of the scheduled 10 teams&nbsp;–&nbsp;which shows how participants exceeded expectations and the adaptability and willingness of the organizers to appreciate talent. Most of the ideas were derived from real problems faced personally by the innovators. The ages of innovators, their experiences and domains were spread across a wide range but all of the innovations had one thing in common&nbsp;–&nbsp;persistence. All of them are working hard to build great products and are sure-shot winners. One that particularly stood out for me was the bedsores application medical device for a preventable healthcare condition. Just knowing how many health issues can be taken care of by reducing the prices of medical device illustrates the incredible capacity in terms of innovation and betterment of human life.&nbsp; <a href="https://ghc.anitab.org/2019-pitcher/2019-finalists/sanna-gaspard/" target="_self">Dr. Sanna Gaspard</a> of Rubitection Inc created a device which was 96% accurate, costing in the $1000 range, compared to between 5 and 20 times the cost of alternative machines. As a Wepay employee I am glad we are funding events that enable such innovators.I loved the radically honest conversations people were having in general, how approachable everyone was and how everyone wants to work together for the upliftment of women in tech in general. At one of the talks I attended, Kathryn O’Donnell discussed how she is building her organization, Clovis Technologies, and its work culture to not count face time, but instead actual work, which is something a lot of working mothers and fatherts could benefit from. This reminded me of a talk by Indra Nooyi where she shared how she focuses on creating a work place where you can bring yourself to work completely.The closing discussion featured amazing women sharing their experiences. Yamilée Toussaint Beach combined her love for dance and her engineering degree to create an electronics based dance routine. This is aimed at getting women engaged in tech at an early age. I would recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1ReDvDxZk" target="_self">checking out the video</a>. The room was filled with excitement, innovation and possibility for a future where we can use our strengths and talents to create an amazing world for women in tech and as a whole.<h2>Bhuvana Kadapakkam, Senior Software Engineer</h2>"I will encourage and support future and fellow women in tech"A few years back, I had the opportunity to teach coding to kids with autism. At that time, I did not know much about autism. As I interacted with the kids, I realized how smart they were, but that they didn't have the right tools to communicate with others. I wondered what the future of these kids would be. At GHC, I heard Jhillika Kumar (Student of Vision Abie Award winner) talk about her autistic brother.&nbsp; He had never spoken a word to her until one day, they brought home an IPad, and he was able to use it with ease and communicate with her. She realized that people with disabilities need the right tools, and she was motivated to be an advocate for disability rights and focus on creating an inclusive world. She is also a founder of mentra.me, which focuses on getting 100K autistic adults into the workforce by 2025. How awesome is that?Speaking of inclusivity, Dr. Fei Fei Li also mentioned we need to create a more human-centered AI which augments human behaviors and emotions. She also said that a diverse set of people should be involved in designing such algorithms to avoid bias in AI.

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Experiences from Grace Hopper Celebration 2019 and our commitment to tech gender equity

Cash is the lifeblood of small businesses and managing cash flow can be the biggest pain point. According to <a href="https://www.score.org/blog/1-reason-small-businesses-fail-and-how-avoid-it" target="_self">SCORE</a>, four out of five small businesses fail within the first five years from poor cash flow. Even with large receivables, having timely access to cash to cover payroll and inventory is a constant juggling act. Anything that can make cash flow faster, easier and simpler to predict is a benefit.&nbsp;That’s why we’re excited to offer Same-Day Deposits* to Chase business bank accounts, at no additional cost. The new functionality will help tens of thousands of U.S. small businesses that use platforms like BigCommerce and Xero to get paid faster. It also showcases the combined capabilities of a Silicon Valley financial technology company and one of the world’s largest, most admired financial institutions. There are powerful benefits that can be unlocked by combining banking and payments and this is just the first.<h2>Help your users get paid faster</h2>Software platforms, and merchants, have been keenly interested in solving this issue. Over the last few years we have seen the emergence of different payout options offered by various institutions. For example, next-day and instant payout options have begun rolling out in the industry but they are still limited and expensive, costing merchants as much as 1.5% for same-day access to funds, or requiring push-to-debit functionality.&nbsp;Putting payments and banking together under one-roof eliminates unnecessary steps in the process, like third-party clearing, and WePay and Chase are using that to our customers’ advantage. As a result, WePay is offering Same-Day Deposits to software platforms and their small businesses - at no additional cost. Rolling out throughout Q4 2019, payments approved before 5 PM PT will be deposited in the merchant’s Chase bank account that night.&nbsp;Here’s a real-life example: a typical small-city restaurant opens for lunch through dinner six days a week, is closed Monday and is busiest Friday-Sunday. With Same-Day Deposits they will be able to process their Friday receipts through 5PM PT and receive payment in their bank account by Friday midnight. In the past, or with other providers, they would have to wait until Monday. And if payroll is cut on Friday, the impact of faster access to cash could be material.<h2>How Same-Day Deposits work</h2>Any platform integrated with WePay’s <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/" target="_self" aria-label="Link">Link</a> or <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self" aria-label="Clear">Clear</a> products will automatically be able to offer this to their merchants upon integration. A merchant onboards with WePay on their platform, and chooses a Chase bank account where funds will be deposited - it’s that simple. In addition, we are adding the ability to receive deposits on weekends and holidays as well as on business days - ensuring all businesses, such as restaurants, construction, or any platform without a traditional Monday-Friday schedule, can benefit from improved cash flow.&nbsp;If a small business merchant&nbsp; has a Chase Bank Account, they will receive their cash same day for any approved transaction Sunday - Friday. Plus, Saturday transactions will be deposited Sunday morning.For a non-Chase bank Account, deposits will occur on the next business day, depending on the receiving bank.<h2>What’s next</h2>Payments are the lifeblood of any business and making payments faster, cheaper, and easier for small businesses is our focus. Access to funds is a huge pain point for businesses and being part of JPMorgan Chase puts us in a unique position to help solve this challenge. Same-Day Deposits is one new feature we're launching enabled by this partnership, but it's just the beginning. We are excited to continue leveraging the Chase ecosystem to expand the benefits we offer to our platform partners and the small businesses they serve.&nbsp;*Same-Day Deposits are available to merchants on integrated software platforms with a 5:00 pm PT cut-off time for payments processed on WePay. Merchants must deposit into a single Chase bank account to be eligible. Payments approved by 5:00 pm PT are eligible. Funds are deposited into Chase bank accounts six days a week, excluding Saturdays. Funds deposited to non-Chase bank accounts may settle as soon as the next business day, depending on the receiving bank. All transactions are subject to WePay terms of service and exclusions therein, including risk assessment and fraud monitoring, which may result in delays. Available in the U.S. only. To create a faster, more cohesive settlement experience, WePay will no longer offer check-based settlements as an option. Merchants who are currently settling via paper checks will be asked to add their bank details to their WePay account to receive their deposits faster.

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Announcing Same-Day Deposits

We are happy to announce the open source release of Waltz. WePay's engineering team has come up with a fresh approach to reconciling transactions on distributed systems at high volume that makes the transaction log the single source of truth rather than the database. Waltz is a distributed write-ahead log. It was initially designed to be the ledger of money transactions on the WePay system and was generalized for broader use cases of distributed systems that require serializable consistency.Waltz is similar to existing log systems like Kafka in that it manages transaction data from many services. However, unlike other systems, Waltz provides a mechanism to maintain serializable consistency in distributed applications. Waltz is regarded as the single source of truth rather than the database, and it enables a highly reliable log-centric system architecture.WePay has released Waltz as open source. You can read much more about it, as well as find out how to participate in the project in <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/waltz-a-distributed-write-ahead-log" target="_self">the announcement on our engineering blog.</a>

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Announcing Waltz: A new distributed write-ahead log

It turns out that adding payments is the solution for finding value and opportunity in almost any size of vertical SaaS business – at least according to Adeyemi Ajao, a co-founder and Managing Partner at Base10 Partners. He recently published an <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/adeyemiajao/2019/03/06/in-small-tams-payments-unlock-giant-opportunities/#2feae3504e7d" target="_self">article in Forbes</a> that takes a look at how SaaS platform businesses can have great success even in markets that are perceived as ‘small’.&nbsp;“Vertical SaaS companies are becoming SaaS + payments companies, and by doing so are creating mega-opportunities in deceptively small TAMs (Total Addressable Markets),” he asserts and goes on to say, “What is clear is that the next generation of vertical market SaaS businesses should incorporate payments functionality directly into the product feature-set and take a cut of that payment flow rather than outsource those payments to external providers. Not only does this increase the TAM, but it also improves customer experience which in-turn leads to customer retention and a better and more valuable business in the long-term.”

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Payments can unlock opportunities for any SaaS business

May 1, 2020 Update: The Financial Conduct Authority announced that due to the exceptional circumstances of the Covid crisis, they are giving the industry an additionally 6 months to implement SCA for e-commerce. The new timeline of September 14, 2021 replaces the previous March 2021 date.August 18, 2019 Update: The Financial Conduct Authority, the financial regulatory body in the United Kingdom, has agreed to an 18 month extension to implement SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) so as to limit the potential impact on consumers. An extension means UK issuing banks, payment processors and online retailers will not face enforcement action if they do not implement 3DSecure 2.0 until March 2021. WePay is currently reviewing the extension and will be in touch with Partners with further details.On September 14, 2019 all companies within the European Union will need to comply with the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), which requires “Strong Customer Authentication” (SCA) for electronic payments. Strong Customer Authentication is a form of 2-factor authentication which will increase customer protection, driving change and innovation for online transactions. Payers will have to authenticate their identity with their card issuer using at least two of the three elements:<ul><li>something they know (a password or PIN code);</li><li>something they own (a card, a mobile phone); and</li><li>something they are (biometrics, e.g. fingerprint or iris scan).</li></ul><h2>What is the 3-D Secure 2.0 solution?</h2>The SCA solution for credit card transactions is 3-D Secure 2.0, the next generation of 3-D Secure.&nbsp; Version 2.0 offers a better user experience compared to its predecessor by not always requiring a “challenge” for the payer to verify their identity for each transaction. With partners that provide additional transaction data, issuing banks can choose to offer their payers a “frictionless flow” which doesn’t require identity verification, and speeds up the check-out process.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h2>Who does this impact?</h2>This mandate applies to all credit card transactions in the European Union. Any platform which onboards merchants in the EU and accepts payments from consumers will need to comply with the mandate.&nbsp; Platforms which do not deal with merchants in the EU are exempt from these changes. Partners will have to update their integrations to support the additional data fields to support 3-D Secure 2.0.There will be work required from ISV’s to comply with this mandate. WePay partners should be on the lookout in the coming weeks for communications on how to complete that work.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you have any additional questions, please contact <a href="mailto:api@wepay.com">api@wepay.com</a> or your WePay representative for more information, including necessary documentation and timelines.

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PSD2 and 3-D Secure 2.0

I recently attended the <a href="https://www.nacha.org/events/payments-2019" target="_self">Payments 2019 conference</a> for the first time in 4 years. NACHA is the organization that sets rules and standards for financial messaging and administers the ACH network. Payments has always been my favorite conference because it meets the intended purpose with good educational content, has excellent speakers and a true sense of the industry dynamics is shared. The primary participants at the conference are financial institutions big and small, corporate customers and all the processing partners that move money along bank rails.Six years ago at the conference, I sat in a session of Q&A with the Federal Reserve as they were soliciting feedback on the <a href="https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-faster-phase-1" target="_self">Same Day ACH initiative</a>. Big banks were really concerned about losing revenue and about changing architecture on legacy systems. Small banks were also worried. And corporate customers really wanted the banks to improve.Fast forward to 2019 where several phases of Same Day ACH have been launched and there were multiple sessions showcasing how a variety of customers have really used this enhancement to their advantage. And while the Federal Reserve is also looking at Faster Payments, they are continuing to focus on Same Day ACH by decreasing the hours between origination and settlement, increasing the number of windows available in a day and increasing the size of transactions. Of course, all of this takes time but it’s really exciting to see how the banks and processing entities are driving forward to the goals of increasing the speed of payments and payment security.One Faster Payments initiative I’m very excited about is Real Time Payments through The Clearing House. We’re working hard to get this tee’d up for our customers as soon as we can. The ability to send our merchants their funds in a real time way is super exciting. We know they need it and we’re going to deliver with the power of JPMorgan Chase.After Zelle won the award for Excellence in Payments, I was reminded of my coffee addiction. With the rise of Starbucks in your local neighborhood, everyone thought that the small mom/pop coffee shops would be put out of business. But that hasn’t happened. Everyone just drinks more coffee! &nbsp;So whether it’s your local specialty store, or Starbucks, the increase in coffee sales has been amazing. Ditto Zelle. It’s been a phenomenal year for Zelle, but also for other P2P methods such as Venmo. P2P transactions have just increased astronomically and I’m betting that consumers are using multiple methods at the same time.Two speakers that really grabbed my attention at the conference were <a href="http://jpnicols.com/" target="_self">JP Nichols</a> who spoke about innovation, strategy and leadership. “Innovation is about creating value. Innovation is an act of leadership.” &nbsp;He reminded the audience of how important it is to understand what your customers want and think beyond what you do today.Second was Shabnam Mogharabi of Soul Pancake. I was not aware of Soul Pancake but I certainly am now. She shared a truly inspiring speech about the content that Soul Pancake serves and people like Kid President who are sending a positive and uplifting message to all. It reminded me and the audience about the value of humanity. And definitely took us out of the world of payments for 30 minutes!

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Report from NACHA: Faster Payments get Banking Moving

WePay’s infrastructure relies on a great deal of robust engineering to support the huge number of transactions we process every hour. Part of that infrastructure is based on open source frameworks. When WePay uses a framework like this it also contributes heavily to that open source community. An example is Apache Kafka®, an open-source event streaming processing &nbsp;platform capable of handling trillions of real-time data events a day and developed by LinkedIn.Recently, Chris Riccomini, a Distinguished Engineer at WePay, spoke with Tim Berglund, Senior Director of Developer Experience at Confluent on an episode of the Streaming Audio podcast about Apache Kafka, hosted by Confluent titled, “<a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/186154/1145507-chris-riccomini-on-the-history-of-apache-kafka-and-stream-processing">Chris Riccomini on the History of Apache Kafka and Stream Processing</a>.” In it, Chris shares how Apache Kafka® was born while he was at LinkedIn and how Kafka and the stream processing framework Samza came about. He also shares what he’s doing these days at WePay—building systems that use Kafka as a primary data store.You can listen to the podcast episode here: <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/186154/1145507-chris-riccomini-on-the-history-of-apache-kafka-and-stream-processing">https://www.buzzsprout.com/186154/1145507-chris-riccomini-on-the-history-of-apache-kafka-and-stream-processing</a>

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WePay talks with Confluent about Apache Kafka

While chargebacks are unavoidable, the goal of any business is to handle chargebacks properly whenever they appear. That means finding out about potential chargebacks as soon as possible (retrieval), contacting the customer, responding to the chargeback and trying to resolve the issue, preventing the chargeback from getting enforced and having financial impact.Unfortunately, chargebacks are not going away anytime soon. In fact, according to our survey of over 500 US small businesses, 25% of SMBs have experienced a chargeback - in the past year. So now, more than ever, we recommend that merchants implement proactive measures to reduce the likelihood of receiving a chargeback. An additional advantage is that most of these best practices also improve communication and customer service for a business.Some payment processors like <a href="https://go.wepay.com/getting-started">WePay</a>, will support their customers and merchants through the chargeback process, others will not. But regardless of the support that is given, there are fourteen core best practices to follow with respect to chargebacks for merchants.<ul><li>Make certain your descriptions and promises about products match reality. A product or service not meeting expectations is one of the grounds for a chargeback and you are better off avoiding the potential of a problem in the first place.</li></ul><ul><li>Make sure your payment descriptor for card receipts and that will go to credit card bills is clear and simple to understand so that customers can easily and correctly identify charges.</li></ul><ul><li>Ask for ID for in person transactions.</li></ul><ul><li>Always create and offer digital receipts as well as paper ones - it makes it easier to document later for fighting a chargeback.</li></ul><ul><li>Monitor for chargebacks regularly and respond promptly - a faster response makes it more likely and easier to head a chargeback off and deal with the issue before incurring extra fees.</li></ul><ul><li>If you do get a chargeback follow the described protocol carefully and exactly. Have your team learn the chargeback reason codes and chargeback response procedures.</li></ul><ul><li>For a service business use written contracts and require a signed copy of the contract to make it easier and clearer to handle disputes.</li></ul><ul><li>Deliver excellent service. Pride yourself on running on a business that prioritizes quality and customer experience.</li></ul><ul><li>Furthermore, as refunds are less of a hassle to deal with than the chargeback process, we recommend highlighting ways a customer can contact you if they are unsatisfied with the product or service they received. In fact go beyond that and encourage communication - the easier it is for a customer to contact you about an issue the more likely they will take the avenue of a return or refund or discussion with you rather file a chargeback. Include your support team’s email address or 800 number. This will help ensure that customers choose the option that is less time-consuming and expensive.</li></ul><ul><li>Make returns and exchanges straightforward so that it is easier to do that than try to reverse a transaction and start again. Disclose refund and cancellation policies upfront so customers are aware of policies and their options.</li></ul><ul><li>Make sure your refund process itself is quick and easy so that it doesn’t add to customer frustration.</li></ul><ul><li>Improve your card security systems so that you minimize the possibility of real fraud. Take advantage of more advanced technologies like chip cards and security codes.</li></ul><ul><li>Provide a summary of services, which is signed by the customer. Have your own audit and accounting teams also go over summaries and orders to spot issues like double charging.</li></ul><ul><li>Ensure you have a streamlined shipping process in place and always set appropriate expectations with your customers as to when they can expect full service or delivery. We also suggest keeping all tracking numbers on items that are shipped out and provide them to customers as well so that delivery issues can be dealt with promptly if they arise.</li></ul>

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14 Tips for Merchants: Best Practices for Reducing Chargebacks

Today, we released improvements to our Know Your Customer (KYC) document upload experience that give merchants better clarity about what documents they need to provide and about the review status of uploaded documents.To comply with financial regulations, WePay must collect and verify KYC information from all merchants before we can pay out any funds in their WePay account to their bank account. The vast majority (95%+) of merchants are verified in real-time on submission of their information. However, if there is an issue, WePay asks merchants to securely upload scans or images of specific physical documents, such as a passport or government issued ID, to help verify the merchant’s identity as quickly as possible. WePay reviews the documents and most merchants are approved and fully onboarded within 48 hours.Our Merchant Center now has an improved status page that shows merchants which documents they have uploaded and what the status of the document review is. The status page contains a card of information for each document that the merchant uploads. Each card includes:<ul><li>Type of document that was uploaded (e.g. passport)</li><li>Date and time when the document was uploaded</li><li>Status for each document: in review, approved, or declined</li><li>If a document is declined, a reason why it was declined</li></ul><img asset_uid="blt665b303211c5d04a" alt="kyc document" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt665b303211c5d04a/62bd48dc4914e97d05120a01/security-_-doc-verification-web-1-1.png" height="auto"/>We have also refreshed the email template used to communicate the need for document uploads to more prominently highlight the custom messages that WePay Risk Analysts include in emails to guide merchants through the onboarding process.<img asset_uid="bltd75520a43e8dec56" alt="onbaording process" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltd75520a43e8dec56/62bd48d6db03ad7e2d27353c/confirm-email-change-v2-1-2-1.png" height="auto"/>We are committed to continuously improving the overall experience for our merchants, and these improvements to the document upload process will help merchants get onboarded more smoothly.

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Improved Know Your Customer (KYC) Document Upload Process

Keeping WePay’s infrastructure running smoothly is a huge challenge, especially under the kinds of volume loads that big e-commerce campaigns can generate. WePay has adopted a modern payments service mesh architecture to handle the shifts smoothly. As we roll out new microservices and as our business grows, the amount of communication needed between all of our microservices has grown and we have been looking at ways to keep latency down and maintain rapid, secure communications.The latest WePay Engineering blog post by Mohsen Rezaei and Dinesh Subramani, “Migrating APIs from REST to gRPC at WePay” addresses this issue. It’s part of a series of posts on how we build and optimize our payments service mesh architecture. The series of articles also covers<a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/using-l5d-as-a-service-mesh-proxy-at-wepay"> how WePay manages its service mesh</a> with<a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/"> Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)</a> and<a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/scds-battle-of-containerization"> containerization patterns we’ve been experimenting with</a> and using in GKE as well as <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/ha-mesh-wepay">keeping a service mesh monitored and available</a>. If you are interested in these techniques or how a modern engineering organization puts together a high-performance system,<a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/"> please take a look</a>. And if you are interested in joining our engineering team, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers#listings">we’re hiring</a>.

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WePay Engineering: How our microservices use service mesh to communicate

<h3>WePay asked some of our partners for their leadership advice and to share a nugget of business wisdom. These became part of our partnership with the popular SaaStr podcast and we’ve collected them here.</h3><a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-206-4-core-considerations-startup-founders-must-recognise-when-pricing-their-product-why-being-good-at-sales-wont-make-you-a-great-sales-leader-and-why-boring-is-better-than-sexy-when-it-comes-to-winning-your-market-with-ryan-barretto-svp-of-global" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 206</a>: <a href="https://kashoo.com/" target="_self">Kashoo</a> CEO Jim Secord, “The most important thing we’ve learned is to really use your own software. I don’t think there’s any better way to develop product and customer insight than actually eating your own dog food. We are the biggest critics or fans of our own software and it drives us to constantly improve.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-207-13-years-to-20-people-3-years-later-350-people-and-50m-arr-why-thinking-there-is-a-price-point-you-need-for-a-rep-is-bs-why-smb-first-works-and-you-must-not-design-for-enterprise" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 207</a>: <a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/" target="_self">BigCommerce</a> CEO Brent Bellm, “My tip is to remember the definition of disruptive technology. By definition, it always starts at the underserved, low end of the market, builds scale and then migrates up to go after the mid-market and the mainstream of the market.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-208-sendgrid-board-member-anne-raimondi-on-why-we-have-to-see-innovation-in-saas-pricing-why-everyone-in-saas-orgs-has-to-be-product-people-why-humans-cant-scale-more-than-100-yoy-what-that-means-for-scaling-orgs" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 208</a>: <a href="https://www.fusebill.com/" target="_self">Fusebill</a> Co-founder and CEO Tyler Eyamie, “There are two key areas of advice that I have that other CEO/Founders could benefit from. #1 Be patiently impatient and #2 Establish KPIs early. For #1 – be patient enough to trust your plan and your team. Impatient enough to ensure your foot is always on the gas. #2 On the KPI side establish these early to hold your people quantifiably accountable for their efforts.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-209-the-3-components-to-successful-saas-pricing-lessons-from-seeing-zendesk-scale-from-12-to-2000-and-how-to-ensure-successful-cross-functional-communication-with-amanda-kleha-chief-customer-officer-figma" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 209</a>: <a href="https://www.americommerce.com/" target="_self">AmeriCommerce</a> VP of Operations Jack Cravy, “It took us several years to get to where we are today but it all started with customers telling us what they were looking for and us doing everything in our power to fit those needs. It wasn’t perfect on the first time around but with enough feedback and enough communication we were able to satisfy what they were looking for and that’s played a big factor in our success.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-210-why-the-best-sales-reps-are-not-outgoing-and-extroverted-why-sales-reps-are-fundamentally-not-coin-operated-and-the-right-way-to-structure-both-comp-plans-and-sales-training-with-bridget-gleason-vp-of-sales-logzio" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 210</a>: <a href="https://www.webconnex.com/" target="_self">Webconnex</a> Co-founder John Russell, “We took a bit of a different approach when we decided to bootstrap our startup. And yeah there sure are &nbsp;challenges but it was probably the best decision we ever made. Eric and I have been able to make better long term decisions for our customers and our team. It’s forced us to prioritize what really matters and it’s given us the freedom to risk and the freedom to be generous. It might have been a bit slower path but we’ve now processed almost $2 billion dollars for our customers and our team has doubled in the past 12 months.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-211-the-ultimate-guide-to-saas-pricing-from-investors-benchmark-matrix-upfront-ventures-operators-figma-snyk-and-kustomer" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 211</a>: <a href="https://payrent.com/" target="_self">PayRent</a> CEO and founder Ryan Abell, “In our culture today it is easy to get distracted and sidetrack your business. It is important to set realistic and clear expectations for you and your team that ultimately align with your goals. I ask myself if Warren Buffet were to watch over me would he be impressed with my actions?”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-212-who-must-fundamentally-own-renewals-within-your-organisation-why-burying-customer-success-under-sales-does-not-work-the-biggest-truisms-on-talent-that-are-false-and-so-dangerous-with-nick-mehta-ceo-gainsight" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 212</a>: <a href="https://www.freshbooks.com/" target="_self">FreshBooks</a> CEO and co-founder Mike McDerment, “If you care about culture and you’re scaling you’ve gotta think about organizational breakpoints. With four or five people in the room, I think everyone knows what’s going on. But 15 people you might start getting into your first managers and that’ll freak some of your team out and then when you hit 40 people not everyone will know what’s going on anymore, that’ll spook some others. At 80 everything breaks down communication-wise. You need new tools. And 150 is kind of another place. So look out for these things when you are scaling your company.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-213-redpoints-tom-tunguz-on-what-makes-the-most-effective-free-trial-what-makes-good-vs-great-when-it-comes-to-benchmarks-for-assisted-vs-unassisted-conversion-why-scoring-leads-may-actually-be-dangerous" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 213</a>: <a href="https://www.printavo.com/" target="_self">Printavo</a> founder Bruce Ackerman, “The two most important things I would say are number one, really focus on niching your business into an area and then be able to expand from there. And then number two, not really worrying about competition. Truly focus on your product and your customers.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-214-new-relic-cro-erica-schultz-on-what-it-takes-to-successfully-scale-into-enterprise-how-the-very-best-reps-build-relationships-with-their-leads" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 214</a>: <a href="https://www.jotform.com/" target="_self">JotForm</a> Director of Communications Chad Reid, “So a big mistake that SaaS companies make is over-monetization. It’s so easy for any business to see a dollar number assigned to each user. But when you offer sizable discounts, sales, free features, and rewards, you get something that’s much more valuable than just immediate revenue, which is customer loyalty.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-215-why-your-sales-team-is-not-working-together-the-way-you-think-it-is-what-is-account-based-collaboration-how-can-you-integrate-it-into-your-organisation-to-drive-conversion-and-account-management-how-to-prevent-silos-forming-within-your-teams-wi" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 216</a>: <a href="https://www.agree.com/" target="_self">Agree</a> founder David Jay, “When I was 16 years old, my Dad sat me down and gave me the best advice. He said, ‘Build your business around helping other people and you’ll always have plenty of work.’ So the more that we can listen to our customers and feel their pain the better we are able to understand them, empathize with them and then create solutions that meet their needs.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-216-twilio-founder-jeff-lawson-sendgrid-ceo-sameer-dholakia-on-why-developer-first-is-a-maturation-in-the-supply-chain-of-software-why-with-software-innovation-costs-being-lower-than-ever-operators-must-maximise-the-number-of-at-bat-opportunities-t" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 218</a>: <a href="https://www.greektrack.com/" target="_self">GreekTrack</a> founder and CEO Tony Schmidt, “Here at GreekTrack we focus on every single support ticket as a design opportunity. So we don’t just solve a support ticket and close it but we take it all the way down to the development team and try and find a solution that will completely eliminate that type of support ticket forever.”<a href="http://saastr.libsyn.com/saastr-222-flexport-cro-ben-braverman-on-why-it-is-total-horeshit-that-the-best-sellers-dont-make-good-managers-why-specialisation-does-not-lead-to-the-best-customer-experience-scaling-revenue-from-18k-mrr-in-2014-to-a-472m-year-in-2018" target="_self">From SaaStr Podcast Episode 222</a>: <a href="https://trellis.org/" target="_self">Trellis</a> founder and CEO Justin Goodhew, “My one piece of advice is do less. I know that sounds crazy but the SaaS platforms that try to do everything end up failing every single time. The ones that can do one specific pain point the best in the world always win.”<div class="sfsiaftrpstwpr"></div>

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Software  Business Advice from 12 Leaders

<a href="https://www.internationalwomensday.com/" target="_self">International Women’s Day 2019</a> is approaching this Friday (3/8) and as Maya Angelou once said, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women.” This holds true as we continue to take action for equality. It aligns with “The Power of Us”—this year’s theme at the <a href="https://www.watermarkwomensconference.org/" target="_self">Watermark Conference for Women</a> with over 7,000 women (and some men!) in attendance.Women have come a long way in fighting for respect and having our voices be heard. But now, more than ever, we need to support each other at work to overcome the inequality we still face. In fact, according to a <a href="https://www.inc.com/laura-garnett/women-in-tech-what-s-the-status.html" target="_self">recent Census survey</a>, women make up more than half of the U.S. workforce yet we make up less than 30% of U.S. tech jobs. At WePay, we believe culture comes from leaders, and our leaders are focused on maintaining a good gender ratio on various teams, including the engineering team.<img alt="engineering team" asset_uid="blt560cb332b4f5d8bd" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt560cb332b4f5d8bd/62bd48ea2359d8256a3b0418/20190222_111628.jpg" height="auto"/>I was fortunate enough to attend the conference and learn from speakers like Gloria Steinem, Dr. Brene Brown, Serena Williams, and Amanda Southworth, along with some of the women of WePay. By the end of the conference, we left feeling inspired and more importantly, empowered: empowered to do more, empowered to contribute more to the WePay culture, and empowered to be courageous.<img alt="courageous" asset_uid="blt97a89c1c0e839dea" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt97a89c1c0e839dea/62bd48ed5e22387f3a531914/20190222_091354.jpg" height="auto"/>One of my favorite sessions was the opening with Dr. Brene Brown, who reminded us that we are all storytellers and we are more courageous than we think. There is no courage without vulnerability. We make up stories that actually highlight our fears and uncertainties. “The story I’m telling myself” is created in the absence of understanding; a concept Dr. Brene Brown stressed to the audience as the one thing she wanted us to walk learning from her session. She encouraged us to find a partner that believes in shared work, shared care because women often are doing “double roles” as a leader at work and a mother at home. Until men are seen as equal at home, women won’t be seen as equal in the workplace.Other takeaways? Let’s hear from the women of WePay who attended:“Choosing Wonder Over Worry” was a breakout session hosted by Amber Rae and left me inspired. She challenged our discomfort and fear, specifically in the workplace and guided the group to reframe our relationships with fear, stress, and anxiety. A big takeaway was to use critical thinking to change the question from “Why?” to “Why not!?” when facing a decision. - MelanieBeing a compassionate, motivated, and empathetic leader doesn’t mean you’re not a strong leader. It is okay to make time for yourself because it is a balance. In the “Introverted Leader” session, I was reminded to focus on where I draw my energy as I become more of a leader. Second, this quote hit home, “you can only move 3 points on a scale, so figure out where you are a 7, and become a 10”. I need to focus on my strengths while seeing others’ strengths to help me ultimately become a 10. - MaralAfter attending the “Budget for Life” session with Tiffany Aliche, I learned I need to retrain my mind on savings. “Your budget is your ‘say yes’ plan,” which to me means, I should think of my savings as not something being taken away from me, but for me giving back to myself. - Nghi“Mind the Gap: Negotiation and Getting Paid” was an eye-opening session for me. I learned women are currently making around 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, and women of color are making even less. Listening to the panel of speakers share their own experience with negotiation not only empowered us, but encouraged us to shift our mindset regarding negotiation. We also received excellent tips and strategies on how to approach negotiations. - Marina<img alt="negotiations" asset_uid="bltfa18c772a6a5e810" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltfa18c772a6a5e810/62bd48e485b5856bca542bab/IMG_2758.jpg" height="auto"/>Some of the Women of WePay attending the Watermark Conference. They come from teams across the company including Risk, Marketing, Sales, Customer Delight, Engineering, HR and Legal.Dr. Brown’s life hack “the story I’m telling myself” sticks out to me the most. We all know in theory that we should be kind to each other, give one another the benefit of the doubt and so on, but this is a simple blueprint for action that anyone can follow. I can’t wait to start using this at work and at home. - SojeongA powerful interactive session by Charmaine McClarie took a packed room through an exercise of communicating our own individual value in “How to Be Heard: Effective Communication for Career Advancement.” It was interesting to learn that most individuals will often say what they do during introductions. However, they missed articulating the value of what they do and as a result, made less of a lasting memory impact. Knowing that we are being seen for the value we bring to the table each day is not only a personal confidence booster, but it’s also a career booster. - AmandaOne of my takeaways is how we tend to overthink instead of taking the initiative to ask for clarification at that moment. Another takeaway was from the “Choose Wonder over Worry” session, where at some point, all of us worry about something in our life. But we should not let the worry take over. Instead, wonder what can happen by facing it. There is always something you can learn when you face it. - SmithaAs a working mom of two teenagers, I’m always juggling with competing demands. As such, I think of shortcuts and ways to hack the system. Dr. Brown’s talk showed that our brain makes up stories to cope, but if we train our brain to create stories filled with curiosities and engagement, in turn, those stories will temper our fear and generate encouragement and empowerment. - Rebecca<img alt="Rebecca" asset_uid="blt011d73fdd48555d0" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt011d73fdd48555d0/62bd48e60ef6a47c1d38a347/IMG_2115.jpg" height="auto"/>In the afternoon keynote, Serena Williams talked about the importance of taking risks and not getting boxed, but instead “shoot for the sky.” That really resonated with me, as we are capable of much more than we think. In the “How Women Rise” session by Sally Helgesen, she pointed out that the very habits which helped us succeed in the past work against us as we try to get to the next level in our careers. It is crucial that we break those habits. One takeaway from the session was not to fall in the perfection trap but to say “it is okay to make mistakes.” The energy was palpable at the conference; so many great stories were shared and I left feeling recharged and full of positive thoughts and ideas. - AditiThe Women of WePay stand together in support of one another and allies of women. We recognize we need to share our opinions and be seen as a leader, no matter what our titles are. So here’s to strong women: may we celebrate them, may we know them, may we be them, and may we raise them.If you’re interested in joining WePay, check out our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers#listings" target="_self">openings</a>!

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The Power of Us – A Watermark Conference Recap

Interviews can be tough for anyone to face, especially at dynamic, modern organizations where interviews are planned rather than held in an ad hoc manner. Engineering interviews, in particular, are an area of intense interest for potential candidates, because they tend to be very structured. In addition the hiring of software engineers is still projected to grow much faster than that of other fields over the next few years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So interviews become a critical way for both employers and employees to differentiate themselves. Interviews are also an area that isn’t given enough attention by both candidates and the companies hiring new employees. But people and companies aren’t all the same, and rather than trying to fit a square candidate peg into a round open position hole, it is better for the candidate to find the ‘square’ position and the organization to find the ‘round’ candidate. One of the issues is making sure that candidates are in a position to show their capabilities well and that companies demonstrate their ability to provide a great career opportunity so that both parties get a good understanding of whether or not this is a fit.The WePay Engineering Blog has <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/preparing-for-top-tier-engineering-interviews" target="_self">a post by Matt Clower that addresses many of these issues and specifically looks at how candidates can best prepare for technical interviews</a>. The post covers understanding interviewing, making the most of whiteboard and coding sessions, preparation and etiquette, technical phone interviews and planning and practice.We’ve also put together a video to help engineering candidates with technical interviews which contains advice from many experienced engineering interviewers and candidates. It covers many of the same points and includes advice about understanding that interviews aren’t adversarial, that you have to convey a lot more than coding skills and the importance of good communication.<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/318586328" title="Good Communication" ></iframe>You can find out more in depth about interviewing here on <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/preparing-for-top-tier-engineering-interviews" target="_self">our Engineering blog post</a>. You can also<a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers" target="_self"> take a look at our open positions and apply here</a>.

ConquerYourEngineeringInterviews (1)

How to prepare for a technical Interview

2018 was a busy year in the world of payments as fintechs have continued to disrupt and force reactions from other financial institutions. Some of the things we saw during the year were the rise of omnichannel payments, consolidation in the market as some technologies matured, and an expected increase in sophistication in fraud and money laundering.As we head into 2019 and what looks currently like a potentially rocky year for financial markets, it’s time to gaze into a crystal ball and provide a few predictions for the year ahead. We asked some of the payments industry experts at WePay to give us thoughts on what they see coming. Common predictions arose such as continued consolidation in the fintech and payments space, rapid growth in adoption and use of faster payments solutions and a fintech getting granted a chartered bank license in the US. The devil can be in the details though, so here are the unadulterated predictions.<h2>Zen Banerjee – Director, Global Payments</h2><ul><li>Payment facilitators begin to outgrow many traditional acquirers in volume.</li><li>The growth of mobile wallet payments at POS systems – PayPal, Venmo, ApplePay, Amazon, ChasePay</li><li>A tech company will get a chartered bank license in the US – Amazon, Square, PayPal, SoFi to name a few of possible candidates.</li><li>Faster payments sees acceleration in B2B payments.</li></ul><h2>Rich Aberman – Chief Strategy Officer</h2><ul><li>Accelerated adoption of Machine Learning and AI among major financial institutions to fight fraud, increase automation, drive insights/offers, etc.</li><li>Financial Institutions continuing to adopt open banking and API-first strategies.</li><li>More and more software platforms and marketplaces offering financial services beyond payments (e.g. lending, insurance, issuing).</li><li>The last few years have been about data breaches. I'm predicting similar announcements around fraud attacks (similar to the recent Venmo announcement).</li></ul><h2>Aditi Gupta – Director of Product Management</h2><ul><li>2019 will be the year of Faster Payments as instant bank transfers pick up steam worldwide.</li><li>Paper checks will see an accelerated decline.</li><li>Payments will become increasingly invisible. Innovation (open APIs, frictionless checkout, improvements in payment security) and standardization in the form of PSD2, 3DS2.0, Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) will drive technology adoption and continue to push payments to the background.</li></ul><h2>Matt Schrey – Head of Strategic Sales</h2><ul><li>The growth of consumer spend on reward cards slows and perhaps even drops, with resulting Interchange relief to merchants, who will continue to pursue legal action against the Card Networks regardless.</li><li>A leading fintech will successfully apply for and be granted OCC’s Special Purpose National Bank Charter.</li></ul><h2>Sireesh Potireddy – Senior Director of Product Management</h2><ul><li>We saw considerable acquisitions/consolidation in 2018 (PayPal acquiring HyperWallet, iZettle and earmarking $3B in acquisitions, Vantiv / WorldPay merger) which will continue in 2019. Consolidation will increase significantly if the market heads toward a recession.</li><li>Continued focus on providing "instant" and "always on" experiences to consumers and merchants – Push 2 Debit, RTP, refund authorization (so consumers can get instant notification when a refund is issued), instant onboarding</li><li>A movement to open standards – Open Banking driven by PSD 2.0, W3C's PaymentRequest API (Visa SRC will supposedly work with W3C), ISO 20022 for faster payments.</li></ul><h2>Catherine Jing – Payments Manager, Global Core Payments</h2><ul><li>More players/solutions tackling the identity verification/security area.</li><li>Open banking to continue getting adoptions in the industry.</li><li>Real-time / instant payments start to grow significantly and become the basic requirement from consumers.</li></ul>

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Payments Industry Predictions for 2019

Rich Aberman, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of WePay, and John Canfield, VP of Product Risk, Compliance and Experience had a recent interview with Karen Webster of PYMNTS.com about risk management and how risk management has become such a complex, interconnected and vast field that payments service providers now need to look at risk management as an art that they have to work at continuously.“On one level, risk itself has not fundamentally changed in the last few decades,” Aberman explained. “As a merchant service provider you need to verify if the merchant is who they say they are, are they in your acceptable use category, can you support their merchant codes, will they deliver as advertised and do you understand your credit risk exposure. Same as always.”What has changed extremely rapidly over the last two decades, on the other hand, is the entire digital context in which commerce is unfolding.Merchant service providers have the same vetting to do as always, but merchants in the modern environment don’t expect a lengthy application and vetting process. They expect a one-page application and to be able to turn on processing capacity like a light switch.At the same time, Aberman said, merchant services has evolved into a longer-tailed tool.“We are opening the floodgates to tiny merchants while having less data and time to make a decision. That precipitates the need to have new ways of look at risk management.”Which, Canfield notes, requires a different and more integrated risk management perspective going forward. In the past, he noted, firms have had a very hard split between underwriting and risk management, where underwriting would evaluate the credit risk, compliance and know-your-customer (KYC) data to approve a merchant — at which time that merchant would be handed off into the risk management silo.“To enable a modern onboarding experience, you can’t have that traditional model because you need to be able to continuously evaluate risk,” Canfield explained.<iframe src="https://widget.spreaker.com/player?episode_id=16346259&theme=light&playlist=false&playlist-continuous=true&playlist-loop=false&playlist-autoupdate=true&autoplay=false&live-autoplay=false&chapters-image=true&episode_image_position=right&hide-likes=false&hide-comments=false&hide-sharing=false&hide-logo=false&hide-download=true&hide-episode-description=false&hide-playlist-images=false&hide-playlist-descriptions=false&gdpr-consent=null&cover_image_url=https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/images.spreaker.com/original/2f6a665eb30f2099dd23936fd281334b.jpg" width="100" height="400" class="spreaker-player" id="spreaker-player-535597" data-gtm-yt-inspected-29="true" style="width: 100%; height: 400px;" title="iframe player"></iframe>

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PYMNTS discussion: The Art of Risk Management

Rich Aberman, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of WePay had a recent interview with Karen Webster of PYMNTS.com about the pros and cons of instant onboarding.&nbsp;Instant onboarding — the ability&nbsp;for&nbsp;a merchant to&nbsp;complete&nbsp;a simple digital&nbsp;application, then instantly process payments&nbsp;—&nbsp;has been heralded as the best thing to happen in payments and to merchants in decades.&nbsp;Rich Aberman isn't so sure. Instant onboarding creates a slick experience for&nbsp;a&nbsp;business interested in obtaining a merchant account, he told Karen Webster in the latest episode of their Unscripted podcast series. However, it’s not the “magical secret sauce” it’s often purported to be.The real “secret sauce,” he said, is having a risk engine that can access and act on data about the merchant’s processing history once they are up and running. That is, a&nbsp;system that is as&nbsp;transparent as it is dynamic so that merchant expectations are always well-attuned to&nbsp;how their businesses will be managed on that platform, based on their business performance, and so that&nbsp;fraud can be spotted and responded to in real time.<iframe title="real time player" src="https://widget.spreaker.com/player?episode_id=16115810&theme=light&playlist=false&playlist-continuous=true&playlist-loop=false&playlist-autoupdate=true&autoplay=false&live-autoplay=false&chapters-image=true&episode_image_position=right&hide-likes=false&hide-comments=false&hide-sharing=false&hide-logo=false&hide-download=true&hide-episode-description=false&hide-playlist-images=false&hide-playlist-descriptions=false&gdpr-consent=null&cover_image_url=https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/images.spreaker.com/original/2f6a665eb30f2099dd23936fd281334b.jpg" width="100" height="100px" class="spreaker-player" id="spreaker-player-977459" data-gtm-yt-inspected-29="true" style="width: 100%; height: 100pxpx;"></iframe>

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PYMNTS discussion: Is Instant Onboarding a Red Herring

One year ago, we announced our acquisition by JPMorgan Chase (JPMC). As you would imagine, there were many conflicting emotions and many new hopes. There was, of course, the exuberance of the long desired exit. There was also both the joy of seeing the business you nurtured for years be recognized but also the potential fear that the precious culture you had built might wane. However, one of the key elements of the acquisition was that JPMC wanted to “protect the precious butterfly” that is WePay’s culture and innovation. Thus, instead of taking control away, they’ve kept us independent and invested heavily in us and the Executive Team. WePay was one of the most significant FinTech mergers and acquisitions deals JPMorgan Chase had closed in over a decade.We’re still learning what works best for both sides, but so far, it truly has been a great relationship – our opinions and voice really matter to JPMorgan Chase. Together, we are embracing change – one of the WePay values we deeply care about.Since the acquisition, JPMC has started to embrace ideas on how to compete for Silicon Valley talent and how to build an engineering culture where top notch talent wants to work. On the flip side, we’ve been exposed to a tremendous amount of resources and opportunities from JPMorgan Chase and our existing relationships have become richer due to our increased capabilities. In the past year, we’ve signed several momentous new partnerships and our pipeline continues to grow, just like our company. In fact, since the acquisition, we’ve hired almost 100 new WePayers and are continuing to hire aggressively (if you want to be part of our exciting adventure, check out our <a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers">latest openings</a>!).As we continue to pursue our aggressive growth, today we are announcing another exciting milestone – first, our Providence office is moving to a bigger space. Second, our new headquarters will be at a completely new campus in Palo Alto with our JPMorgan Chase colleagues. This campus is being designed for us and built from scratch. When completed in 2020, this campus near Stanford University will have the latest in workplace design, reflecting our employees’ feedback about what matters most. With the new headquarters, we will be able to collaborate more easily and increase creativity. Ultimately, this is another huge milestone for WePay and JPMC, as this new campus demonstrates the major investment that JPMC is making to build a true tech innovation hub in Silicon Valley.As we look forward, integration won’t always be easy. However, if we continue the care and commitment that WePay and JPMC have already brought to the acquisition, we’ll be writing the new playbook for successful FinTech M&As that others will follow.

Palo Alto Office

WePay's New Home with JPMC

After joining WePay many years ago I’m now its longest tenured software engineer and I’m proud of the corporate culture I’ve helped develop. Our culture has been paved by a shared value system and deep sense of values led by innovative entrepreneurs that I’m now grateful to call friends. One of our core values has always been Investing in Engineering Relationships and it has done its part in shaping our philosophy of the lifecycle of employment in Silicon Valley. As a technology company it isn’t surprising that engineering is our largest department and engineering at WePay is an excellent example of WePay’s continued investment in its relationships with employees.Early on, WePay struggled to establish an effective way to grow the engineering team. Like many early technology companies we didn’t have very organized hiring practices and we were unable to consistently identify or hire the right talent. I remember one occasion when after a full day of interviews, we realized that in a bizarre turn of bad luck none of the interviewers had asked one candidate any coding questions. Some engineers felt time spent interviewing was simply time that couldn’t be spent doing their real job building the product and spent as little of their time as possible when obligated to conduct interviews. As we grew, we eventually embraced the reality that the best thing for us was not to spend less time on hiring but to change our approach.Today the investment in WePay engineers begins long before an engineer is ever hired. WePay isn’t just hiring good engineers, we deliberately invest our time and resources in ensuring that every potential WePay engineer is set up for success once hired. We devised a thoughtful and <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/software-engineering-interviewing-wepay" target="_self">comprehensive evaluation system</a> based on real roles and acknowledged that many engineers don’t inherently have interviewing skills. In all stages of the hiring process every WePay engineer has been trained to fairly and consistently evaluate particular attributes and skills while ensuring a positive experience for the candidate. Working at WePay is a pleasant experience and we want the interview to be a genuine reflection of our culture.<a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.wepay.com/2018/10/08/investing-in-engineering/&text=I%E2%80%99ve%20been%20asked%20how%20it%E2%80%99s%20possible%20to%20justify%20such%20an%20expense%2C%20especially%20when%20engineers%20are%20in%20such%20high%20demand.%20The%20answer%20is%20simple%20and%20true%20to%20our%20core%20values%3A%20it%E2%80%99s%20not%20an%20expense%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20an%20investment.&related" target="_self">"I’ve been asked how it’s possible to justify such an expense, especially when engineers are in such high demand. The answer is simple and true to our core values: it’s not an expense, it’s an investment.</a> <a class="bctt-ctt-btn" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.wepay.com/2018/10/08/investing-in-engineering/&text=I%E2%80%99ve%20been%20asked%20how%20it%E2%80%99s%20possible%20to%20justify%20such%20an%20expense%2C%20especially%20when%20engineers%20are%20in%20such%20high%20demand.%20The%20answer%20is%20simple%20and%20true%20to%20our%20core%20values%3A%20it%E2%80%99s%20not%20an%20expense%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20an%20investment.&related" aria-label="teweet" target="_blank">Click To Tweet</a>In addition to their interviewers, each candidate at WePay is likely to meet several other engineers more informally. Candidates invited onsite also spend time with our most senior engineering leaders and executives to reinforce our open culture and best answer their questions. The cost of all this engineering time adds up and I’ve been asked how it’s possible to justify such an expense, especially when engineers are in such high demand. The answer is simple and true to our core values: it’s not an expense, it’s an investment. Some of the same people have also asked how we’re fortunate to have such a high caliber, high output, efficient and effective engineering organization. Ironically, the second question is a good way to begin to describe why this deserves so much of our time.<iframe title="good way" class="full_size_iframe" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/273422055?byline=0&portrait=0?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe>Having talented engineers who are constantly pursued by other great companies is definitely not without its challenges. It’s very easy for the goals of a company to drown out an individual employee’s needs and that inevitably burns people out or causes them to leave. After such a substantial investment in selecting the right engineers it’s imperative that we keep our teams happy and engaged. Not everyone has the same needs but the relationships and bonds of trust we’ve forged with our engineers make it easier for us to address the needs of the individual. We must constantly evaluate things like benefits, competitive compensation, work environment and other perks that are standard in the valley and considered table stakes. The need for career advancement is often overlooked in Silicon Valley and it’s unfortunate that engineers can be forced to move to another company to obtain a promotion they clearly deserve. At WePay, we’ve leveraged our growth as a company to create an environment that provides opportunities aimed at growing engineers’ skills and advancing their careers. WePay’s most recent promotion cycle saw more engineers earn promotions to Staff and Senior Staff Engineer than ever before.<a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.wepay.com/2018/10/08/investing-in-engineering/&text=It%20is%20our%20hope%20that%20the%20impact%20of%20our%20investment%20influences%20our%20engineers%20as%20they%20grow%20to%20continue%20that%20investment%20in%20others.&related" target="_self">"It is our hope that the impact of our investment influences our engineers as they grow to continue that investment in others. </a><a class="bctt-ctt-btn" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.wepay.com/2018/10/08/investing-in-engineering/&text=It%20is%20our%20hope%20that%20the%20impact%20of%20our%20investment%20influences%20our%20engineers%20as%20they%20grow%20to%20continue%20that%20investment%20in%20others.&related" target="_blank">Click To Tweet</a>It’s personally important to me that every software engineer at WePay understands the path to their next role. Career progression follows a framework of clearly defined software engineering roles and responsibilities from entry level engineers to C-level executives that helps identify and close gaps required for promotion. Whether it’s building a piece of infrastructure or writing about it in the public eye for the <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/" target="_self">WePay Engineering Blog</a>, this framework ensures that we’re able to offer the opportunities and mentorship our engineers need most to advance their career objectives and other ambitions. The investment we make in an engineer continues to prove invaluable not only for WePay but for the rest of the engineer’s career. It is our hope that the impact of our investment influences our engineers as they grow to continue that investment in others.WePay engineers are routinely asked by candidates and others interested in WePay how WePay has contributed to their growth as engineers and I’m impressed with the responses I’ve seen. When asked, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/biplapsarkar/" target="_self">Biplap Sarkar</a> said, “WePay helped me by providing a culture where I could thrive, making it transparent how my work is contributing to WePay's success and by providing guidance for what is expected at the next level and how to get there.” Biplap began his career as my intern before finishing school and joining WePay full time in January 2015. We established a career path providing him with opportunities we felt would interest and benefit him and he quickly earned a promotion to Senior Engineer. Biplap is now considered a veteran and mentor by numerous newer engineers and is one engineer we saw promoted to Staff Engineer this year. This cycle we’ve established will fuel our investment in <a href="https://go.wepay.com/careers#listings" target="_self">future generations of WePay engineers</a> and help us maintain our high standards for engineering excellence.

growth

Investing in Engineering

<h2>We sat down with CEO and Founder of PayRent, Ryan Abell, to talk about the rent payment platform and how it operates.</h2>Q: Can you tell us about PayRent – what it does and for whom and how it came to be?A: PayRent is seeking to eliminate the checkbook by taking rent payments from paper to digital. As a landlord myself, I came to the realization that there had to be a better way to accept payments than through a physical check. Upon further research I found that landlords lacked a simple platform that would allow them to accept rent payments easily online. I began researching and found that over 50% of the rental market was comprised of landlords that own from one to four rental units. I began calling landlords &nbsp;listed on craigslist across the country and asked “how are you collecting rent” and the majority response was overwhelmingly, “by check.”As I researched various platforms that facilitated payments, I noticed a handful of peer-to-peer platforms that allowed one to pay a buddy back for a burrito on a small transaction basis. However, there was not an industry platform that provided the necessary tools and features for small independent property owners.Q: Can you walk me through how your platform helps users?A: The majority of our landlords have full-time jobs as well as rental properties and are always on the go. We’ve had many landlords who have had to wait until the beginning of the month for rent checks to come in and then make the trip to the bank to deposit them. It’s exciting to be able to impact landlords’ and renters’ lives by providing an online solution where they can collect and pay from anywhere at any time. Besides landlords, renters have been thrilled with the implementation of PayRent because now it gives them an easy way to pay their individual rent.Q: What is it important for people to know about your organization?A: We are extremely passionate about putting PayRent into the hands of every landlord big and small. Processing rent payments across the country is a thrilling experience as we are seeing first-hand the positive impact we are making. I have always told myself that each landlord currently collecting a paper check will inevitably accept digital rent payments.Q: What’s a lesson you’ve learned in building PayRent?A: Building PayRent has shown me that every Landlord and Property manager needs a system that works for them. That has allowed us to constantly tailor our product to our customers’ needs. Hearing feedback from industry professionals who use our service has allowed us to grow in a dynamic way.Q: Can you tell us about your journey into offering payments – what did you learn along the way?A: Starting a payments company comes with many challenges and even though you would like to be the next “unicorn,” we are keeping our eyes on the future. The key to a healthy payments company is steady growth.Q: You're now working closely with WePay. Can you tell us about the experience and results?A: Our experience with WePay has been extremely positive. Their team is exceptional and will undoubtedly be a driving factor in how our payments are processed. I am looking forward to a long-term relationship with such reputable brands as WePay and Chase.There is a lot that goes into payments when it comes to risk. Our vision is to process rent payments for landlords and managers across the country, and WePay’s infrastructure was the exact fit we were looking for.Q: What has changed in your business and outlook now that payments are integrated?A: We now have the ability to focus more on our platform and the upcoming features we plan to implement in the near future.Q: What metrics do you pay attention to for business success?A: The amount of rental units that process on a monthly basis as we may have a landlord that processes one rental unit vs. a landlord that processes 100+ units a month.Q: Can you tell us something unusual about you, your organization and your work?A: I have worked in the fire service as a Firefighter/Paramedic for 9 years. We work out of an old US Navy Officer headquarters that has been completely revamped.Q: What inspires you?A: Faith, family and perseverance. Believe in something and go after it. Embrace hard times, that is where character is built.

Headshot

PayRent: Q&A with CEO Ryan Abell

In this short interview, Rich Aberman, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of WePay talks with Karen Webster of PYMNTS.com about compliance, how it affects platforms and ISVs and the emergence of Compliance-as-a-Service (CaaS).&nbsp;<iframe title="compliance as a service" src="https://widget.spreaker.com/player?episode_id=15827608&theme=light&playlist=false&playlist-continuous=true&playlist-loop=false&playlist-autoupdate=true&autoplay=false&live-autoplay=false&chapters-image=true&episode_image_position=right&hide-likes=false&hide-comments=false&hide-sharing=false&hide-logo=false&hide-download=true&hide-episode-description=false&hide-playlist-images=false&hide-playlist-descriptions=false&gdpr-consent=null" width="80" height="100px" class="spreaker-player" id="spreaker-player-627431" data-gtm-yt-inspected-39="true" style="width: 80%; height: 100pxpx;"></iframe>"U.S. firms are complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it is better to have a “consistent system than a divergent one running globally.”"These are opposing forces running at once, he noted, and the pendulum will likely continue to swing between them. The goal of FinTech firms, in an era when compliance can be offered as a service, is to basically help firms stop from having to swing along for that pendulum ride, while still trusting they are in the driver’s seat."“The onus is on us in this business to really offer up the best of both worlds, where you as a merchant or platform can deliver the experience you want and avoid being on the hook for managing compliance,” Aberman said.You can find a full summary of the interview <a href="https://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2018/wepay-podcast-compliance-services-management-outsourcing/" target="_self">here</a>.&nbsp;

compliance

PYMNTS discussion on Compliance as a Service (CaaS)

A huge part of keeping any high volume SaaS business running smoothly is handling an enormous flow of data back and forth. It’s especially important for a company like WePay where we are handling people’s transactions and money. All our services have to be available 24/7 and running smoothly, swiftly and effectively. We’ve written previously about our engineering team’s efforts in this area, specifically how we use service mesh technologies to manage all the many services. &nbsp;The <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/">WePay engineering blog</a> covers many of the techniques and approaches we use and how we come to choose them. Mohsen Rezaei, Staff Software Engineer, just continued a series of posts there about our service mesh technologies with <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/ha-mesh-wepay">a piece on how we monitor and maintain availability of our service mesh</a>. It’s a best practice piece that anyone interested in high availability services and service mesh technology will find valuable. The series of articles also covers<a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/using-l5d-as-a-service-mesh-proxy-at-wepay"> how WePay manages its service mesh</a> with <a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/">Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)</a> and <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/scds-battle-of-containerization">containerization patterns we’ve been experimenting with</a> and using in GKE. If you are interested in these techniques or how one organization handles high volume transactions online, <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/">please take a look</a>.

continuous availability

WePay Engineering: Keeping a service mesh monitored and highly available

I recently had the opportunity to go on an interesting journey, a buyer's journey. The first part was like hacking through a dark and tangled jungle with nothing but a faded map. The second part was like sitting on the beach at a fancy resort with people coming by constantly to see if I needed food, drink, shade, fresh towels or any other little creature comfort.The journey I’m talking about is the B2B software buyer’s journey. As a sales guy, it’s a journey I’ve read a lot about, and I’ve guided many people through the second part of it, but I hadn’t taken the full journey as a traveler. Since there’s no better way to understand someone’s journey than to walk a mile in their shoes, I was keen to finally experience it for myself.The opportunity arose when we decided we needed better software to serve up relevant content to the sales team as they guided prospects along their journey. Our company is growing quickly, and we needed to improve the efficiency of our sales process, and ensure consistency in our stories and value proposition.My experience was eye-opening, exhausting, and inspiring. I came away with new empathy for what buyers go through and many ideas for how my company, and yours, can make this journey easier.The current buyer journey has two parts – what I’ll call the pre-sales phase, which is mostly conducted by the buyer alone on the internet, and then the actual sales cycle where the buyer is actively engaged with vendors.In this post I’ll talk about what companies can do to help would be buyers navigate a path through the jungle that is the internet to their product. Marketing is the tour guide for this part of the journey.<h2>Wrong expectations</h2>Probably the biggest thing I learned is that the buyer’s journey is longer and more difficult than I expected. Because we were envisioning a simple repository or database solution, I thought the purchasing process would be pretty straightforward and take a couple of weeks. Wrong.Like the majority of buyers, before I spoke to any sales people, my first step was to spend time online researching potential providers. I had no idea there were so many in this area, and I quickly became overwhelmed with the number of options. The most frustrating thing was that on the surface, they all seemed to solve our problem. That made it really difficult to even assemble a short list of vendors to talk to.My team and I put together a color-coded, multi-tab, Excel document which grew to include detail on nearly 30 different companies. Obviously, we couldn’t talk to all 30, so we scoured their websites for clues, sifting through product information, customer reviews and any information we could find about pricing to qualify them. In hindsight, this level of detail seems like overkill, but at the time it was what we needed to wrap our heads around the space, and feel confident about our process.As we made our way deeper into the research, and weeks became months, the path forward became less clear. The more we researched, the more options there seemed to be. Vendor differentiation was hazy, and few companies inspired confidence that they could completely solve our problem. We began to question our buying requirements. We were starting to feel lost.It was a tiring experience: there was so much information available, and we still had our day jobs to do. After two months, we finally identified a shortlist of six vendors to speak with based on our initial buying requirements.Here’s how vendors could have helped us better navigate a path to their offering:<h2>Show the ROI impact of the solution</h2>Budgets and resources are often a moving target, and many buyers can’t get budget approval for their project without showing the projected ROI. This is not easy to do, especially for complex systems that many people will use. Buyers are also competing with other internal projects, so even if a solution will return X value, if a different project will yield 2X, that one may take priority. Do whatever you can to help your buyer make a strong case for the ROI in your solution.<h2>Differentiate the solution</h2>“A confused prospect never buys” is a familiar maxim among sales people. Buyers need assurance that a solution will meet their requirements. They need clarity on the detail that’s important to them. They need to feel confident this will be a win for the company, their department, and for their own career. Hone in on what’s important to the ideal customer. Is the solution great for enterprises, or small businesses? What are the solution’s super powers? Security? Compliance? Ease of use? Integrations? In trying to generate the maximum number of leads, vendors use vague marketing language and they all end up sounding the same. Focus on generating the right kind of leads, or you may not make the short list at all.<h2>Ensure brand consistency across all channels</h2>Most folks still judge a book by its cover, especially buyers in the exploratory phase. I spent a lot of time not only on vendors’ websites, but on other sources that would provide detail on the quality of their organization and their services. This included reviewing a company’s Twitter feed, their LinkedIn profiles, user reviews on G2Crowd, blog posts, their YouTube Channel and even employee reviews on GlassDoor.Untended social feeds created doubt about the company’s funding and viability. Use of multiple versions of their logos or messaging made it hard to tell if I was looking at the same company on each channel. It also made me wonder if anyone was home in marketing, which made me wonder if the company had their act together. When you see a house in disrepair on the outside, you don’t think, oh I bet it’s beautiful inside. You think it’s a wreck.<h2>Utilize thought leadership to educate and influence</h2>Most buyers understand their problem, but they don’t know exactly what the solution is. They’re not always up to date with technology trends and offerings. Nor do they see all the additional opportunities for growth they could exploit with new technology. In other words, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Thought leadership articles help them see the forest—the context around the problem, and they point the way to possible paths forward.As a result of taking this journey myself, I now realize that by the time I speak to a buyer, they’ve probably already been on a long and challenging journey. They’ve been hacking their way through the jungle alone, just to get to my team and whoever else they’re talking to.Marketing is mainly responsible for providing frequent, clear trail markers to shorten the path to the resort, but there needs to be a seamless handoff to sales who will then take a consultative position of recommending the most appropriate solution.Once I made a short list of providers, it was time to reach out to their sales teams to learn what I couldn’t find online. That experience was much different from my lost and lonely journey online. &nbsp;[This piece was originally published on LinkedIn.]

jungle

Welcome to the Jungle - What I Learned Walking a Mile in a Buyer’s Shoes

Last time we looked at SaaS and ISV business growth we examined user growth - the core element for success in these businesses. But there is another element to growth that can be just as important - increasing user engagement. If your customers use your platform more frequently that in turn drives up overall usage and in the end, revenue. Plus you pick up all kinds of secondary benefits around brand and brand image that will help with other aspects of growth.Driving user engagement is a more complex topic and not one that typically lends itself to instant results because it is also intimately connected to your product and product development. But that doesn’t mean you should shy away from it. We’ve dug up a series of the best evergreen articles on user engagement and how to grow it.The first step to increasing user engagement is understanding who your users are and how they are acting. The Amplitude Blog has <a href="https://amplitude.com/blog/2017/05/24/user-analysis-strategies">a great piece on best practices for understanding who your active users are</a> - the ones actually using your platform - and they do that by showing you how to find your DAU (Daily Active Users) and then looking at what they are doing. “The key to successful analysis of active users is to be clear on what DAU means to you. Different companies define it in different ways.”The next step is to break these active users into different groups based on their demographics and behavior - since it is unlikely that your users all think and act alike. This is a process called cohort analysis. The Nickelled blog takes a thorough look at cohort analysis for a range of business types. <a href="https://www.nickelled.com/cohort-analysis/saas/">This piece is a chapter specifically on SaaS cohort analysis</a> but it has links to their other articles on cohort analysis. “Calculating the activity of groups of users over time is the most common application you’ll see for cohort analysis in the SaaS world, because it’s much, much more accurate than any other way you might do it.”Before you take action on what you have discovered about your users and their activity it makes sense to also look at what the standards and benchmarks are for user engagement for a SaaS or ISV business. Hackernoon has an article from Mixpanel, the data analysis company, about <a href="https://hackernoon.com/what-billions-of-user-events-taught-us-about-saas-products-fdf45a7b1fbc">what they learned for SaaS businesses from analyzing the aggregate data from billions of user events</a> across all their customers. The following is a typical insight: “As such, product managers should consider launching features on Monday or Tuesday when overall engagement peaks.”One area for improving engagement is to specifically look at increasing usage by existing customers. Quora (a surprisingly consistent good source of information and answers for SaaS businesses) has <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-are-methods-that-SAAS-companies-use-to-increase-the-usage-of-their-product-by-their-existing-customers">several answers to the question here</a>. Of course, an alternative approach is to dive right in and try to increase engagement right away with new customers. Pressfarm <a href="https://press.farm/best-saas-startups-increase-daily-product-adoption/">takes a look at this scenario</a> and offers some practical suggestions. “Higher signup rates and lower numbers of daily users continue to press even some of the most accomplished startups in the market.”In addition to specialized approaches, specific advice on engagement growth tactics can be invaluable. Deborah Preston from 2Checkout has some <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-saas-tactics-communicate-value-customers-increase-deborah-preston/">advice on three tactics to communicate value to users in order to increase engagement</a>. “Potential customers will always believe their peers more than your top-down messages, which brings us full-circle: to communicate your software's value and engage your customers, you need to leverage your existing customers.”The SevenAtoms blog takes <a href="https://www.sevenatoms.com/blog/7-ways-to-increase-user-engagement">a look at seven specific strategies to improve engagement</a>, things like triggered messaging or offering free training. “In the end, it’s important to remember that engagement = retention. If people aren’t using your platform, it could be because they are not engaged. It’s essential that SaaS marketers try out different user engagement strategies to find the most effective tactics for improving customer retention.”The pickSaaS blog takes a look at ten basic strategies to improve customer engagement. Several of these are pretty obvious and you should already be doing them but pretty much any SaaS business should find at least one thing to work on here. “Nothing is more engaging than contact in person – organize meetups, networking events and conferences to show your customers you’re approachable and let them take an active part in joining your mission.”For some even more specific advice, including sample customer scripts, the <a href="https://fi.co/insight/4-saas-tricks-to-increase-your-customer-engagement-and-retention">Founder Institute has a guest post from NinjaOutreach on four approaches to take to increase customer engagement</a>. “Retention is best achieved proactively as opposed to reactively, that is, don’t wait until the customer churns off to engage with them. We use our usage data to identify when a customer hasn’t used the software in a while as an opportunity to re-engage them.”For some very modern approaches, <a href="https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-customer-engagement-strategies">the Appcues blog wrote about its ten best customer engagement strategies for 2018</a>. It’s got some great ideas covering the gamut from support to product. “No matter what stage your company is in, you should have a well practiced process for customer development. Because no matter how large you get, there are always feature requests that need to be scoped and customer pain points that need to be addressed.”Neil Patel, recognized as a top digital marketer, has a piece on the Crazy Egg blog on <a href="https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/27-customer-retention-strategies/">27 different customer retention strategies that SaaS businesses should be using</a>. “Existing customers are where the big spending happens. According to Groove, there’s a 5-20% chance of selling to a new prospect. What about your existing customers? You have a 60-70% chance of a successful sale.”Finally, let’s take a look at engagement from the opposite direction. The Evergage blog has a look at the top five barriers to customer retention. “Acquisition costs, customer churn rates and the profitability of your organization depend on how well you can provide value to the relationship and tear down the barriers to SaaS customer engagement.”

connection

Strategies for increasing SaaS and ISV user engagement

Podcast-Feature-Image

PYMNTS interview on the future of POS

One part of keeping an organization like WePay running smoothly is handling the ebb and flow of transactions smoothly. We base a lot of our architecture on Google Cloud infrastructure and various open source technologies running on top of it.The <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/">WePay Engineering blog </a>regularly publishes articles about how we use modern technologies to pursue constant improvement in our work. Some of these techniques are valuable to anyone working on scaling infrastructure online and in the cloud.Mohsen Rezaei, Senior Software Engineer, recently wrote about exactly <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/using-l5d-as-a-service-mesh-proxy-at-wepay">how WePay manages its service mesh with GKE, particularly some of the routing and load balancing options used in the past, then compared them with possible service mesh proxy services</a>. The most recent article focuses on <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/scds-battle-of-containerization">containerization patterns we’ve been experimenting with and using in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).</a> If you are interested in these techniques or how one organization handles high volume transactions online, <a href="https://wecode.wepay.com/">please take a look</a>.

containerizationpatterns

WePay Engineering and Kubernetes Containerization

Hiring for SaaS companies is difficult. Hiring is often cited by leaders of platform and ISV companies as one of the single biggest challenges they face. Many believe that it is an ongoing challenge and one that they need to stay on top of throughout the growth of their organization. But even if you are in ‘always be hiring’ mode, you’ll need more focus at startup, at times of rapid growth and when hiring specifically for customer growth. Your organization is going to need to have established policies and procedures for hiring that can maintain success and quality even when under pressure to hire rapidly. The needs of hiring for customer success teams can be different from other areas like engineering.Emily Smith on the Cobloom blog wrote <a href="https://www.cobloom.com/blog/startup-hiring">an eight part series on hiring for a startup</a> that covers the early stage issues and also hiring for growth. The series covers initial hiring, building a company that people want to work at, what to look for in employees, who to hire, writing a job description, building a hiring process, interviewing process, and onboarding process. “In the early days, one wrong hire can literally make-or-break your company. But a great team working in a company with a positive, inclusive and dynamic culture can be the competitive advantage your startup needs to outgrow your competitors.”Michael Redbord at the Harvard Business Review writes about <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/09/scaling-customer-service-as-your-startup-grows">the specifics of hiring for customer service and the way your hiring changes as you scale</a> from startup to hundreds of employees. He points out that, “you’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem.”On the SaaStr blog, Jason Lemkin <a href="https://www.saastr.com/customer-success-managers-hire-early-and-no-squishy-goals-its-all-about-the-numbers/">writes about the importance of hiring quickly and well for customer success</a>. He points out that it is easy to hire in customer success for squishy and soft goals but that the temptation should be resisted and that hires should be all about the numbers - and success should be measured on renewal rate and churn metrics. In other words, hire people who help you keep your customers.Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess<a href="https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/hiring-for-customer-success/"> writes about the specific characteristics to look for in hiring a customer success leader</a>. Some of these include relationship building, a passion for the success of the customer, practical business and tech experience and industry or domain expertise. One point he makes strongly is that there is no standard background that fits his profile of a rockstar customer success manager.Brooke Goodbary, a customer success consultant, also <a href="https://medium.com/@brooke.land/hiring-your-first-customer-success-manager-5eba3f867631">looks at making the first customer success hire within an organization</a>. The main points she considers are when to make the hire, who that hire should be and how to set the team up to succeed. She brings up a common $2M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) per CSM (Customer Success Manager) metric but points out that this should be modified by the size and number of accounts and the resulting workload on each CSM.Megan Lozicki came up with <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-success-manager-interview-questions">eight questions to ask prospective customer success hires</a> as a way to kickstart preparing for your customer success hiring. They include ‘what kind of customer news would change your day and why?’ Note that this is an open ended question that doesn’t assume positive or negative news. The proposed questions run the gamut and are a good starting point to customize your own interviews.One of the key issues around your prospective customer success team is precisely when to get it off the ground and that’s what <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-right-time-to-hire-a-head-of-Customer-Success-in-a-SaaS-company">this thread from Quora answers with a range of insights from a range of customer success leaders</a>. It’s worth taking the time to scope out other customer success questions and answers while you are there.

hiringcustomersuccess

Hiring for SaaS and ISV customer success

We sat down with <a href="https://www.touchbistro.com/" target="_self">TouchBistro</a> founder and CEO, Alex Barrotti, recently to get his thoughts on TouchBistro's history, direction and how it has gone about its payments journey as well as how it came to <a href="https://media.chase.com/content/pr/touchbistro-chase-next-gen-payment-technology" target="_self">partner with Chase and WePay.&nbsp;</a><h2>Q: Can you tell us about TouchBistro: who its serves, what it does, and why it is special?</h2>A: TouchBistro is an award-winning iPad POS built for restaurant people, by restaurant people – &nbsp;with every feature designed to meet the unique needs and fast pace of the foodservice industry. It has been used by over 12,000 restaurants worldwide in more than 100 countries, enabling them to make more money, deliver a great guest experience, and take the guesswork out of making business decisions.<h2>Q: What's the TouchBistro origin story?</h2>A: I was dining on the patio of my friend’s sushi restaurant in the Caribbean when he asked for help to find technology that would reduce the amount of time his waiters were spending running back and forth to the patio to take orders, deliver food, and accept payments. The iPad was just launched. I thought it was the perfect form factor for a waiter to take to a table and enter orders – like an order pad – but I found there were no restaurant point-of-sale apps for the device. So I returned to Toronto, met my co-founder, and pulled together a team of talented designers. A year later TouchBistro was launched as a pioneer mobile POS explicitly for restaurants.<h2>Q: What's an operating lesson you've learned that you often share with others?</h2>A: Success isn’t easy. Edison said invention is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The inspiration happens in a moment, but then it takes years and years of fine tuning, being resilient, and following through on a plan, while encouraging others to share the vision and dream.You need courage to pursue things despite other people saying it is never going to happen or you can’t do it. It is so easy to be a skeptic or give up. But what is the challenge in that? I disagree with the negativity. You have to ignore the naysayers, watch the trends, and believe in yourself and take action.<h2>Q: What metrics do you pay attention to for business success?</h2>A: Restaurants that use TouchBistro processed over $6 billion in the last year, which is pretty exciting growth from our launch just seven years ago. This March, we onboarded the highest number of new restaurants we’ve ever had in a single month – just under 500.<h2>Q: When you look to other companies for inspiration, which are you looking at and why (other than Apple)?</h2>A: There are several companies that have grown in the face of massive competition – they are truly inspiring. Spotify came up with the idea of music streaming and subscription-based music downloads. It looked like they were going to be wiped out when Apple, Goggle Music, Amazon Prime all came out with similar services, but Spotify is still growing and just had a successful IPO. &nbsp;And Look at Dropbox. They were called the company everyone was trying to kill as the giants came out with their own cloud storage services - Google Drive, Amazon Drive, Microsoft OneDrive. But Dropbox just had a hugely successful public offering.These companies had brilliant visions that were first-to-market. They had plans that they fine-tuned and followed through implementing. Despite ginormous opposition trying to carve away at their market share, they stuck with it and were tremendous successes.<img asset_uid="bltcfb6b7989a77f0a0" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltcfb6b7989a77f0a0/62bd49e5db03ad7e2d273550/Counter_Service_Payments_for-blog.jpg" height="auto" alt="service payment"/><h2>Q: You recently announced you'll be introducing TouchBistro Payments powered by Chase, leveraging WePay technology. What led you to take this step?</h2>A: We wanted a seamless experience, frictionless for the customer. So many customers call us on a Wednesday and say they are opening on Friday. We could get them up on TouchBistro immediately, but it could then take a week or more to get their payment processor operating and this delay was a problem because 85% of transactions in the US are credit card.The WePay-Chase team offered us the most compelling solution to provide customers with the seamless experience we wanted to deliver. With TouchBistro Payments powered by Chase, we can offer instant onboarding, integration with other Chase banking services, and a payment device we are launching together that can accept all traditional and mobile payments right at tableside<h2>Q: What's next for TouchBistro?</h2>A: We will continue to expand our customer base by doing what we do best – providing restaurateurs with an intuitive POS at an affordable price that makes running a restaurant easier by streamlining and simplifying all aspects of restaurant management – so restaurateurs have more time to focus on their passion and the reason they opened their business in the first place.<h2>Q: And of course we've got to ask a person that serves restaurateurs all day - what's your favorite kind of food?</h2>A: Sushi

Alex-Barrotti-CIOReview-headshot-2

Q&A with TouchBistro CEO & Founder Alex Barrotti

SaaS businesses tend to believe in and use aggressive growth marketing approaches - at least once they are past the phase of building product and figuring out product-market fit. But growth marketing and marketing for growth aren’t quite the same thing, and every SaaS business is unique. Some have a relatively tiny universe of potential customers, others have an almost infinite group. So no one approach is going to be successful for all. With that in mind, we have rounded up some of the best articles on SaaS marketing for growth we could find.Sixteen Ventures’ customer-success blog by Lincoln Murphy provides a list of <a href="https://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks">21 different growth marketing hacks specifically for SaaS businesses</a>. They are a mixed bag as with any big list, but are straightforward and all good ideas. As always, with any growth marketing tactic, you should set yourself up to test carefully and implement and iterate rapidly. One example given is, “Why not auto-fill as much as possible for your customers – surprise them with how easy things are for them to get going?”Inside Intercom, the blog for the Intercom sales and marketing messaging platform, has a piece called <a href="https://blog.intercom.com/saas-marketing-101-marketing-for-growth-and-survival/">SaaS Marketing 101: marketing for growth and survival</a> which focuses primarily on demand gen approaches to digital marketing. Here’s a sample: “As cheap, fast and easy as it is to dream up ideas, it’s the same for making simple models to help prioritize and determine if they’re worth pursuing. Doing so involves some thinking about the different paths and steps people might take to buy your product, followed by basic math. These are our ‘funnels’ and they are informed by every aspect of how the customer might convert, from where they’ll find you to the scale of the channel you’re using.”The prolific and often insightful Hubspot blog also has an <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/saas-marketing-plan">overview piece for SaaS Marketing growth</a>. They break their advice down into four stages: goal setting, tactics, resources and evaluation. Leading off with goal setting they have this to say: “For growth to be lasting, it must be backed by clear goals and an operational framework that allows you to measure exactly what's working and what isn't.”Ryan Law, writing on the Cobloom blog also addresses <a href="https://www.cobloom.com/blog/saas-marketing-strategy#">marketing strategy for faster growth in SaaS companies with a ten step plan</a>. At the end of the ten step plan, when a business is poised to grow, he suggests investment in the developed plan: “That means once you've seen the first signs of Product/Market Fit, and you've started to gain traction, your single biggest focus needs to be marketing. You need to hit the accelerator, and channel your resources into growth.”Every set of advice pointing in one direction (in this case growth marketing) needs a contrarian opinion - a naysayer whose words reveal something about what everyone else is doing and how to understand it better. <a href="https://www.pierrelechelle.com/interview-david-darmanin-hotjar">Pierre Lechelle interviews David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar</a>, to get that contrarian viewpoint. Basically, he says you shouldn’t have a growth team because everybody should be the growth team. “Calling it ‘The Growth Team’ is a strategic mistake: For everyone else in the organization, they’ll stop caring about Growth (someone else is handling it, right?).”Returning to the main thesis of marketing for growth, and trying to do Ryan Law one step better, the Ladder blog has a piece on <a href="https://blog.ladder.io/saas-marketing/">11 essential marketing tactics for growth and retention</a>. It’s solid, even-handed advice that includes use cases and simple UX examples.Ben Jacobson at Marketing Land <a href="https://marketingland.com/10-experts-pair-growth-marketing-saas-product-development-213402">interviewed ten SaaS marketing experts to get advice on pairing SaaS marketing growth with product development</a>. The advice from all ten experts, with solid real-world experience, is valuable and he provides a quick summary of the points they all agree on: “Here are some of the pieces of advice that seem to unite our experts, as opposed to dividing them: Iterate quickly, use your own app, segment your users when gathering feedback, validate ideas before and after developing them, emphasize efficiency in the user experience, identify why people leave, use your business goals as your guide.”Neil Patel of Kissmetrics writes in their blog about <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-saas-marketing-is-different/">how SaaS marketing is different from every other kind of marketing</a>. He leads off by pointing out that SaaS businesses are typically hard to explain, involve abstract concepts, are typically at least partially business focussed rather than consumer focussed, etc. He also points out that counterintuitive practices like giving away product or service for free are actually considered strong SaaS marketing practices. His conclusion? “Great products and great service are at the core of a SaaS marketing strategy. As it turns out, SaaS marketing does have a few things in common with other types of marketing, but nowhere else will you find the integration as tight and symbiotic as in SaaS marketing.”Once again, it’s time to present a contrarian viewpoint. Sensei Marketing has a great blog post about how SaaS is the BEST business for digital marketing. Why? “SaaS users are often businesses and/or professionals with budgets. Research on SaaS products is primarily done online. Users can usually test SaaS products with free-trials and downloads before they purchase. Many if not most SaaS products can be easily purchased online (even while you sleep). SaaS product pricing is often subscription or licensed based (recurring revenue).” The post then highlights what the author sees as <a href="https://senseimarketing.com/saas-startup-heres-marketing-plan/">the best SaaS marketing plan</a>.

marketingforgrowth

SaaS Marketing for Growth

SaaS business growth isn’t always that different from non-SaaS business growth. At the core, every business of any size has to get business the same way: through selling to customers. There are three three critical stages for doing that: Attract, Convert and Retain. For traditional businesses the focus is more on Convert and for SaaS it tilts a bit more toward Retain due to the prevalence of the subscription model. The reality is that all three stages are important regardless. You can’t Retain a customer that you haven’t already Attracted and Converted. So we will take a look at some of the better advice out there to do just that and achieve growth through those three stages.<h2>Attract</h2>The Software Pricing blog has <a href="https://softwarepricing.com/blog/saas-revenue-strategies-top-ten-growth-strategies/" target="_self">a simple post listing ten straightforward strategies to help SaaS businesses grow</a>. Its focus is mostly on sales and the list is generally about growth hacks, but despite that the post also thinks about customer interactions in the form of an hour glass rather than a funnel. “Nick redraws the typical funnel — you know, leads come in the top and customers pop out the bottom — into an hourglass. Nick’s point is that getting customers to value faster is one of your best sales tools for growth. In the hourglass example, what pops out the funnel is customer success which in turn grows outward into more revenue for the company on all fronts.”<h2>Convert</h2>One of the stats that people always want to know about the effectiveness of marketing is customer engagement. It can be hard to place engagement into a simple bucket because it can contribute to both converting and retaining customers. However the typical usage, is to look at engagement as part of the customer journey all the way from attracting the customer through to the sale.<a href="https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-customer-engagement-strategies" target="_self">The appcues blog looks at customer engagement from a number of angles</a>, from early touches with the customer to improved engagement with existing customers. However most of the suggested strategies in this blog post revolve around better engagement with the customer along the path to converting them. These ten tips are all very practical and easy to implement.<h2>Retain</h2>The kissmetrics blog, a well-known fount of wisdom around metrics and content marketing, has <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/5-user-engagement-strategies/" target="_self">a great piece about five strategies to increase user engagement.</a> Their five very different suggestions all come back to one truism, “Customers are the lifeblood of your business. To retain your users, experiment with different engagement strategies to improve retention.”<a href="https://blog.drift.com/go-to-customer-strategy/" target="_self">This post on the Drift blog argues that rather than a go-to-market strategy, SaaS businesses should employ a ‘go-to-customer’ strategy</a>. What is a go-to-customer strategy? According to the post “it’s a focused product, marketing, and sales strategy that drives product usage, measures satisfaction, ensures renewals, and grows from within the customer base.”Bplans, the site about tools to help you better launch your business, has <a href="https://articles.bplans.com/strategies-to-increase-saas-business-revenue/" target="_self">a solid article about twelve different strategies to increase SaaS business revenue</a>. The suggestions are mostly in reverse order in that they start with retaining existing customers and end with ways to improve signups.Stimulead writes about <a href="https://stimulead.com/5-ways-to-increase-your-b2b-saas-revenue-today/" target="_self">five ways to increase SaaS revenue in a piece that looks at customer acquisition, onboarding and retention</a>. They focus mostly on marketing and have this to say, “In terms of revenue, marketing is just as important as a great product. Thinking great products sell themselves couldn’t be farther from the truth so it’s important to allocate resources to optimizing your acquisition and onboarding processes and strategies.”The Cloud Strategies blog is firmly in the camp that <a href="http://cloudstrategies.biz/maximizing-revenue-for-saas-companies-is-more-than-customer-acquisition/" target="_self">customer retention is the most effective growth strategy</a>. “The best SaaS companies maximize their revenue growth and minimize the cost of growing their revenue by optimizing three revenue sources: 1) New Customers, 2) Incremental Sales to their Customer Base, and 3) Retaining the Customer Base. &nbsp;Those that focus primarily on new customer acquisition will have to drive a high level of new customer sales just to stay in place. &nbsp;It is much more expensive to replace a customer than to retain them.”<h2>Putting it all together</h2><a href="https://www.cobloom.com/blog/saas-growth-hacking-strategies" target="_self">This blog post from cobloom covers 87 different growth hacking strategies from four stages of customer interaction: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight</a>. Although some of them are fairly specific and only suitable to certain types of SaaS business, there is still something for everyone in this list.The SaaS Growth Strategies channel on Medium has <a href="https://medium.com/saas-user-onboarding-resources/top-ten-resources-to-help-you-grow-your-saas-business-2ec2a2208bbf" target="_self">a great post listing more resources around SaaS growth</a>. It’s well worth a look to get even more viewpoints about effective SaaS strategies for growth.If you want to learn more about how to grow your platform’s revenue with payments, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/collateral/integrated-payments/" target="_self">take a look at our whitepaper on driving revenue by taking payments</a>.

SaaS Strategies for Growth

In case you missed it, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published the <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-05-11/pdf/2016-10567.pdf">Customer Due Diligence Requirements for Financial Institutions Rule</a>, or the CDD Rule, on May 11, 2016. The goal of this new regulation is to reduce the risk of money laundering and corruption through business entities and nonprofits. The Rule requires that financial institutions collect and verify the identity of Legal Entity Customers’ beneficial owners.A Legal Entity Customer is any entity created by filing documents with a Secretary of State or similar regulator. Examples of Legal Entity Customers include registered business merchants and nonprofit organizations. As it relates to business merchants, a beneficial owner is someone who owns 25% or more of the business's equity.For business merchants, information will be collected for up to five individuals, including up to four beneficial owners and the financial administrator. The business representative who signs up for your platform’s payments solution will submit basic information on all beneficial owners -- WePay will not reach out to additional beneficial owners directly.For nonprofit organizations a beneficial owner is someone with significant responsibility to control, manage, or direct the organization (e.g., a Chief Executive Officer, Vice President, or Treasurer), or a controller. Information will only be collected from one individual from a nonprofit organization.If your platform uses WePay’s onboarding iframes or redirects your merchants to wepay.com to onboard, WePay will update our forms to collect beneficial owner information from your merchants. For both of these scenarios, there is no need for further action by your platform.For platforms that use WePay’s Know Your Customer (KYC) API, you will need to upgrade your API version to collect beneficial owner information from merchants. The API upgrade must be completed by April 30, 2018. We’ll reach out to impacted partners with the API version and documentation once it is available, which will be on or before March 30, 2018.See below for more information on the new regulation and what you need to do.<h2>Who is impacted?</h2>Information will be collected for new merchants that your platform onboards. There is no impact to existing merchants that have onboarded successfully. However, if KYC information needs to be modified for an existing user (e.g., if there is a change in tax identification number), they will have to provide KYC information again and provide beneficial ownership reporting information, as appropriate.<h2>What information needs to be collected on beneficial owners?</h2>The same information required from your existing merchants - such as name, address, and date of birth - will be asked of beneficial owners.<h2>What do I need to do to ensure that my platform is compliant with this new requirement?</h2>As previously mentioned, if you use WePay’s merchant onboarding iframes or redirect to wepay.com for onboarding, no action is required. If your platform uses our KYC API, you will need to upgrade your API version.<h2>When do I need to do this by?</h2>WePay will release our new API version on or before March 30, 2018. If your platform uses our KYC API, you will need to complete the upgrade by April 30, 2018. Your Technical Account Manager or Field Technical Services Manager will reach out to you as soon as the new API version is available.<h2>What happens if I don’t upgrade my API version in time?</h2>For platforms that use WePay’s KYC API that do not upgrade within the required timeframe, users will be unable to onboard after the enforcement date of May 11, 2018. Once your platform upgrades to the correct API version, the block will be automatically lifted.<h2>Who should I contact if I have additional questions?</h2>If you have additional questions, reach out to your Technical Account Manager or e-mail <a href="mailto:api@wepay.com">api@wepay.com</a>.

finregulation

FinCEN Regulation to Reduce Risk of Money Laundering and Corruption

Last week we took a look at tuning a SaaS business for growth. That’s a task that cannot be completed effectively without measurement and analytics - in other words, metrics. So this week we are looking at metrics specifically geared toward measuring and helping to optimize the growth stage of a SaaS business.Flashnode, a SaaS platform that automates interactions between software applications, published <a href="http://blog.flashnode.com/en/the-5-best-metrics-to-measure-the-growth-of-your-saas-company-leadfeeder-case" target="_self">a post about the five most important metrics to measure growth</a> that arose from a discussion they had with another SaaS business, Leadfeeder. They realized that they were looking at the same set of metrics to make business decisions, so they wrote a post about them. Their top metric? MRR (monthly recurring revenue) Growth. And the top piece of advice? “choose the ones [metrics] that really matter and every time you make changes, look at the results, analyse and adjust.”Openview Partners has <a href="https://labs.openviewpartners.com/mapping-key-metrics-to-saas-growth-stages/#.WnNaiZM-dE4" target="_self">a lengthy post about the appropriate metrics for different stages of growth</a>. They are mostly looking at growth in what they call the ‘rapid scale’ stage of growth. (For metrics applicable at earlier stages, see our previous post, ‘<a href="https://blog.wepay.com/2017/05/16/lies-damn-lies-saas-metrics/" target="_self">Lies, Damn lies and SaaS Metrics</a>’). Interestingly, they also highlight MRR as the most important metric at the rapid scale stage.One popular growth technique, especially for businesses moving into the rapid scale stage, is growth hacking - which essentially means applying a rapidly trying out and testing new marketing and growth techniques and repeating the process continuously to find techniques taht work well as quickly as possible . Growth Media - a growth hacking publication - <a href="http://growthmedia.ca/blog/saas-metrics-definitions/" target="_self">takes a look at the SaaS metrics most applicable to growth hacking techniques</a>. They don’t really highlight a preferred metric but instead provide a laundry list of metrics for different stages of the customer acquisition process. It’s worth noting that they focus on the subscription model for SaaS businesses.The Chargebee blog has a great post about <a href="https://www.chargebee.com/blog/saas-unit-economics-negative-churn/" target="_self">using metrics to take your company on a journey</a>. Presumably a journey to success. The post covers a wide range of metrics including some real-world examples from successful companies. One summary quote stood out, highlighting that every company needs to look at the metrics that actually apply to its operations rather than blindly following what others do. “SaaS metrics and their relationships are complicated. They shift and transform, and the laws that bind them change. Some changes can catapult growth and profitability.” And other changes don’t….Just in case the whole concept of metrics leaves you in hives and you haven’t a clue what people mean by churn, MRR or ARPU, Chart Mogul has <a href="https://chartmogul.com/resources/saas-metrics-cheat-sheet/" target="_self">a great simple metrics fact sheet</a> in PDF form. And Chaotic Flow has an <a href="http://chaotic-flow.com/media/saas-metrics-guide-to-saas-financial-performance.pdf" target="_self">even more comprehensive one</a>, with some charts to illustrate.Besides these definitions, Incisive Edge has a straightforward infographic with definitions of more SaaS growth metrics. It’s embedded below.<img asset_uid="blt828496dc19aa6517" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt828496dc19aa6517/62bd49fe93c77e05f799815b/SaaS-Metrics-Infographic.png" height="auto" alt="metrices image"/>Source: SaaS Metrics: Measuring Your SaaS Growth – <a href="https://www.incisive-edge.com" target="_self">Incisive Edge</a>David Skok’s For Entrepreneurs blog features<a href="https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/" target="_self"> a great post about second generation SaaS metrics</a> that are useful throughout the SaaS business lifecycle. The post doesn’t just cover useful metrics but why they matter and how to use them with examples of situations where they are helpful and where they are not. One conclusion, common to other articles in this roundup look at SaaS metrics is that, “SaaS businesses are remarkably influenced by a few key numbers. Making small improvements to those numbers can dramatically improve the overall health of the business.”The SaaS Growth blog, just based off its name, is obviously going to have plenty to say on the topic of metrics for growth. <a href="https://medium.com/the-saas-growth-blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-saas-growth-metrics-2a4de6f1779" target="_self">This post is one part of a four part series</a>. This piece lists 12 different metrics useful in the growth stage, and it leads with MRR, like many others here.One final group of stakeholders that can add a lot of value is the VC community. On one hand they have extensive experience with and visibility into a huge range of businesses, which could be very similar to yours. On the other hand their goals may not be perfectly aligned with yours. Nevertheless it would be smart to look at and take seriously <a href="https://www.geckoboard.com/blog/saas-metrics-vcs-share-key-metrics-track/#.WnNZ9pM-dE4" target="_self">any suggestions they have.</a>This roundup of advice on SaaS metrics for growth is a great way to get some idea of what other use and what they are thinking but it is important to remember that all businesses are unique and have a unique mix of factors that influence success so think carefully about which pieces of advice to adopt when you build out a growth dashboard for your organization.

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Tracking SaaS Growth: Metrics that matter

As a SaaS business, or any online software business, moves beyond its startup phase and starts to grow seriously, there is a period of adjustment as the business adapts its operations, sales and other functions to the need for scale.Some of these changes are obvious adjustments - user onboarding needs to be streamlined to drive increased conversion or there won’t be any capability for more rapid growth. Sales and marketing teams need to prioritize new customer acquisition. Underlying engineering and capacity issues need to have been solved so that the software and server capability can handle the anticipated growth.We have gathered a set of articles that look at this period of adjustment and operational tuning to find the secrets to success.It’s fair to say that all plans need to start with information. So it’s no surprise that SaaS companies tend to obsess about metrics - perhaps too much. Nevertheless, the right metrics are crucial. <a href="https://medium.com/@jsonnenschein/track-it-tune-it-drive-it-68f24b3afdf8">This blog post by Jon Sonnenschein</a> takes a look at the right customer metrics to measure so that you can then drive growth. It’s a real hands-on article with details on building out a dashboard and then using it properly.David Skok looks at more stages of growth and the top to bottom of a sales funnel in a piece on his For Entrepreneurs blog. <a href="http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/optimizing-the-saas-funnel/">The post is about optimizing the whole SaaS Sales Funnel</a> and cites a lot of additional material for reference. It’s not as hands-on and specific as the Sonnenschein post but does take a more holistic approach.<a href="https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/07/transforming-saas.pdf">KPMG produced a report on transforming SaaS businesses</a> (and cloud software businesses) that is mostly a report on the state of the industry and which businesses have managed the transformation to growth. But it also includes details about how specific businesses did it, including a study of the metrics that these businesses used to facilitate the transformation. The report also looks at different market segments and verticals and analyzes some of the specific approaches that led to success. At 64 pages this is not light reading but careful study provides some very useful tips about SaaS success.Now that we’ve started to dive into some of the specifics about making adjustments for growth, let’s take a step back and consider just exactly what growth means. In an uncertain economic climate, expectations shift. <a href="http://www.insightsquared.com/2016/02/its-time-to-adjust-saas-growth-expectations/">The Insight Squared blog takes a look at how the concept and targets for growth have shifted</a>, particularly in light of a new awareness that grand exits and IPOs are less likely and where success means a steady ongoing business showing growth. It turns out that that kind of growth is slower (NOT slow - slower) and more sustainable.One way to make adjustments for growth is through pricing. It is an obvious consideration for a consumer-focused platform but can be much less obvious for enterprise platforms where pricing ramifications can take months or even years to play out. <a href="http://www.funnelenvy.com/blog/develop-optimize-profitable-saas-pricing-strategy/">The Funnel Envy blog takes a look at strategies to optimize SaaS pricing for profitability.</a> There is useful advice in there but we’d also suggest considering growth, in addition to profitability as you read this article.An alternative viewpoint on <a href="http://www.insightsquared.com/2017/03/the-metrics-needed-to-run-your-saas-business/">the necessary metrics to run your SaaS business comes from the Insight Squared blog</a>. They view the transition to growth as an opportunity to correct misalignment between revenue and expenditures - not a surprising viewpoint considering that expenditures often get skewed during startup. Their focus is more on controlling customer churn rather than growing customer acquisition.Paul Glarata wrote a <a href="http://sandhill.com/article/top-9-ways-to-tune-your-saas-v2-0/">great article covering nine different approaches to tuning a SaaS startup</a> when moving from its first major iteration to its second - in other words from startup to growth. There are three main factors to his approaches: Optimize perceived and real performance, measure and monitor customer engagement, and map the full SaaS customer lifecycle. But he then expands on these precepts to an additional six factors that are worth consideration.If there’s one thing to read in order to help you grow a SaaS business, then it’s the SaaS Growth Guide, a whole website devoted to a seven month plan that can help grow your SaaS business. An example of the great advice on tap is month 5’s piece on analytics and advanced revenue tracking, which includes updating your database and recordkeeping in order to improve the metrics you are collecting.A lot of this advice focuses on sales, customers and revenue, but sometimes it is your operations (including your marketing, sales and revenue operations) that need a shake-up. This <a href="https://www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/transforming-SaaS-business-operations-with-systems-of-engagement-codex1195.pdf">Cognizant whitepaper takes a dive into using systems of engagement to transform your business operations</a>.

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Tuning a SaaS business for growth

A key phase for any SaaS or software platform business is when they move beyond the idea, startup and product fit stages of their business to growing successfully. It’s one of the hardest transitions to make and a key hurdle to reaching real revenue and eventually profitability. To help illustrate the challenges and some of the strategies to succeed in the transition, we’ve curated nine articles plus a couple of Quora threads.<h2><a href="http://fortune.com/2013/02/11/transitioning-from-a-startup-to-growth-stage-company/">Transitioning from a startup to a growth stage company</a></h2>This piece, in Fortune, highlights several surprising things that can be drivers for growth. One is talent - but not just any talent - the exceptionally high performers who deliver significant value to the whole company. Another is finding the specific engine for revenue within your company and using it to provide energy and momentum to everything else. The article also includes one of the single commonest themes about making the transition from startup to growth successfully: transitioning to a more professional approach to operations.<h2><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html">Do things that don’t scale</a></h2>One of Paul Graham’s often contrarian pieces of advice is to do things that don’t scale in order to succeed and grow. That seems counterintuitive, but he believes that growth comes because of a need and desire to grow, and so growth comes from pushing for it with individual effort. In other words, in order to grow through scale you have to first push your organization to a point where it CAN grow with scale - which means fixing all the issues around acquiring new customers BEFORE you make that push to scale.<h2><a href="https://www.chargify.com/blog/the-stages-of-a-saas-company/">The stages of a SaaS company</a></h2>The Chargify blog discusses the various stages of SaaS startup growth and takes a stab at codifying them. They break things down into four stages: pre-startup, startup, growth and maturity. Our article is concerned with the transition from startup to growth which they characterize as the point where your efforts move from process improvement to rapid scaling. But the whole piece covers a range of factors to consider in growing a SaaS business.<h2><a href="http://tomtunguz.com/grow-fast-or-die-slow/">Grow fast or die slow</a></h2>Tomasz Tunguz takes a look at growth rates and success for SaaS startups and focuses on growing fast in order to move past various points where software companies seem to fail. He quotes a McKinsey report that says “If a software company grows at 20% annually, it has a 92 percent chance of ceasing to exist within a few years.” In other words you have to grow at more than 20% annually.<h2>The growth hacking formula of successful SaaS companies</h2>Many organizations feel that the concept of growth hacking is one of the most successful ways to drive growth for a software business. Growth hacking is a process where an organization tries as many creative strategies as possible to grow, measures the success of them all and iterates on the most successful ones. The GrowthFunnel blog believes in growth hacking and lays out what it sees as the formula for success with a foundation built on email marketing. The article covers a range of other tactics but the real secret to success it highlights is to take the tactics that work for you and then integrate them thoughtfully.<h2><a href="https://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/growth-hacking/10-commandments-growth-hacking/">10 Commandments of Growth Hacking</a></h2>Smart Insights is also a fan of growth hacking and this piece takes a look at the ten commandments of growth hacking from its point of view. Their approach is based around research and understanding the market and customer, trying many solutions, measuring success, and being ready to be creative and try alternatives often. To quote, “to quickly and cheaply test a marketing idea, use data to analyse the outcomes, and iterate, optimise, implement or change the experiment.”<h2><a href="http://www.saasgenius.com/blog/does-growth-hacking-work-story-12-million-profit-and-4500-growth-over-three-years">Does growth hacking work?</a></h2>SaaS Genius interviews Tom Gorski, its CEO, for his approach to successful growth hacking and some stories from his experience as a consultant. He advocates a cutting-edge approach in which marketers take risks and develop leading edge techniques to drive growth. A telling quote is, “Identifying new, game-changing trends before they peak is a good example [of&nbsp;a game-changing approach to growth hacking] .”<h2><a href="https://medium.com/@jasonlk/why-some-saas-hit-a-wall-at-20m-in-revenues-fb945be0e96">Why some SaaS companies hit a wall at 20M in revenues</a></h2>Jason Lemkin truly believes that customer satisfaction drives growth and that SaaS companies plateau because they are satisfying the customer in terms of functionality and core product but that they are failing to make the customer truly happy to use the product. And they will stay on that plateau until they do satisfy the customer. So it’s imperative to find a way to make a customer-focused change.<h2><a href="https://www.chargify.com/blog/reignite-saas-growth/">Reignite SaaS growth</a></h2>Successful SaaS growth requires not only beginning to have scale and rapid growth, but then also sustaining it. Many companies, as described above by Jason Lemkin, plateau. Getting the momentum going again after that stall is what Chargify addresses in this article, which provides twelve tips to rekindle growth. Much of the advice to restart growth is similar to that for growing in the first place but one key point they highlight is to take the time to analyze lost deals and why they were lost.<h2><a href="https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-speed-the-growth-of-my-SaaS-startup">How can I speed the growth of my SaaS startup?</a></h2>This Quora thread highlights a range of advice on improving SaaS startup growth. Quora is a great source of solid SaaS advice because many SaaS leaders use the platform and are prepared to offer concrete advice and suggestions openly. Six different founders and business leaders offer advice to this question in this thread.<h2><a href="https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-growth-strategy-for-a-bootstrapped-B2B-Saas-startup">What should the growth strategy for a bootstrapped B2B SaaS startup be?</a></h2>This might seem to be an overly specific question on Quora, but the advice is useful for most SaaS businesses and it also gets to the value of Quora for even the most specific questions. People with real experience are prepared to share what they have found.Finally, if you are interested in more on SaaS, software startups and how to find success, take a look at our previous series on SaaS startups. The last article, Product-first SaaS approaches, also has links to the rest of the series.

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SaaS and software platforms: Moving from Startup to Growth

2017 has been a busy year in payments and for us here at WePay as we were acquired by JPMorgan Chase. We acknowledge that it’s the year of bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but the payments industry as a whole also had a lot of developments. It’s not always easy to tell what changes are going to end up being significant in the long run, but we are going to take a stab at what the meaningful developments were this year for payments. So we asked some of our industry experts for their opinions on what was significant.<h2>Cryptocurrency and blockchain</h2>Bitcoin in particular had a headline-generating year with growth in value of 2000% over the year. Other cryptocurrencies fared even better with some managing over 10,000% growth over the year. But the more significant long-term developments may well be in the underlying blockchain technology and its other applications throughout the payment and banking industries.Vinodh Poyyapakkam, Senior Director, Risk Management at WePay said, “a big development is the rise and rise of cryptocurrencies before the impending regulatory squeeze. It's going to happen when something unfortunate is connected to something like perpetrators financed through BTC (bitcoin).”Matt Marino, Head of Sales at WePay, pointed to the rapid rise of BTC and, in particular, banks participating in blockchain research. And Catherine Jing, Payments Manager, Global Core Payments at WePay, added, “blockchain developments are the biggest thing to happen this year and how they are cropping up everywhere in all kinds of use cases.”<h2>Partnerships, acquisitions and consolidation</h2>Another clear theme, accelerated by the many changes happening throughout fintech and global commerce, was consolidation via partnerships and acquisition. Karen Redwood, VP Global Core Payments at WePay said, “Chase acquiring WePay is one part of a story of consolidation and acquisition in the payments industry. &nbsp;There have been a variety of big deals, for example Vantiv acquiring Worldpay.”Sireesh Potireddy, Director of Product Management at WePay said, “In 2017 there have been a lot of partnership announcements, specifically from PayPal, for example PayPal with Citi, Chase, Discover, Android Pay and Apple, but also Stripe with AliPay and Amazon Pay with First Data or Clover.”Bill Clerico, our CEO, added “in particular there was lots of consolidation in the integrated payments space &nbsp;- for example First Data bought BluePay.”<h2>Faster Access to Funds</h2>The third big theme was the beginning of the first steps in offering real-time payments. Bill Clerico said “same day ACH is really starting to take hold and become a reality.” And Tina Hsiao added “One of the themes of 2017 is faster settlement - there is a lot of talk around the promise of faster settlement and Zelle is being pushed as well.”But it is still early days for real-time payments and Zen Banerjee highlighted that when he said, “One significant development was the first transaction on the Real Time Payments network. &nbsp;This is a big deal as people have been talking about a faster payment infrastructure in the US for a long time. Worth noting that Chase is one of the original participants.”Rich Aberman, WePay Chief Strategy Officer, summed the competing efforts up. “One of the biggest developments is real time payments - the evolution of rails to drive payments faster. Major banks are investing in new mechanisms to move money faster as the modern successor to ACH. For example TCH, same day ACH, Zelle, etc.”Pretty much everyone agreed on these first three themes but we also had a few others worth noting.<h2>Data Breaches</h2>Several years of larger and more significant data breaches came home to roost in 2017 with the revelation of the Equifax data breach. Matt Marino described it as, “the worst year on record for data security breaches (Equifax, OneLogin, Verizon, Yahoo, etc.)” But Vinodh Poyyapakkam felt that as the culmination of several years of breaches, “Data breach fatigue is setting in with most of us reading it as another news article and moving on (how many still remember Equifax breach from a few months ago?)”<h2>Global payments and commerce</h2>Rich Aberman said “One thing of importance in 2017 was global commerce - Adyen, Stripe, Alipay, Klarna - everyone is racing to cover the globe and to be the first with global acceptance and international coverage. It’s going to lead to a lot of unusual competition.” Zen Banerjee pointed out that “the Indian economy survived its demonetization initiative and as an upside leapfrogged into digital payments.” While Matt Marino added “China is overtaking the US as the largest ecommerce market.”<h2>Evolution and Change</h2>One thing is certain - the payments market will continue to evolve and change. Rich Aberman pointed out a couple of ways that is happening. “On the consumer side and purchasing we now have ambient commerce - Google Home, Alexa, IoT, AI-enabled commerce driving more convenient purchasing from all kinds of locations.”He also pointed to a slow evolution in some markets to subscription-based purchasing with the rise of food subscriptions like EatClub and Blue Apron and many others, as well as clothing subscriptions from companies like Stitch Fix, and the rapid return of content subscriptions across the board.Other developments mentioned that highlight ongoing change included more and more businesses, especially marketplaces, seeking to become merchants of record for their customers; the move by card networks to no signature needed; and ongoing regulatory changes around the globe in how payments can operate.

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2017: The Year in Payments

While most of us are occupied with shopping and travel for the holidays, small & medium-sized business (SMB) owners have even more end-of-year issues to navigate. In our second national <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wepay-survey-reveals-substantial-end-of-year-payments-challenges-for-small-businesses-300555829.html" target="_self">SMB & Money Survey</a>, we developed a better understanding of how the holiday season impacts entrepreneurs and their businesses.Our findings? SMBs earn a significant percentage of their annual revenue at year-end. Business owners reported that 20% of their revenue is earned between Thanksgiving and December 31. For SMBs that sell only goods, this figure is even higher at 28%.Adding to the stress of managing this end-of-year business activity, a whopping 70% of SMBs reported experiencing at least one severe business issue during this timeframe. The most commonly cited pain point was late payments, with more than 21% of SMBs grappling with this problem at the end of last year. Other notable end-of-year payments challenges include fraud and chargebacks.What’s more, these issues significantly impacted business owners. 44% of those who dealt with fraud at year-end rated the severity of this issue as a 9 or 10 (with 10 being the highest). 40% of those who dealt with chargebacks reported a 9 or 10 in severity.As a partner to platform businesses, we’ve developed best practices to quash SMB pain points. Our insights and learnings are below.<h2>Late Payments</h2>While integrated payments can help tackle the issue of late payments - since consumers can pay immediately online - additional tactics include:<ul><li>Enabling multiple payment methods: By casting a wide net and accepting credit, debit, ACH, and other payment types from the get-go, your merchants are more likely to get paid immediately.</li><li>Incentivizing customers to pay early: Money is a great motivator, and merchants can capitalize on this by offering a discount to customers that pay early. However, there is no need to limit creativity — customers can be rewarded with points, statuses, and other incentives to drive early payments.</li><li>Discouraging customers from paying late: Once again, financial consequences - such as late payment fees - can help encourage desired customer behavior.</li></ul><h2>Fraud</h2>There are numerous types of fraud out there that can impact your merchants, their customers, and your platform business overall. We developed <a href="https://go.wepay.com/collateral/online-credit-card-fraud/" target="_self">an overview</a> on fraud types and their impacts.<h2>Chargebacks</h2>In addition to having a well thought-out process and program for handling chargebacks (something WePay devotes significant time and resources to), preventing chargebacks is often the best and easiest option. For tangible ways to avoid chargebacks, check out these <a href="https://blog.wepay.com//reducing-chargebacks-14-tips/" target="_self">best practices</a>. Additionally, we’ve developed a list of <a href="https://support.wepay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001853973-Things-to-Look-Out-For" target="_self">things to look out for</a> - indicators of bad transactions that can lead to chargebacks. Want more best practices to empower your busy merchants? Contact us at <a href="mailto:sales@wepay.com" target="_self">sales@wepay.com</a>.

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SMB Update: End-of-Year Hurdles for Small Businesses

<h4>WePay had the opportunity to catch up to Karen Webster, President of PYMNTS.com, at Money 20/20&nbsp; and turn the tables a little on her by interviewing her about the payments space and trends she sees in payments coming out of the conference.</h4><h3>How did you get payments space and go on to build one of the payments industry's top information platforms?</h3>The consulting firm that I co-founded in the early 2000’s specialized in helping platform businesses develop the strategies, design principles, business and pricing models to launch and scale their businesses. Key to our work was a proven economic framework based on more than two decades of economic empirical work by my co-founder and our Chairman – both recognized experts on this topic. We used this framework to help platforms across many industries identify ways to leverage their platform assets to identify new opportunities, create and ignite new platforms, and/or defend their platform against emerging competitors. Payments was one of the sectors that we focused on and we were lucky to have worked with many of the leading innovators in the space (and we still do!) In 2007, we began doing work with the then CEO of Business Wire after she read something we wrote about platform business challenges. Business Wire’s core business is content distribution – and we suggested, among other things, that they consider a strategy to reinvent the way that business- to- business content was developed and distributed. That evolved to become a joint venture with them to launch V.0 of PYMNTS.com in October 2008; Business Wire remained our partner until 2015.The rest, as they say, is history.<h3>Coming out of the Money 20/20 conference, what's exciting you most in terms of companies, technologies, and/or trends?</h3>I think there are several things that have caught my attention over the last year:Authentication – even though it may not *sound* exciting, getting the balance right between security and convenience is really important now that a whole new crop of connected endpoints are capable of enabling commerce. The parties involved need assurance that the person or business they are interacting with is the real deal, has authentic credentials and the permission to use them. And the consumer can’t be subjected to lots of friction in the process – yet needs to feel comfortable that her identity and account credentials are secure. I see a lot of exciting (and necessary) developments in this area, particularly in the area of biometrics.Voice-enabled commerce – voice is the most ubiquitous and natural “access” interface that we have – and for commerce, I think it has amazing potential. We are in very early days, but the level of interest in buying and using voice-activated speakers to engage in commerce, in just the last few years, from across all demographics makes my point.Acquiring and Merchant Services. The transformation and disruption of the merchant services business is playing out right in front of our eyes – and in real time. I would characterize it as co-opetition on steroids right now as hardware, software, payments, processing services and new platforms all converge, consolidate and collide to reshape the merchant services supply chain in entirely new ways.&nbsp; How these players and the balance of power ebbs and flows over the next couple of years will be fascinating to watch.<h3>And what do you see as most overhyped right now?</h3>Cryptocurrencies and “the blockchain.” There is such a lack of understanding about both – including how the terminology is used – &nbsp;and the lack of a framework and context for examining the practical application of these technologies for financial services. It’s hard to have a balanced debate on the topic as a result so it all sounds like noise to me right now.<h3>You've got pretty much every payments industry and fintech CEO on speed dial. Who most inspires you and why?</h3>I admire and am inspired by every innovator I talk to – from the new guys just starting out to the big guys looking to adapt their business to a new way of doing business in the dynamic digital world in which we live now. I love hearing about what motivated their ideas, how they plan to ignite those ideas, and what they are learning along the way. It takes guts to get up every day and give it your all while slogging through the tough work of getting a platform off the ground. I always leave those conversations humbled by the unwavering commitment they have to solving the tough problems in payments and commerce in the face of such huge obstacles. <h3>What's the fate of the Bitcoin?</h3>B.U.B.B.L.E.<h3>When you think about the business of the PYMNTS.com platform, what metrics do you use to measure success?</h3>We track three metrics, four times a day, that tell us how engaged our readers are – and we circulate those metrics to everyone in the entire firm. This reader report card measures how many people come to the site, how many pages of content they consume when they get there and how much time they spend doing both – and it’s important that everyone in the firm feels that they play a part in driving those numbers. If we are able to engage our readers with the kind of interesting, original content that helps them do their jobs better – and if we focus on nailing that each and every day, then I believe the rest will take care of itself.<h3>What's an operating lesson you've learned that you often share with others?</h3>I guess if I had to boil it down to one lesson, it’s to focus. That probably sounds a bit like motherhood and apple pie, but to know where to focus one first must have real clarity about what problem you’re out to solve – and for whom; some certainty about whether that problem is big enough to build a business around; whether it is one in which you have or can create the kind of barriers to entry that drive scale. Then, once you’ve answered the tough questions that narrow that focus, it’s then time to execute the heck out of it.<h3>What's the next big thing in payments?</h3>I don’t think that there is just one big thing. What I love about where we are in payments right now is the many, many opportunities at the intersection of mobile, digital, data, the cloud and the internet that are there – just waiting for innovators to find and unleash their creative energies. Three years ago, the notion of talking to a virtual assistant via a speaker and having her order and deliver your dog food a day later was the stuff of either science fiction or cartoons. So was the ability to embed payments into software so that businesses could get paid faster and improve their cash flow without having to endure months of development and integration time. Or for a bank to digitally open a new account and have it provisioned inside of a mobile app – knowing that the person on the other end was the real deal – and have it done quite literally in the blink of an eye. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of where innovators and their imaginations can take us – and I feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to talk to and work with so many of them as help us see and live a new future – and share their accomplishments on PYMNTS.com.

Karen Webster

Q&A with Karen Webster, President of PYMNTS.com

Most credit card fraud prevention features are designed for “card-present” (face-to-face) payment environments. But the shift toward EMV chips, to authenticate and secure transactions, has introduced something entirely new&nbsp;—&nbsp;and sinister.Now, fraudsters are turning their attention to “card-not-present” transactions (where card payments are made without a physical swipe of the card, such as for online payments) performed on online platforms or marketplaces.When people fall victim to identity or card theft, they can request that their credit card provider (a.k.a., the issuing bank) work on their behalf to reverse the fraudulent charges. In the traditional online commerce model, with a buyer and a single seller, the issuing bank would typically hold the seller or “merchant” liable for any fraudulent charges made on the website.However, in this newer state of ecommerce in which an online platform or marketplace combines many buyers and merchants, the specifics of the platform-merchant relationship will dictate who is exposed and liable.There are also situations emerging on these newer online platforms where fraudsters operate as merchants (rather than simply buyers), with the aim of defrauding the platforms and quickly disappearing before the platform realizes what's happened. This leaves the platform on the hook for all fraudulent charges.What can a platform owner do to gain protection against fraudsters? And when is the time to start doing it? Here are five tips to help prevent the surprise and sting of fraud losses for these platform and marketplace providers.<h2>Educate yourself.</h2>Fraud and loss come in different forms, such as chargebacks, merchant-identity fraud, buyer-identity fraud and merchant-credit risk. Attacks can also come from fraudsters who masquerade as legitimate buyers and sellers.Awareness of these types of payment risks for you and your business is the first step in avoiding them.<h2>Start with simple protections.</h2>For starters, you can leverage traditional, time-tested tools to prevent fraud. For example, you can validate data provided by users with information maintained by large vendors like Experian, Equifax or Lexis-Nexis. These services can also help to check a user’s business credit and history, to further assess his or her legitimacy.<h2>Verify with social data.</h2>While there are many advanced fraud protection tools out there , all tools can be enhanced and complemented by social data verification. With much of the world on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, there’s a lot of available information that could be mined to validate someone’s identity. It may be easy for a fraudster to set up a new social media profile, but it would be difficult to create one with a long history that also matches the name and email address they wish to fraudulently use.<h2>Trust your instincts.</h2>We’ve seen an old scam re-emerge on online business platforms whereby a fraudster posing as a potential client approaches a small business via email regarding a sizable project. The fraudster suggests a deal in which he (or she) will pay for the project in advance.This includes an extra amount the criminal wants the small business to pay out to a third-party subcontractor (e.g.,you're asked to build the fraudster's website for $10,000; so he seeks to pay you "$15,000" after which you'll pay $5,000 to his “photographer.").The fraudster will say this approach is needed because he is limited in how many payments he can make. In reality, he's operating with a stolen credit card and trying to get you to send $5,000 to his bank before you realize that original $15,000 is fraudulent. Victims of this scam have often said that the project sounded too good to be true.When it seems too good to be true, it probably is. It’s safer to meet or speak with a prospective client before agreeing to any work. Be cautious if you find that someone wants to work with you from far away&nbsp;— when he or she could probably work with many others much closer to that location. And of course, be wary of any outreach that asks for money and/or personal information.<h2>Don’t wait.</h2>Fraud is highly non-linear, making it inconsistent and unpredictable. Your business may experience zero fraud for weeks and then a sudden spike in fraudulent activity could overwhelm you before you can react. For this reason, you’ll want to consistently monitor activity with the right tools even if the immediate threat isn’t apparent.The most important takeaway is to avoid the element of surprise when it comes to fraud. If you’re not on top of it, fraudulent activity can take time away from your normal business activities and can negatively affect profits, employee morale and your business’s reputation.We recommend that all businesses plan for fraud risks. For online platform providers, we believe that it’s even more crucial for them to ensure that their platforms remain a safe place to conduct business.[<a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299388" target="_self">This post originally appeared at Entrepreneur.com</a>]

Fraud Alert

5 Tips to Protect Your Business When Dealing with Payments

There are several ways to approach rolling out and improving any SaaS product or platform in search of elusive market success. The two most common are to plan and develop your SaaS product with either a user-first mentality or with a product and feature first mentality. Obviously you are eventually going to want to deliver completely across both these axes. But realistically, you are going to need to prioritize one over the other as you start out.The full range of product development and planning for a SaaS business is continuous responsibility. Almost by definition, a SaaS business and associated products and services are never done - there is always more to do. To get some idea of the full range and scope, read <a href="https://blog.chartmogul.com/best-way-build-product-roadmap/" target="_self">this ChartMogul piece on how to build a SaaS product roadmap</a>. It breaks the process down into stages, from early planning to rollout to growth to maturity. And it advocates for a user-first process at the beginning.So we will take that advice and start with user experience - this article will take a look at user experience (UX) and user-first planning for a SaaS product.\<h2>User Experience is Key</h2>This ConversionXL blog covers <a href="https://conversionxl.com/blog/how-to-design-user-flow/" target="_self">how to go about designing user flow in depth</a> and covers state diagrams, different forms of user flow, examples, case studies, getting data from users and how to measure and iterate. The Chargify Bullring blog talked to experts at InVision to get <a href="https://www.chargify.com/blog/saas-ux-bible-must-have-ux-principles-from-invision/" target="_self">seven UX principles</a> that are requirements when building out a SaaS user experience. They refer to the seven principles as the SaaS UX Bible. These principles include frictionless signups, great support and more. Incidentally, WePay advocates very similar principles and approaches in our&nbsp; report, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/offers/10-ux-tips-drive-payments-adoption/" target="_self">10 User Experience Tips for Driving Payments Adoption</a>. UX Matters wrote about <a href="https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/05/the-role-of-user-experience-in-the-product-development-process.php" target="_self">the role of UX in product development</a>, in an in-depth examination for the SaaS industry. The piece covers all the ramifications and considerations for UX in product development. [Warning - this is a long post].The Stunning Blog wrote about <a href="http://blog.stunning.co/setting-up-the-right-ux-for-your-saas/" target="_self">setting up the right UX for your SaaS product</a>. They cover some similar points to other articles listed here, especially the need for signup and onboarding to be frictionless. UX Planet made its points about the importance of UX by <a href="https://uxplanet.org/how-to-stop-enraging-your-users-start-getting-more-saas-customers-47ed1d91d85a" target="_self">suggesting that SaaS companies stop enraging their users and start taking UX seriously</a>. That’s how important an issue UX is for SaaS businesses. The implication also is that far too many SaaS businesses do NOT take UX seriously enough. The Process.ST blog made <a href="https://www.process.st/saas-user-experience/" target="_self">the connection between UX and customer success for SaaS companies</a>. It’s a well-known and important connection and drives home the point that SaaS success and growth is inherently tied to successful UX. So what about SaaS companies that are more established? Most of the advice already given applies to them, but not all. Hopefully these companies have addressed some of these points already in rolling out their solution successfully. But SaaS success cannot be taken for granted. It is very easy for a new company to come along and iterate and improve and start eating into your customer base. What to do in order to improve your existing UX? According to the Altolus Digital blog, the answer is to <a href="https://www.altolus.com/blog/enhance-your-saas-user-experience-commission-ux-audit" target="_self">perform a UX audit to identify the UX areas and issue</a>s which you are not handling effectively. Hopefully these articles and suggestions help you to focus properly on the UX of your SaaS business.

Customers

SaaS approaches: UX First product development

We know your ecommerce business is unique. Your business has a unique viewpoint, set of needs, and product. Why then would you partner with a payments processor offering an ordinary, inflexible payments system? (We know why processors do it – it’s easier to build and sell). But in reality, the payments experience your company could offer is a potential minefield of problems. Nothing can cause user friction quite like buying products or services, or how your merchants receive funds that they are owed. <a href="https://blog.wepay.com/saas-payment-monetization/6-ways-risk-management-can-lead-ecommerce-profit/" target="_self">In this blog post, we discussed the importance of risk management</a>. Many payment processors make you sacrifice either risk management or your UX to succeed at the other. But it doesn’t have to be that way.In payments, we use the term ‘white-labeling’ as short-hand to describe an integrated payment experience where your users only see your brand and your user experience when sending and receiving payments. Think of Shopify Payments, Etsy Payments, and Wave Accounting Payments as examples. White-labeling is at the complex end of the user experience scale – it requires more work. Some payment companies can offer anything from complete white-labelling to forcing the user to be taken off your site to the payment processor’s, to anything in between. But how do you know what UX is right for you? Here are three considerations:<h2>The Merchant Experience</h2>A unique consideration for platforms is how their merchants experience the platform, including the sign-up process, receiving funds from completed services, and reviewing data from previous transactions. In merchant sign-up, for example, what’s more important to your business? Do you want to get merchants registered and using your site as quickly as possible or do you want to restrict sign-up to merchants on whom you have done due diligence, requiring a lengthier merchant sign-up process? That requires a different experience than a platform offering business services to general contractors who have a limited number of large transactions, which may require greater upfront scrutiny of the contractors to manage risk.<h2>The Payer Experience</h2>The choice for the payer experience is often whether your company hosts a custom checkout page or whether the payer interacts more directly with the processor. Many platforms don’t have the time or resources to support a customized payments integration. They want a minimum viable product. In such a case, a payer will often get taken off the platform website to the processor’s website. Another consideration is the number of pieces of information a payer needs to provide during the checkout process. A processor should be able to enable you to give the payer experience you prefer.<h2>PCI & Brand Exposure</h2>Your UX is also dependent on your company’s ability to meet certain Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Often a company wants a capability, like storing a payer’s credit card information to allow them to use multiple processors, but this capability comes with a number of security tests to ensure payer data is safe. The more white-labeled a site, the more liability is put on the platform when things go wrong with merchants and payers. If your company’s branding is the only branding a payer sees when he or she pays, your company will be the contact if something goes wrong.Integrated payments is not a system suitable for everyone, but we have seen significant improvements to a platform’s number of merchant sign-ups, user engagement, and overall payment volume after adopting integrated payments. There are usually a few reasons for this – a good UX means fewer pieces of information to input, fewer times. It means your payment pages look like the rest of your site and there’s less clutter on those pages. It means you tailor your options to fit consumer behavior.Now that you’ve learned more about payments UX, you can find out more about integrating payments and your choices <a href="http://www.wepay.com" target="_self">here</a>.

cake

Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Customized User Experience (UX)

We often talk to clients who think they don’t have a risk problem. A risk management program is an extra to them, something to worry about after their company gets to a certain size in transactions or when they feel real pain from chargebacks. This points to a misunderstanding of effective risk management services&nbsp;–&nbsp;the best ones can boost revenue and profit, not just save company costs. Here are the top 6 ways a sophisticated risk management system drives increased revenue and profitability, also improving the experience customers may have.<h2>1. Increasing the Number of Merchants on your Platform</h2>Platforms want to reach as many merchants as possible and to onboard these merchants as quickly as possible to increase engagement. A risk system can be designed to onboard merchants as quickly as possible, minimizing information requirements placed on them. Faster onboarding and higher engagement on the platform can lead to more transactions overall, which means more revenue on your platform.<h2>2. Increasing Payer Conversions</h2>We’ve all had the experience of paying for something online and had to enter information multiple times, creating an unnecessary level of friction. A sophisticated risk management program means payers only get asked for the most critical information to enable payments. Minimizing what you ask makes it easier on them, improves their user experience, and, in turn, increases the chances that a user completes a transaction and sends your merchants money.<h2>3. Increasing the number of transactions that are auto-approved</h2>Once you have a payer who wants to make a transaction, then you have a different issue – whether to approve their transaction or not. Risk management in ecommerce tackles the challenge of offering payers a great user experience (including speed and ease of use) vs. protecting your company from fraud. Focusing on one will often come at the expense of the other. But some new payments companies help you get the best of both. These companies use a combination of ever-improving risk signals and machine learning to provide more accurate risk profiles. Better understanding the riskiness of a given payer or merchant using your platform means you as an ecommerce provider can auto-accept more transactions instead of declining them out of fear of fraud and still offer a customized user experience. That means more revenue for you.<h2>4. Saving Time through Managing Manual Reviews</h2>You can’t auto-approve all transactions; some need personal attention. This requires having risk analysts who can make a determination and customer support agents to handle all user queries. As you can imagine, manual reviews require significant resources. Moreover, because you won’t be operating at the same scale as a company specializing in risk, there can be meaningful challenges ramping up and operating efficiently. A risk management company can create a program to manually review fewer than 5% of cases. Your company starting out would likely review about 20%. Being better at manual reviews also means less work for customer support. So in addition to saving money on personnel expenses, you also save time.<h2>5. Increasing Profit by Lowering Chargebacks</h2>Now that you’ve boosted conversions, auto-approvals, and enabled an efficient manual review system, you still have to deal with chargebacks and refunds, the main drivers of loss. Finding a provider who can help you identify causes of chargeback fraud in your system can prevent significant chargebacks on your platform. Even better, risk systems improve over time, meaning you could save even more money later on.<h2>6. Increasing Your Merchants’ Cash Flow</h2>Many platforms assume a merchant using their solution will receive funds for services rendered either the same day or the next day. Wary of risk, acquiring banks limit the speed in which these funds are dispersed. Risk systems employ a number of measures that could unnecessarily disrupt a platforms’ merchants: blocking potentially fraudulent transactions, holding a portion of a merchant’s funds in reserve, or affecting a merchant’s time to payout. A proper risk program can strike the right balance between protecting you and minimizing disrupting risk management efforts to improve your merchants’ access to their cash.Risk management is more than preventing fraud on your platform. A good program can improve the user experience with your company in a number of ways. But understanding fraud that may be occurring on your platform is important too.

Profit From Risk

6 Ways Risk Management can lead to ecommerce profit

Your SaaS business is starting to grow and need to ramp your hiring. It is critical to get the right few people at the start in important leadership roles because they will be responsible for building out their respective teams in turn. Better choices at the beginning will make for a better team from top to bottom.But SaaS businesses also have a number of differences from other startups, especially around managing sales and customers. So your customer support and sales teams are of special importance. There are also nuances to engineering, infrastructure and product that you should be aware of.Some great general advice on building out and structuring SaaS teams comes from SaaStr in a great article about what your typical first 100 hires will look like: <a href="https://www.saastr.com/what-your-first-100-hires-will-look-like/" target="_self">https://www.saastr.com/what-your-first-100-hires-will-look-like/</a>. It confirms that sales, customer success and support are going to be your biggest and most critical teams.Confirming that analysis is the KISSmetrics blog &nbsp;(a great blog for understanding marketing) which argues that customer success is going to be part of the role for every single hire you make in a SaaS business. <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/saas-employee-customer-success/" target="_self">https://blog.kissmetrics.com/saas-employee-customer-success/</a>Finally, the InsightSquared blog takes a look at aggregate lessons about team size from 11 different SaaS businesses and provides some insights about what functions and in what numbers you should hire. <a href="http://www.insightsquared.com/2015/08/saas-company-structure-learning-from-13-more-companies/" target="_self">http://www.insightsquared.com/2015/08/saas-company-structure-learning-from-13-more-companies/</a>Once you’ve got some idea of where you need to hire it is time to move onto the specific characteristics you need to look for in each role. We’ve broken that advice down into sales hiring, CTO, marketing and product hires below.<h2>Sales</h2>Hiring for a sales leader and for sales reps in a SaaS business is key because you need people who understand that they are selling a long term value proposition and a relationship rather than just a product. InsightSquared has a great piece about the 7 characteristics a SaaS salesperson should have. <a href="http://www.insightsquared.com/2015/10/7-traits-of-a-great-saas-sales-rep/" target="_self">http://www.insightsquared.com/2015/10/7-traits-of-a-great-saas-sales-rep/</a>SaaStr thinks hiring your VP of Sales is so important that they have built a section consisting of sixteen articles just to go over all the things you should consider for this critical role.<h2>CTO</h2>On the engineering side you have a number of roles to consider but the critical one is your CTO. A great CTO can help you fill the development and infrastructure and all of the other critical slots that you will need. You may already have this role filled by a co-founder or it may be you that is planning to fill the role Even in that case it is still good to be aware of the need because down the road as you grow you are going to need to delegate.The Stride blog has a piece on how to hire a CTO with some good points of consideration. <a href="http://blog.stridenyc.com/blog/7-steps-how-to-hire-a-cto-for-your-startup/" target="_self">http://blog.stridenyc.com/blog/7-steps-how-to-hire-a-cto-for-your-startup/</a>If on the other hand you really don’t have much engineering experience, CoFoundersLab has a great piece on how to hire a CTO if you aren’t technical yourself. <a href="https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/how-to-hire-a-cto-if-i-am-not-a-programmer" target="_self">https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/how-to-hire-a-cto-if-i-am-not-a-programmer</a><h2>Customer Support and Success</h2>This is another critical area in which to hire and it is even more important because your customer success and support teams also need to understand the specific space in which your particular SaaS platform operates.Client Success has a great piece with four reasons why a CSM should be one of your first hires. <a href="https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/4-reasons-why-a-csm-should-be-an-early-saas-startup-hire/" target="_self">https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/4-reasons-why-a-csm-should-be-an-early-saas-startup-hire/</a>SaaStr has some really great advice about your customer success team and why you should hire it with real goals – not squishy ones – in mind. <a href="https://www.saastr.com/customer-success-managers-hire-early-and-no-squishy-goals-its-all-about-the-numbers/" target="_self">https://www.saastr.com/customer-success-managers-hire-early-and-no-squishy-goals-its-all-about-the-numbers/</a>Finally, Groove has a great piece about how to write a customer service recruitment post that will succeed in getting the candidates you really want. <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/support/customer-service-job-description" target="_self">https://www.groovehq.com/support/customer-service-job-description</a><h2>Marketing</h2>Despite a frequent feeling that marketing is a soft discipline, the reality is that marketing is a key component of demand generation and success around awareness and sales. If you don’t start out strong here you have just as much risk down the line as with any other discipline.KISSmetrics has some great advice about how to hire a world-class marketer for your SaaS business. <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/world-class-marketer/" target="_self">https://blog.kissmetrics.com/world-class-marketer/</a>SaaStr has an even harder-hitting article about the importance of the VP of Marketing hire and how to do it right – as well as the cost in blue pens of doing it wrong. <a href="https://www.saastr.com/hire-the-right-type-of-vp-marketing-or-youll-end-up-with-a-bunch-of-blue-pens/" target="_self">https://www.saastr.com/hire-the-right-type-of-vp-marketing-or-youll-end-up-with-a-bunch-of-blue-pens/</a><h2>Product</h2>Last up on this list is product – partly because this is a role frequently held by founders for a significant period of time. But the reality is that great product management has skill sets that go beyond what a founder may typically have, even if the founder is the true expert on the product they are building. So don’t neglect this discipline either.Forbes has a piece about when and how to hire your head of product – note that the when is as important as the how. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronhirson/2016/03/25/startups-when-and-how-to-hire-your-head-of-product/#6db3d65b6e45" target="_self">https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronhirson/2016/03/25/startups-when-and-how-to-hire-your-head-of-product/#6db3d65b6e45</a>Eran Aloni wrote a great piece on how to hire the best product managers. <a href="https://eran-aloni.com/4-tips-on-hiring-great-product-managers-2aa152c28d8c" target="_self">https://eran-aloni.com/4-tips-on-hiring-great-product-managers-2aa152c28d8c</a>All of this advice is just that – advice. It’s your SaaS business and your responsibility to hire your team well.

Delegate

Starting to Grow: How To Build Out A Great SaaS Team

Platforms and merchants periodically ask us to help them pass credit card fees onto the customer, so that the merchant does not have to incur the charge. This practice, called surcharging, has numerous drawbacks and benefits.WePay can indeed help partners with surcharging. But before we dive into the details of surcharging, we feel compelled to state our point of view: we do not think surcharging is a good business practice for most platforms and merchants. Why? Because additional fees add friction to the checkout experience and <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/war-against-conversion-friction/" target="_self">checkout friction leads to a lower conversion rate</a> – this is at odds with our aim to help platforms and merchants earn more revenue with integrated payments.So we encourage you to tread very carefully into this area… and do consider alternative approaches for covering the cost of credit card fees. Below is additional information to help you decide if surcharging is right for your business:<h4>How does surcharging work?</h4>Use WePay’s credit card call to retrieve the card’s BIN (bank identification number). The BIN indicates if the card is a credit card or a debit card (only credit cards are eligible for surcharging in the US). If the card is a credit card, then the merchant can assess a surcharge fee. This WePay functionality is currently available to partners with custom checkout pages.<h4>Are there any rules in surcharging?</h4>Yes, there are a lot. Certain states in the US have laws limiting or prohibiting surcharging. Credit card networks have their own rules on surcharging as well. The surcharge amount can be a fixed or variable amount, but it cannot exceed the merchant’s credit card acceptance fees or 4%, whichever is lower. Surcharge disclosures are necessary too: the surcharge amount must be included as a separate line item on the receipt, and there needs to be a surcharge disclosure on the checkout page. As mentioned above, surcharges in the US are only limited to credit cards.<h4>Does WePay help?</h4>As always, WePay is your trusted partner in making this important business decision. Your account manager can offer counsel on surcharging based on your industry and your unique business model. WePay will also provide guidelines and help your business comply with card network rules through card testing and validation of receipts. At this time, the platform is responsible for complying with state laws.<h4>What are viable alternatives to surcharging?</h4>If you want to help your merchants cover the cost of accepting credit cards, there are other options available. A Convenience Fee can be applied to all payment methods for card-not-present transactions. Additionally, merchants can offer discounts or other incentives to payers using alternative methods of payment.For more information, see our documentation <a href="https://developer.wepay.com/docs/articles/surcharging" target="_self">here</a> or reach out to your account manager to get started.

surcharge

To Surcharge or not to Surcharge? That is the Question

You’ve got your SaaS business sorted out, figured out the product, figured out the market fit and you are ready to go. You’ve even got some test customers and everything’s going well. But you’ve exhausted your personal network of potential customers who might actually use your product. It’s time to hit the wider market and that means getting some marketing ready to start feeding some leads to your brand new sales team.The basics are clear: take everything you have learned from your early stage customers who were your guinea pigs, and distill down the key reasons your SaaS product works to apply those insights to future customers. Discard your initial direction and just follow what you are actually doing that they like. Use that and your identified product-market fit to build out a value proposition – a clear statement of who your SaaS solution would benefit and why they would find value in it. Layer in the current state of the market, any competition and refine out some positioning that clearly lays out more exactly who should choose your product and why. Then tell that story clearly and succinctly. Sounds simple. Unfortunately it isn’t. For any kind of business, getting messaging right can be a challenge but SaaS businesses have additional layers of difficulty and complexity to unpack for their prospective customers.We’ve collected some of the best advice for SaaS businesses on honing their marketing and messaging.<h2>Value Props</h2>Let’s start with some examples. <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/saas-value-propositions#sm.0001bjggbjo9kdattj226xn3qy0x2" target="_self">Hubspot pulled together ten examples of value propositions it thinks most SaaS companies would kill to have</a>. These companies are mostly very established names that got an early run into a new market or that have succeeded really well in their respective markets. So these are companies that got it right.Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist with Redpoint, writes frequently on SaaS issues and <a href="http://tomtunguz.com/three-value-propositions/" target="_self">penned a blog post about three different kinds of SaaS value props</a>: software that increases revenue, software that reduces cost, and software that promises improved productivity. He distills out the essence of these three approaches so you can base your value prop on one of them. SaaS Foundry takes a more traditional approach to how to create a value proposition and breaks it down into all the decision points you will need to follow and then walks you through building your value prop back out of them. They throw in an analysis of several real value propositions for good measure. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-paas-saas-value-proposition-yvan-cognasse" target="_self">In a post on LinkedIn</a>, Yvan Cognasse takes a look at the value prop of one specific case, the platform as a service, and why that can be a valuable approach to building a SaaS business.<h2>Positioning</h2>Myk Pono over at Startup Grind has a <a href="https://medium.com/startup-grind/strategic-communication-how-to-develop-strategic-messaging-and-positioning-3cc59689ca28" target="_self">very concrete strategic messaging map </a>to use when developing your positioning. He accompanies it with a basic guide to how to go about developing strategic messaging and positioning. The PM Vision blog, by John Peltier, has a great piece specifically about developing SaaS product positioning. He covers some of the core issues you will have to face around clarity, and even pivoting and dealing with change. Ryan Battles covers benefits, attributes, use cases, the competition, market positioning and a lot more in <a href="https://ryanbattles.com/post/position-your-saas-product" target="_self">a post about how to do SaaS product positioning</a>. In contrast, <a href="https://medium.com/@rfelix/why-positioning-is-important-for-your-saas-3091a535962f" target="_self">Richard Felix takes an in depth look at SaaS positioning</a> through the lens of brand in a post on Medium. Switching to a more competitive focus, <a href="http://sixteenventures.com/saas-competition" target="_self">Sixteen Ventures looks at creating SaaS product positioning in a highly competitive market</a> and has been updating the post for a couple of years to keep it current.<h2>Messaging</h2>Messaging is where you put it all together. You can see some results from 7 leading SaaS companies in <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/7-examples-of-saas-companies-with-exceptional-marketing#sm.0001bjggbjo9kdattj226xn3qy0x2" target="_self">this Hubspot blog post where they look at leading examples of SaaS marketing</a>. <a href="https://www.chargebee.com/blog/content-for-saas-product-marketing/" target="_self">Chargebee has a great blog post about the implementation of messaging </a>in a content marketing strategy. It covers how some top SaaS companies implement their messaging through content marketing. Inturact has a lengthy post that culminates in some good advice on messaging but actually <a href="https://www.inturact.com/the-saas-marketing-journey" target="_self">covers the whole marketing journey from start to finish</a>. <a href="http://aaronbeashel.com/brand-building-b2b-saas-startups/" target="_self">Aaron Beashel has a great post </a>about branding messaging for SaaS companies that goes further than basic messaging and looks at the longer term approach to building a brand over time. Hopefully this collection of articles will give you a good foundation for building out the value proposition, positioning and messaging for your upcoming SaaS business.

message

Getting ready to sell: SaaS Product value propositions, positioning and messaging

A few weeks ago, I participated in a panel session at the <a href="https://know.oneworldidentity.com/" target="_self">K(NO)W Identity Conference in Washington D.C.</a> to discuss the significant and growing Know Your Customer (“KYC”) challenges in the payments space, as well as ways in which technology can help with effective and efficient risk assessment and compliance. During this conversation, I highlighted how the increased automation of fraud presents challenges for WePay’s current KYC program, and how digital identity systems, as proposed by the World Economic Forum and other innovation and technology leaders in the financial services industry, could address this pain point for WePay and many others in the industry.<h2>What Are Our Challenges?</h2><h3>Making our product as seamless and invisible as possible while meeting the regulatory expectations of KYC</h3>Everyone in payments today adheres to prescribed standards of KYC and identifying &nbsp;their customers, as required by the Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”). WePay’s challenge is to adhere to this prescribed KYC model in a manner that meets regulatory and partner expectations while also remaining a creative and disruptive FinTech company.Our &nbsp;approach to this challenge has been to adopt a multi-step on-boarding and underwriting process. This means we allow our merchants to accept payments immediately with only a name and an email address and then, later in the payment lifecycle and before settlement, we require completion of KYC and underwrite the merchant. This model allows for flexibility that both our platform partners and our merchants find valuable. You can imagine how much higher the conversion rates for our partners are since we make it so easy to accept payments quickly. Similarly, you can imagine how powerful being able to accept payments immediately as a small business can be in growing the customer base.While we have successfully implemented a model to provide seamless payments and meet our KYC obligations, digital identity systems can serve to eliminate the bottleneck that failed KYC verification creates. Here at WePay, approximately 15% of users fail automatic identity verification and may be subject to manual review and authentication, which is quite time consuming. As a further challenge, current standards for identity verification are based on physical records, i.e. the ability to prove identity depends on access to and authentication of physical documents, like passports and government-issued ID cards. This creates tons of friction in the digital economy in which we play, because 1) physical identity documents can be falsified and altered as well as lost or stolen, and 2) the transfer and review of physical identification documents is slow and creates the potential for human error.On the other hand, a digital identity system would exist as a set of digital records that the user can control and use to complete transactions. In this way, proof of identity would be communicated between an individual and financial institutions in a standardized, digital format. Proposed identity systems would also adapt to the nature of the transaction, and continuously adapt to requirements by integrating additional information to create a rich view of the user.This type of system would allow WePay as the payments partner to interpose itself in the merchant/platform relationship as little as possible, thereby enhancing the user experience, and have a better understanding of the user, thereby more efficiently monitoring for fraud and other suspicious activity.<h3>Fighting the increased automation of fraud</h3>Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage and, to a certain extent, how we techies have differentiated ourselves from traditional financial institutions. WePay employs machine learning models trained to distinguish between fraudulent users and good ones. The model uses a random forest algorithm and the model score is available as a&nbsp;variable for writing rules. The rules refer any payment or withdrawal with a high enough risk score to human analysts for review. Read more information about WePay’s machine learning approach <a href="http://blog.wepay.com/payment-security/how-were-using-machine-learning-to-fight-shell-selling/" target="_self">here</a>.Despite the great promise of machine learning, it is still considered a black box. Financial services has been at the forefront of machine learning advancement, but not everyone is deploying machine learning because the industry has not been able to substantially overcame the hurdle of financial regulation. That’s because it might prove quite challenging and inadequate to tell a regulator that a computer made a risk decision and show them a piece of math as proof.Since we’re not regulated on the federal or state level, WePay is currently fortunate to not have to be too concerned about scrutiny associated with machine learning models. &nbsp;That might not always be the case for FinTechs generally, and payment facilitators specifically, as the conversation regarding regulation expands beyond traditional financial institutions.In addition to machine learning technology, traditional information sharing (e.g. with other financial services companies and law enforcement) also remains an important factor in effectively monitoring transactions, and therefore minimizing both fraud and compliance risk. That’s because transaction monitoring software is only as good as the data we feed it and sharing information allows for greater insight into a merchant's activity across the ecosystem.<h3>Take Aways</h3>To succeed in this payments environment, payment facilitators like WePay will need to successfully address the challenges around risk, speed, and competition. I feel confident that WePay is building a product and risk solution that adds maximum and unparalleled value for small businesses and our platform partners. Nevertheless, challenges around KYC are a critical pain point that inevitably slows down our operations.This is just one problem that the adoption of digital identity systems would address. Such systems enable proof of identity for transactions that take place in the digital economy, unlike physical identity systems, which were designed to support face‐to‐face transactions. Digital identity systems will be crucial to continuing innovation and delivering efficient, secure, digital‐based Fintech products. These are systems that will make the question of competition more about the technology that most efficiently improves the user experience and minimizes fraud and compliance risk.<iframe class="full_size_iframe" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4DwDGFLCyq8" title="youtube iframe"></iframe>

Digital Identity

The Promise of Global Digital Identities: Facilitating Ecommerce In A World Where Everyone Is A Merchant

SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses are not just hot right now but in some areas are considered indispensable. If you are starting an online only business or any kind of business or solution that delivers a significant part of its value online, then you pretty much have to consider SaaS as a model. Fair enough. But once you’ve decided on the SaaS model, you still have to decide if you have a viable business. This is a critical point in the development of your idea. Lots of business ideas fail simply because entrepreneurs fall in love with a business idea without finding out if anyone was ready to pay.<h2>Step one: Set up your value proposition</h2>Before you can properly determine if your idea is a good one you have to make a good case for it – lay out the value proposition. This basically consists of documenting the answers to the following questions properly and thoroughly so that you can make the case for your business idea clearly to anyone who might be interested.<ul><li>What is your solution?</li><li>What problem does it solve?</li><li>How does your solution solve the problem?</li><li>Why would someone buy it?</li><li>What makes it better than competing products?</li><li>Who is the target market?</li><li>When will it be available?</li></ul>The following articles have more advice and detail on the right way to go about this. The goal is to make a strong business case for your idea because that’s going to set you up to succeed.<a href="http://www.startupsecrets.com/building-compelling-value-proposition" target="_self">http://www.startupsecrets.com/building-compelling-value-proposition</a><a href="https://venturebeat.com/2012/04/28/killer-value-proposition/" target="_self">https://venturebeat.com/2012/04/28/killer-value-proposition/</a><a href="https://conversionxl.com/value-proposition-examples-how-to-create/" target="_self">https://conversionxl.com/value-proposition-examples-how-to-create/</a><a href="https://georgianpartners.com/maximising-saas-outcomes-clear-value-proposition/" target="_self">https://georgianpartners.com/maximising-saas-outcomes-clear-value-proposition/</a><a href="https://medium.com/startup-grind/5-steps-to-rock-your-value-prop-for-saas-customer-success-6c8229bd7d3a" target="_self">https://medium.com/startup-grind/5-steps-to-rock-your-value-prop-for-saas-customer-success-6c8229bd7d3a</a><h2>Step two: Market Research</h2>Next up, you have to do some basic market research. Find a segment of your target market (reach out to friends, colleagues, online groups, events, anyone else you can) and collect a set of people who are willing to listen to you and answer some questions. A popular way to do this is to build a following around your area of interest online and then ask them to take a survey.Give them the highlights of your value proposition and make the pitch for your business idea. Then ask them some simple questions.&nbsp;<ul><li>Would you buy this product or solution?</li><li>Would you switch from an existing product?</li><li>What is the best part of this proposed solution?</li><li>What would prevent you from choosing this product?</li></ul>The following articles also have some good suggestions on doing basic market research.<a href="http://time.com/money/3941642/small-business-idea-market-research/" target="_self">http://time.com/money/3941642/small-business-idea-market-research/</a><a href="https://www.productplan.com/lean-market-validation-10-ways-rapidly-test-startup-idea/" target="_self">https://www.productplan.com/lean-market-validation-10-ways-rapidly-test-startup-idea/</a><h2>Step three: Get serious about market size and opportunity</h2>You should have some idea if your idea will be well received or not at this point but you have to go farther and get some quantitative data. It’s not going to help you much if everyone loves your idea but nobody will pay for it! The following steps will help you determine if the market opportunity is large enough.<ul><li>Estimate market size from industry and other data</li><li>Estimate revenue opportunity per customer</li><li>Calculate total addressable market.</li><li>Is it big enough for you to succeed?</li></ul><a href="https://www.inc.com/guides/201109/how-to-assess-the-market-potential-of-your-new-business-idea.html" target="_self">https://www.inc.com/guides/201109/how-to-assess-the-market-potential-of-your-new-business-idea.html</a><a href="https://www.chargebee.com/blog/identify-saas-target-market/" target="_self">https://www.chargebee.com/blog/identify-saas-target-market/</a><a href="https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-startup-company-best-evaluate-market-size-and-find-the-market-data" target="_self">https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-startup-company-best-evaluate-market-size-and-find-the-market-data</a>By now you should have some inkling if your business idea is worthwhile or not. If your value proposition resonated and the total addressable market is good then you have a shot at converting some of that market to your product and making a real go of it. But if one of those two factors isn’t looking good you probably still have some work to do.Finally, here are a couple of alternative viewpoints on the process. The first <a href="http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/brian-balfour-saas-product-market-fit-is-wrong" target="_self">argues strongly that market fit is more important than product</a> and the second that <a href="http://www.saasgenius.com/blog/illusion-productmarket-fit-saas-companies" target="_self">product-market fit is an illusion and that rapid iteration is the secret to success</a>. It is standard business practice away from the tech/startup space to focus on the market fit foremost and move the product/solution to match. But the tech/startup space often tends to prefer to ‘fail fast’ and pivot – in other words, start with a product/solution that you know is in the right region to be successful and then iterate your way to a product-market fit. Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong but a common mistake in the ‘fail fast’ methodology is to make the mistake of not iterating fast enough and sticking with a preferred but failing solution for too long. Whichever method you choose, make sure to get to that fit as fast as you can.

Market (potential)

How to tell if your SaaS business idea has market potential

Choosing the right payment processor for your business is no easy task. With so many things to take into account, business owners often overlook some of the most important elements of a complete <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/286006" target="_self">payments solution</a>. Generally, business owners look to save money wherever they can. When it comes to your payment processor however, it's important to look beyond the payment processing fees. Here are four other elements you need to look for in your payments provider aside from processing fees.<h2>Security</h2>Whether it's your money or your customer's, payments security comes first. The majority of small businesses won't be able to bounce back from a data breach, so make sure you do everything in your power to avoid them. First and foremost, you should make sure your provider adheres to the latest Payments Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). If your provider fails to clearly provide information in regards to these standards, it's probably best to look elsewhere.In addition to PCI compliance, inquire about how customer data is stored. Make sure customer card data is stored on a third party server and encrypted. That way, even if an intruder was able to access it, the data would be useless to them.It's estimated that about 95% of credit card breaches are at small businesses. That's because fraudsters assume they won't be able to afford proper security measures. Now that you know, it's definitely worth it to spend a bit extra on fees for improved security.<h2>User Experience</h2>The payments process is two sided. First, you want to make sure your bases are covered as the business owner. Second, you want to make sure you can optimize the payments experience for your customers. User experience can make or break any business, and this is especially true when it comes to payments. As a business owner, you want to create a virtually frictionless checkout experience.Many of the top payments companies will provide you with tools to customize your payment flow. In order for these companies to offer these kinds of solutions, they need to cover their costs. For example, many companies are offering one-click payments incentivizing customers to shop at their stores again. This requires your payments processor to securely store the customer card data for reuse at a later time. If this is easily doable, customers will be more willing to come shop at your store again. Repeat customers mean increased revenues. If increased payment processing fees means getting customizable UX, it may be well worth the investment.<h2>Support</h2>One of the best ways you can ensure your customers are taken care of is by providing multiple means of customer support. This is especially important when it comes to payments. Your payments provider should provide you with an easy way to track and manage all your payments in a single platform. Whether you need to check the status of a payment or issue a refund, it needs to be readily available. When it comes to their money, you can assume your customers will have little patience. If your payments solution doesn't provide the infrastructure to easily take care of these support requests then you're in big trouble.Additionally, make sure you inquire about how chargebacks are handled by your provider. <a href="https://blog.wepay.com/reducing-chargebacks-14-tips/" target="_self">Chargebacks</a> can occur at anytime and are can potentially create <a href="https://www.business.com/articles/cash-flow/" target="_self">major cash flow problems</a> for any business. Again, these support packages come at a price. Many companies will offer tiered support structures that scale with your business. It's not a bad idea to spend a little extra on support now so you can avoid expensive issues down the road.<h2>Partnership</h2>When looking at payment processors it's important to look for a partnership. This is where it's very important to set the fees aside when identifying a proper solution. Many payment processors who are offering reduced fees are simply looking for a one-way transaction. They'll process your payments for a fee, and that's about it.You want to look for a payments partner who will provide you with much more than just a means of accepting payment. A payments partner will typically provide many of the elements listed above. They provide you with multiple payment options and packages catered specifically to your business. Whether it's customized UX or a dedicated account manager, a payments partner is a valuable asset to your business.<h2>Final Thoughts</h2>It's not easy to identify the right payments solution for your business. Every business has different needs which makes it difficult to identify a universal solution for all. However, there are definitely strategies you can use that will help you choose the right processor. Remember, it's very important to look beyond payment processing fees when trying to evaluate the right payments provider for your business.

transaction1

Why just looking at fees is the wrong way to evaluate a payment processor

It’s beyond time to move on from HTTP – at least in the world of e-commerce, secure checkout and payments. Last September, Google announced that starting this year, its Chrome browser would begin marking HTTP sites that transmit payment card information or passwords as non-secure.Part of Google’s big security push includes potentially flagging all HTTP sites with a red-for-danger icon by the end of the year. Businesses that have not implemented the necessary security measures are in danger of being flagged with this red icon, which could turn away customers who access their website.This stems from a larger campaign for more security, as many tech companies have increasingly emphasized users switching their sites and businesses over to HTTPS encryption so that they can be used for things like secure checkout, one of the main lines of defense against the growing threats that exist on the web.For the average consumer this may seem trivial, but as an e-commerce site owner or an online business that handles sensitive data wanting to reach a broader customer base and build more trust, this means that there is a need to take security more seriously. Not only will switching to HTTPS elevate the security of online services, but it will also help increase customer awareness and trust when they visit insecure websites.Here are some measures businesses can take to move to and beyond the basic security HTTPS can provide:<ul><li>Enabling HTTPS will remedy most issues surrounding Google’s new agenda, but beyond that, transitioning to the encryption will provides user authenticity of the website they are visiting. The S within the protocol stands for “secure”, and that means any communication or transfer of data between the user and the site is encrypted.</li><li>If online businesses haven’t done so, installing basic security is a necessary step in the right direction. Protecting sites with at least SSL/TLS protocols, especially on login and checkout pages where sensitive information may be shared, will add an initial layer of defense that is imperative.</li><li>The past few years have seen various attacks like Heartbleed, BEAST, and POODLE targeting security vulnerabilities in SSL/TLS. Make sure these implementations are following best practices such as having strong private keys (e.g. 2048-bit RSA), supporting TLS 1.1 and using higher, secure cipher suites with perfect forward secrecy, and a reliable Certificate Authority.</li></ul><h2>Secure checkout on payments pages</h2>As of 2020, virtually all software platforms use the HTTPS protocol by default for both shopping and checkout. What’s more, the credit card collection processes used by WePay in our deployments of <a href="https://go.wepay.com/link/" target="_self" aria-label="link">Link</a>, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self" aria-label="clear">Clear</a> and <a href="https://go.wepay.com/core/" target="_self" aria-label="core">Core</a> require high degrees of <a href="https://go.wepay.com/security/" target="_self" aria-label="security">security</a>. Consumers and platforms can proceed with confidence that secure checkout with WePay follows these high standards.Hopefully these practices will help you avoid the expected Google flags but more importantly will lay a foundation to keep your site and your users safer online. To find out more about the risks that insecure practices can lead to, take a look at our webinar on fraud on payment platforms.

Security

Three Measures for Secure Checkout on Your Website

2016 saw a major step forward in EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa or more sensibly, chip cards) adoption and now, point of sale transactions are more secure than ever. This growing change to the in-store payments landscape has made a significant impact in lowering fraudulent activity.Here are a few numbers to think over:<ul><li>VISA reported that over 47% of their cards in the United States were chip enabled and also reported that almost half of their in-store payments came from chip enabled merchants.</li></ul><ul><li>Mastercard saw a 25% month to month increase in chip transactions, with 80% of their cards in the United States being chip enabled. This led to over a 60% reduction in point of sale card fraud.</li></ul>However, as the transition to EMV continues and point of sale transactions become safer, a new level of risk has developed in the fast growing e-commerce space. Fraudsters are rapidly shifting their focus to online businesses and platforms, targeting card not present transactions and monetizing stolen identity and financial information. A smart move for fraudsters considering the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/e-commerce-growth-has-hit-a-two-year-high-2016-8">16% year over year increase</a> in online transactions in 2016 and a big challenge for online commerce.So what does this mean for online businesses and platforms? With the increasing risk in the e-commerce space, business owners now have to be more cautious than ever, and must strike the right balance between declining bad payments and not turning away legitimate customers. This is a tough task indeed, but there are preventative measures to take to protect a business from the incoming threats:<ul><li>E-commerce businesses should use the latest fraud prevention tools to detect irregular transactions, and have them individually reviewed by a risk analyst, or even decline them automatically. This can be the difference between a risk free transaction, or a long winded chargeback dispute.</li></ul><ul><li>Take advantage of the ability to screen suspicious IP addresses and devices where the original payment originated. This can identify fraudulent payments and information uncovered should be stored in a database in case of repeat encounters to soften the damage done to the business.</li></ul>If both these measures pique your interest, considering using a trusted payments processor with advanced risk technology that can provide all these preventative services for you, mitigating your online fraud problems without driving away your real customers.

EMV ecommerce blog

EMV and e-commerce fraud – Protecting your online business

Here’s something we continue to hear about from our platform partners and their users: a prospective client reaches out to a small business owner via email or a website contact form seeking help on a big, new job. This prospective client says he’s also working with another party whom he wants the business owner to pay from a single lump sum he’ll pay in advance.Sounds sketchy, to be sure. But the payoff is attractive and the explanation for this unusual arrangement is plausible – perhaps he can only write a limited number of checks from a trust or estate account, or he’s overseas and constrained in the number of international payments he can make. My advice, rooted in more than 10 years of work helping people and companies avoid costly fraud: Don’t do it.Chances are, that prospective client is a fraudster with a trove of stolen credit card numbers. And that other party is either that same fraudster or an accomplice, not a legitimate third party subcontractor. So a business owner who proceeds will later find they’ve been victimized. They will be then be out all the money and likely charged with additional bank penalties.This is the modern, sophisticated version of the decades old 419 scam – a type of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam" target="_self">Advance-fee fraud</a> named for the criminal code where the scam was apparently first hatched. Today the stakes have never been higher – because commerce platforms enable fraudsters to reach you in more ways, the dollar amounts keep rising, and the liabilities have increasingly shifted to harder hit those who do business online. Here are my top 5 common sense practices that every merchant should follow, and every platform should convey to their users:
1. Don’t trust a new contact
It’s a highly unusual arrangement for a client to require one vendor to pay others. So if you haven’t already worked with the different players involved, don’t trust that it will all work out ok. In fact, I’d say a small business owner should NEVER agree to send payments to a third party unless it’s related to a client whom they’ve done extensive business with in the past.
2. Get on the phone fast
Email is a great way to transact business. But when the opportunity is dubious, getting on the phone can go a very long way. I advise business owners to speak directly with the client and third party by phone. More often than not, such discussions will give further indicators or hints of the fraudster’s actual intentions before anything other than time has been lost.
3. Press for more details
Most fraudsters like to gloss over details. Don’t let them. It will always serve well to seek more, to clarify details, and so on. And when sweating those details, it’s also good to pay attention to language – if the follow-on discussions are less polished or inconsistent with the initial outreach, that should be a giant red flag.
4. Don’t think banked money is safe money
It’s sad how many times I’ve heard of someone saying “I thought it was ok when the credit card payment cleared my bank.” Banks and processors do their best to stop fraudulent transactions, yet some slip through and are only resolved later when the legitimate card holder discovers them. From there, it’s just a matter of days before the involved bank will claw back funds from the victimized merchant and levy a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback" target="_self">chargeback</a> fee too. I tell people not to assume the money is safe until six months down the road.
5. Trust your gut
At the end of the day, don’t succumb to the appeal of a quick credit card payment. Even when that fraudster comes off as polished, professional, even patient while working through details with you, know that too much of a good thing is often too much to be a good thing. If your gut tells you something’s not right, move on without ever looking back.

fraud

Advanced Fee Fraud

In payments, as the volume of transactions increases, the number of ways things can go wrong also increases. This is particularly true at the point where a processor interacts with its bank acquirer. Here, declines can happen for a whole host of reasons — insufficient funds, mismatched addresses, expired cards, etc. Being able to provide test coverage for all these failure conditions is crucial in assuring the quality of payment processing.Yet this isn’t always easy. In the payments industry, many services offered by financial institutions are based on Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) in the backend. SFTP has its advantages — it can handle a large volume of data as well as asynchronous data exchange. Yet that also means SFTP-based backends usually operate by sending files in batches containing thousands of transactions, and these batch files are usually sent daily.This, frankly, is too slow. In order to ensure good test coverage, it’s necessary to increase transaction frequency by mocking these backends.There are further considerations, as well. For a single request file, multiple response files can be generated at different times. For example, once the request file is transmitted through SFTP, a confirmation file will be generated first. However, if some of the transactions in the request fail to go through, a reject file will be generated at a later time. Therefore, a realistic mock service will follow these timing rules. An engineering implication of this is that the request data need to be saved persistently in order to be able to generate different responses at different times.This post is aimed at explaining a setup for mocking out the service backends of financial institutions we use at WePay. It explains the basic requirements, functionality and technical choices, intended for software developers working in the &nbsp;financial and payment service industry.<h2 style="text-align: left;">How WePay does it</h2>At WePay, we simulate the SFTP backends for both Valitor and Litle, our two gateway providers. They both work similarly, except the request/response file formats and login credentials are different. Because of the similarity, we use a single mock service to handle both. This mock service is encapsulated in a Docker container. Inside the docker container, we set up the inbound and outbound file directories for the request and response respectively.Here is our overall picture of our setup: The Docker container that we are using is based on the latest Ubuntu. To enable SFTP access, the OpenSSH-server package needs to be installed and a mock user account created. To monitor and auto-restart multiple service daemons, a supervisor is used.A PHP code is constantly monitoring the inbound directory in a daemon process. When a request file is detected, the PHP code will parse the request file and store the data:<pre>$this-&gt;iNotify-&gt;on(IN_MOVED_TO, function ($path) { $name = dirname($path); if ($name == $this-&gt;config-&gt;getDirectory() . 'inbound') { echo "IN_MOVED_TO: Inbound file detected" . $path . PHP_EOL; echo "IN_MOVED_TO: Attempting to process" . PHP_EOL; $this-&gt;processPath($path); } else { if ($name == $this-&gt;config-&gt;getDirectory() . 'outbound'){ echo "Output file " . $path . " generated" . PHP_EOL; } else { echo "Error " . $path . PHP_EOL; } } });</pre>In this PHP snippet, we have set up a monitoring and processing daemon process for the inbound directory.To save data persistently, there are a lot of options — MySQL, SQLite or even a csv file. At WePay, we use <a href="http://www.doctrine-project.org/" target="_self">Doctrine</a> to map PHP objects to the relational database that comes with the Doctrine API. Information related to a particular transaction such as the amount, status, transaction id is mapped to into Doctrine <a href="http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/basic-mapping.html" target="_self">Entities</a><pre>class PaymentRecord { /** @Id @Column(type="integer") @GeneratedValue */ private $id; /** * @return mixed */ public function getId() { return $this-&gt;id; } /** * @Column(type="string") * @var string */ protected $recordId; /** * @Column(type="string") * @var string */ protected $paymentMethod; /** * @Column(type="string") * @var string */ protected $creditFlag; ... }</pre>In the PHP snippet above, a payment record is mapped to an Entity following Doctrine’s coding convention. Once a payment object is mapped, it can be saved persistently using the persis() method and retrieved by the find() method provided by Doctrine.Once data is persisted in request, responses can be generated from it. Different passing and failing responses are mocked out based on the request data. Depending on the payment processor, the response format can be in plain text or a structured file such as XML.To emulate a particular payment processor’s timing, different cron jobs are scheduled to generate various reports. One example is that a confirmation file is generated every minute and a reject file is generated every two minutes to keep the order of the timing while also keeping things relatively short to ensure a faster turnaround rate.<h2 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h2>As we are mocking out more and more service backends, this setup can be scaled to add more processors. Since we are not particularly interested in how different service backends perform under heavy load, very high performance is not stressed in this setup. For better performance, a load balancer can be used to distribute requests to multiple processors simultaneously.WePay’s framework to mock out SFTP payment processing service is currently being used as an integral part of the integration tests. To cover different fail conditions, matching front-end test cases must be provided in order to see how the payment processing system as a whole reacts to these conditions.

How WePay mocks SFTP payment processor backends

You’re killing it. Your online business is running on all cylinders, you’re making sales and pulling in transactions. But then you get the letter from your bank. It says there’s been a dispute on a transaction you don’t even remember, and as a result a large sum of money has been pulled from your account. You’re also getting fined. What just happened?If you haven’t done business online before, you might not be familiar with the term, but what you just experienced was a chargeback.If you’ve experienced a chargeback, we feel for you. At WePay, we work to insulate the platforms we work with from chargebacks by shouldering all the risk ourselves. It’s a big part of our value proposition, but it puts us in the line of fire. So we know what it feels like to have transactions refunded, and we’re here to help if we can.Here’s a little primer on chargebacks for merchants and platforms. Hopefully it cuts back a little on the confusion around chargebacks, if not the financial sting of receiving one.<h2>Okay, start at the beginning. What are chargebacks, and why do they exist?</h2>“Chargeback” is a payment industry term for a very broad set of consumer protections for credit and debit transactions in the U.S., U.K. and many other countries.The actual mechanism is a little complicated, but at a high level, they allow anybody making a purchase with a card to get an automatic refund from their bank without having to involve the merchant they’re buying from.You may have invoked this right in the past without knowing it. If you’ve ever seen a suspicious charge on your statement and called your bank to have it removed, for example, what you’ve actually done is initiate a chargeback.As to why chargebacks exist, they’re actually mandated by law. In the U.S., the law in question is Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act of 1968.The Truth in Lending Act, or TILA, was a landmark bit of legislation that clarified and standardized the rules on consumer credit, then in its infancy.General purpose credit cards had only existed for about a decade at that point, but already debt was exploding as a method of payment. Between the end of WWII and the year TILA passed, Congress estimated that the amount of credit in the country ballooned from about $5 billion to more than $96 billion.The trouble was that legislation hadn’t kept up. Although some states had acted to protect consumers from predatory lending practices, these protections were limited in scope and difficult to enforce.Abuses were rampant. For example, it was common practice for banks to sign people up for loans or credit cards without explaining things we take for granted today, like the actual APR or what fees could be assessed for nonpayment.Sometimes unlucky borrowers didn’t even know they were using credit. A particularly nasty scheme that was common at the time was for contractors to pressure homeowners to borrow against their homes to pay for costly renovations, without explaining that this is what they were doing. Some didn’t find out they’d gotten a loan until they couldn’t make payments and the bank repossessed their house.It was things like this which drove Congress to include strong protections for people who realized, after the fact, that they’d been swindled. This included a 3-day “cooling off” period for loans, which lets borrowers cancel any loan they’ve entered.It also included the chargeback, which was intended to let consumers avoid going into debt over shoddy merchandise or things they didn’t actually order.<h2>Wait. I’ve been doing business offline for a long time and I’ve never seen a chargeback before. How is that possible if they’ve been around all this time?</h2>The answer is that all transactions are not created equal.The card networks make a distinction between transactions where a physical card is swiped and transactions where the credit information is simply entered. The former is considered fairly safe, and the latter, very risky. This is because it’s harder for criminals to counterfeit a physical card and use it in store than to simply enter that number into a form.Because of the relative safety of face-to-face transactions, the banks have traditionally borne the cost of any chargebacks they incur. Online merchants haven’t been so lucky — chargebacks from their card-not-present transactions come directly out of their pocket.Yet even that is changing. New rules put into place by the card networks in October 2015 place the chargeback liability on the party in the transaction with the lowest level of fraud-fighting technology. This is intended to speed the adoption of the newer, more secure bank cards with an EMV chip in them.In practice, it means that merchants who swipe EMV cards rather than running them using the chip will be liable if the transaction results in a chargeback. That’s even if you can’t run the card with EMV because you don’t have a chip-enabled terminal.In other words, all merchants should start learning about chargebacks, not just those who do business online. And if you’re still using an old terminal to process cards, now might be the time to upgrade.<h2>What actually happens when a chargeback occurs?</h2>It’s more complicated than you might think, because it involves a minimum of two individuals and three financial institutions.Here’s how this delicate dance is done:<ol><li>The cardholder notices something is wrong and calls their bank to dispute a charge.</li><li>The cardholder’s bank investigates the complaint to determine whether there’s cause for a chargeback. If the complaint is completely ridiculous, the bank might reject the chargeback at this point. But the burden of proof is usually pretty low. Keep in mind: It’s the cardholder’s bank, not the merchants. This means the cardholder is the person the bank has a vested interest in keeping happy.</li><li>Once the complaint is determined to be valid, the cardholder’s bank will issue them a provisional account credit for the amount of the transaction.</li><li>The cardholder’s bank will then turn around and initiate a chargeback to get its own refund from the merchant’s bank.</li><li>The merchant’s bank, called an acquirer, will then do its own research to see if the chargeback is valid. They will often, but not always, alert the merchant of the pending chargeback before they take action.</li><li>Assuming the chargeback proceeds, the merchant’s bank will remove the money from the merchant’s account and send it to the cardholder’s bank. They’ll also charge the merchant a fine. The amount varies from financial institution to financial institution, but is usually between $15 and $25.</li><li>Once the chargeback is processed, the merchant is given a chance to dispute it by presenting their own evidence that the transaction was valid and should have been completed. Assuming they win, the cardholder will be charged yet again and the merchant will be refunded the price of the transaction. (Although not the fee, usually.)</li><li>As an optional step, the cardholder now has an opportunity to appeal the decision if they didn’t get the refund they wanted by rebutting the merchant’s response. This is processed as yet another chargeback, and the appeal will be decided by the card network itself. There’s a $250 fee for arbitration that is borne by whomever ultimately loses the dispute.</li></ol><h2>That all sounds a little scary. What limits are there on chargebacks?</h2>In theory, a chargeback can only be initiated for four reasons:<ul><li>Technical Error: e.g.“The bank accidentally deposited a bunch of money in your account and now it wants it back.</li><li>Clerical Error: e.g. “Whoops, accidentally ran your card twice. Let me refund that for you.</li><li>Quality problem: e.g. “I ordered the blue one and you sent me a red one. Give me my money back"</li><li>Fraud: e.g. “Someone stole my card and used it to buy a jet ski and I want my money back.”</li></ul>In practice, it’s a very broad protection. People can complain to their bank whenever they’re dissatisfied and the bank will usually start the chargeback process for them. The burden is on the merchant to protect themselves through the dispute process.<h2>Do merchants ever win those disputes?</h2>Sometimes, but it’s hardly a sure thing.According to the Cybersource Online Fraud Report, about 60 percent of chargebacks are challenged by the merchant. Of those, only 41 percent are won.That means about one in four chargebacks end up being recovered by the merchant — not exactly a reassuring statistic.<h2>So what can I do to dispute a chargeback?</h2>The first step is to determine how much time you have to respond. Chargeback disputes have to be initiated within a narrow window of time after they occur, but the exact window will vary depending on the card network and your financial institution. Typically it’s between 5 and&nbsp;10 days.Once you know how long you have, the next step is to gather as much information as you can about the transaction. You’ll want to pay close attention to the reason code given for the chargeback, because this will let you know why the chargeback happened and thus, what kind of argument you should make. (It’s not much use arguing that you delivered an item when the chargeback happened due to identity theft, for example). Each network has its own distinct reason codes, so you’ll need to check with the specific card network.Once you understand the charge, it’s time to start building your case. You’ll need to fill out a ChargeBack Adjustment Reversal Request, and attach that to a letter outlining why the transaction should be honored.You’ll also need to provide whatever evidence you have that supports your case. Here’s some ideas for things the bank might accept:<ul><li>The sales receipt or order form</li><li>Anything you can use to show the customer was satisfied with their purchase (reviews, feedback scores, thank you emails, etc.</li><li>Any independent quality measures you can provide for your product</li><li>Proof that the good or service was delivered</li><li>The customer’s purchase history, if it shows that they’ve bought from you in the past and have been satisfied enough to keep purchasing</li></ul><h2>You keep saying merchant. But I’m a platform — I don’t actually sell anything myself, just allow people to do transactions with my service. And yet I’m still getting chargebacks. What gives?</h2>It’s important to remember that “merchant” is a word with a very specific meaning in the payments world that is a little different from what it means more generally. Specifically, when we say merchant we generally mean the “merchant of record,” the entity that actually takes possession of the funds once the transaction is completed.Platforms can be the merchant of record, depending on how their payment settlement works. If the funds from the transaction land in an account you control and then are paid out to someone else in a separate transaction, you’re probably the merchant of record for that transaction. This is called “aggregation.” It’s bad for a lot of reasons.Chargebacks are one of the dangers associated with aggregation. As the merchant of record, you’re the one that the bank goes to in order to recover funds. This can happen even though you might not be the one responsible for the things that led to the chargeback.There’s basically two ways to avoid chargebacks as a platform:<ul><li>Adopt a “bring your own merchant account” model where you require everybody who processes payments to have their own merchant account. This makes them the merchant of record, but it also tends to increase friction considerably.</li><li>Work with a third party processor like WePay that moves the money for you, allowing transactions to occur seamlessly without making you the merchant-of-record.</li></ul><h2>I’m pretty sure I did everything right, yet I still got a chargeback. What’s going on?</h2>You might be the victim of something called “friendly fraud”.This is when a customer receives what they pay for, but charges it back anyway. They might be a be fraudster looking to get something for free. They might just be clueless — a surprising number of people initiate chargebacks simply because they forgot that they bought something. Either way, the result is the same: a chargeback and a potential loss for you.Believe it or not, this kind of fraud is very common. Visa said merchants lost $11.8 billion to friendly fraud in 2012, for example.[twitter_share class="twitter-block"]"Friendly Fraud" is a very common source of chargebacks. Visa said merchants lost $11.8B to it in 2012 alone.[/twitter_share]<h2>I’ve never had a chargeback. That means I’m safe, right?</h2>Not necessarily.The problem with chargebacks is that while we talk about them like an ongoing cost, in reality they don’t occur at a steady rate. A business can go months or years between chargebacks. Or they might have a bunch of chargebacks, all at once.In particular, chargebacks tend to come fast and without warning when you’re targeted by the kinds of organized cartels that perpetrate the majority of credit fraud online. These organizations look for places that don’t have adequate fraud monitoring in place, and then try to push through as many bad credit transactions as they can before the security hole is patched.Having someone like this target you is potentially quite costly — we know some platforms who’ve lost several months worth of profit overnight due to a sudden spike in chargebacks. So it’s very important to be proactive about chargebacks, even if you aren’t currently seeing them.<h2>So how can I protect myself?</h2>You can never fully protect yourself from chargebacks, but you can take measures to make them less likely. Here’s some ideas:<ul><li>Do what you say you’re going to do: Happy customers don’t initiate chargebacks. Shockingly, merchants that honor their agreements, provide high-quality products, and go out of their way to serve their customers receive fewer chargebacks than crooks.</li><li>Make your refund policy as simple as possible: Sometimes mistakes happen, even when you’re doing everything right. When mistakes happen, your customer has two choices: they can go through you, or they can initiate a chargeback. A simple, easy, and permissive refund policy will help ensure they make the choice that costs you the least money.</li><li>Be aware of how your charges appear on a credit statement: A shockingly high number of chargebacks occur simply because the cardholder doesn’t recognize a charge they made when they look at their credit statement. This is especially likely if you do business under a name other than your legal business name. If this is the case, you need to be clear with your customers about what name they’ll see on their statements.</li><li>Consider anti-fraud technology: If you’re a platform, WePay offers this as an integrated part of our payments at no extra charge. Yet individual merchants can benefit from a risk vendor too. In the past few years, vendors like Sift Science and Kount have sprung up offering services that use data about buyers to try to head off fraudulent payments before they go through. This can significantly cut back on chargebacks, but it can also be costly. You have to determine what your risk profile looks like and whether it makes economic sense for your business to implement one of these vendors.</li></ul>

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The ultimate guide to chargebacks

When it comes to online commerce, the point at which money changes hands has often been the moment a sale falls apart. What was a carefully crafted brand experience becomes off-putting and complicated. There are confusing redirects, forms that clash with the rest of the design, and a lot of sensitive data that needs to be entered.But that’s now changing, and fast. Innovative companies have stepped up their game, using technologies that make a much easier payment experience possible. That in turn is changing consumer expectations about what a payment transaction should be like. You now need to bring your payments experience up to this new standard, or risk getting beaten by competitors who do.Why? Because removing barriers for your customers is a hallmark of customer intimacy, and <a href="https://hbr.org/1993/01/customer-intimacy-and-other-value-disciplines" target="_blank">customer intimacy is one of three value disciplines</a> that every company must master to dominate their market. A customer-intimate company has to get to know its customer at a deeper level with every interaction. It must understand what they want and need, sometimes even before they do. Payments are the last mile of customer intimacy.<h2>So not intimate</h2>Contrast that experience with the historic way of making payments online using a credit card or PayPal. Credit cards were not designed to be secure in card-not-present transactions, and adding the necessary layers of security makes onboarding hard and checkout tedious.The big consumer innovation with PayPal was that you could set up an account you could use at a variety of different sites without having to reveal your credit card information. But that adds another account to maintain and another set of passwords to remember–both challenges to customer intimacy.Another challenge is that when you’ve filled your shopping cart and want to pay, you’re kicked over to a form on another website to complete the transaction, then kicked back to the original website once the transaction has concluded.The original merchant, who has invested a lot of time and money in getting the customer to that point, loses their consistency of branding and customer experience because they lose control of the customer while the transaction is happening.As a sales guy I can tell you, that’s a bad way to close a deal. You’re counting on someone else to take care of your hard-won customer. Even if the transaction goes well, the reality is when they’re sent back to your site, their experience is different than before they left. That’s not a customer-intimate payment experience.<h2>With you all the way</h2>In the traditional payment model, if something goes wrong, the customer may not know whom to call. They don’t know if it’s a credit card issue, a PayPal issue or an issue with the site itself. It doesn’t really matter because it reflects on your company. It’s your customer, and you may very well have lost the sale and made them angry.Even if the customer completes the transaction, there’s still a lot that can go wrong. They think they paid, but don’t get a confirmation email. Or they get a call from the credit card company asking if they really meant to spend that much money. Or the product or service they wanted isn’t delivered. All these scenarios create uncertainty, confusion, and friction — none of which you want associated with your brand or your customer experience.Customer intimacy isn’t just about making it easy to pay. It’s maintaining security, transparency and accountability across every facet of the experience. It’s making sure you stay close to your customer, and they know it’s you and you’re with them all the way.<h2>Managing the last mile</h2>Payment is not the main objective of any transaction. It’s just the last mile of a decision that has already been made, but it’s a big part of that whole experience. It needs to be valued and curated and managed in the same fashion as the rest of your customer experience.In the past, customers accepted payment struggles as part of buying online, because that was the industry standard. That standard is rapidly changing as new technology gives companies the ability to extend customer intimacy to payments.At minimum, you have to make it so payments aren’t part of what the customer is struggling with. But there’s also an opportunity to exceed expectations and use a customer-intimate payment experience as a competitive differentiator. In the platform economy, the companies that understand and execute on that will win.

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Payments: The last mile of online customer intimacy

<h2>What is HTTPS?</h2>Have you ever wondered what that little “s” at the end of HTTPS in your browser address bar stands for? Think back to when you last made a donation or purchased something online. You probably saw both the URL of the webpage you visited likely preceded by the letters “HTTPS” and maybe even a green lock icon. Back in the day, there was no “s” — only HTTP. So what happened, why the change, and why should you care?It all boils down to security. The “s” at the end of HTTPS stands for secure, and it means that all communications between your browser and the website you’re visiting is securely encrypted. A secure connection is important when you’re transmitting sensitive data such as payment information over the Internet. This is why HTTPS is a standard — especially for all reputable online businesses today.<h2>Improving security</h2>When it comes to security, standards continue to evolve. As new vulnerabilities are discovered in the underlying protocols used to encrypt cardholder data, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Council responds with updates to its Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) that reflect new best practices. Two months ago, we took to our blog to help you understand the most important changes in <a href="https://blog.wepay.com/2015/10/15/what-wepay-partners-need-to-know-about-the-new-pci-rules/" target="_self">PCI DSS 3.0</a>. While it may seem too soon to start thinking about another update to the security standards, the newly released <a href="https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-1_Summary_of_Changes.pdf" target="_self">PCI DSS 3.1</a> contains information that we think is worth the deep dive.PCI DSS 3.1 is an incremental update to the standards that primarily addresses web browser security. The focus is on basic but commonly used Transfer Layer Security (TLS) protocols that no longer meet the criteria for strong cryptography required by the PCI Council. This means that the susceptible protocols, SSL 3.0 and its early successors, TLS 1.0 and 1.1, are prohibited from being used to encrypt cardholder data. By extension, the PCI Council is requiring anyone involved in the handling or processing of payments — including WePay and our partners — to disable support for the aforementioned protocols and enable support for TLS 1.2 in their place.<h2>Working together</h2>In response to this mandate, we plan to end support for all earlier versions of TLS by June 30, 2016. This means that all incoming API requests or web portal (e.g. logged in site) sessions will need to use TLS 1.2.To ensure continued access to WePay services, partners may need to update internal technology stacks to support TLS 1.2. This may entail updating servers and/or programming language environments. Partners may also need to update lists of supported browsers (or versions) to ensure a fully functional WePay experience for merchants and payers.We will send out periodic communication to guide your efforts during this time of transition to TLS 1.2. In case of any questions, contact us at <a href="mailto:security@wepay.com" target="_self">security@wepay.com</a>.UPDATE 12/21/2015: The PCI Council has recently announced that the migration deadline for older versions of SSL and TLS has been extended from June 2016 to September 2017. In accordance with this update, we now plan to end support for all earlier versions of TLS by September 2017.&nbsp;UPDATE 05/16/2018: The PCI Council has released <a href="https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-2-1.pdf" target="_blank">PCI DSS Version 3.2.1</a>. In accordance with this update, WePay now complies with PCI DCC Version 3.2.1.

PCI DSS 3.1: An Important Incremental Change to Payment Security Standards

When you’re where the money is, bad guys will target you. It’s why criminals rob banks despite their armed guards, reinforced vaults, and state-of-the-art security systems. &nbsp;And it’s why fraudsters now target platforms — either to gain access to their payments data or to run stolen credit card numbers through them.Detection is the name of the game: you have to be able to spot fraud with a high degree of accuracy so that you can shut it down before it results in a loss. That means technology and people. It means rules engines that flag suspicious behavior and experienced risk professionals who can then dig into those suspicious behaviors. At WePay, it increasingly also means machine learning models which can spot complicated fraud patterns faster with less human intervention. This is something we talked a bit about a few months ago, in a <a href="https://blog.wepay.com/how-were-using-machine-learning-to-fight-shell-selling/">blog post about machine learning and shell selling.</a> Today, we’re looking at another challenge we face as we use machine learning to fight fraud in the real world: adapting our models quickly enough to keep up with the attacks we face.<h2>Fraud doesn’t stand still</h2>In payments, we tend to talk about fraudsters like a monolith and fraud like a natural law: “fraudsters do this” or “fraud was at this level this month.” It’s often easier to think of fraud this way.Yet the reality is that fraud isn’t perpetuated by a small, tight-knit group criminals; rather, it’s often the work of a huge range of individuals all over the world, working alone and in groups. As a class, these fraudsters are smart, resourceful individuals, and the fraud they perpetuate is born of them working full time to find and exploit weaknesses in the platforms they target. They aren’t just mindlessly repeating the same behaviors over and over again -- they are probing defenses and adapting to them. Plug one hole, and they’ll find another.Said another way: fraud is constantly changing. Machine learning models are great for spotting fraud, but they aren’t psychic — they rely on past data to make predictions about the transactions they’re currently looking at. Since the patterns aren’t constant, that means they go out of date quickly. In fact, experience has now taught us that even the most accurate model has a shelf-life of about a month without being refreshed. Beyond the month, its accuracy may drop by 50%, and will continue to slowly decrease after that.<h2>Refreshing models is hard</h2>So if models don’t last long, the key is to refresh them constantly. But this approach presents its own challenges. Each refresh is a major undertaking if not properly managed. Retraining a model by running the full machine learning pipeline can take hours. This includes extraction and transformation (ETL) of incremental new data, feature creation and engineering, model training, performance evaluation, and model deployment. Even after the model is trained, deployment can itself be a bottleneck. When models are trained in traditional machine learning languages like R or SAS, the models and the whole data pipeline have to be translated to a production language like Java&nbsp;— something that can add weeks of engineering team work. Some companies reduce the burden by opting for simpler models like logistic regression; however such an approach is too rudimentary for complex and high stakes fraud detection. There’s also one more complicating factor: the newest data might not be the most useful for model training purposes because new fraud can take time to mature — it can often take two or more months for a cardholder to see and report fraud. This means new data can be labeled good before it’s seen as bad, and training models with the latest data can actually hurt model accuracy.<h2>Automation: how we hit a moving target</h2>In the face of these challenges, WePay has been able to build a machine learning architecture that allows us to refresh the models daily without overburdening our engineering team or degrading our performance. We’ve done this by being smart about automating services and building with an eye toward speed and precision. First, we’ve automated the retraining process to the point that it can be performed daily with relatively little work by our data science team. Our retraining process looks like this:<ul><li>Pull new, incremental retraining data daily</li><li>Refresh the model by running it again with combined new and existing fraud data</li><li>Test the new models, evaluating each on Area Under Curve (AUC), precision and recall</li><li>Transfer models that meet initial test criteria into a pseudo-production environment for additional assessment against test cases</li><li>Deploy upon satisfactory completion of all performance and test case validation</li></ul><h2>Python makes automation easy</h2>In order to make model deployment easier, we chose Python as both our model development and production language. Although many machine learning researchers work in more specialized scientific languages like R and SAS, we’ve found these to be a poor fit. I don’t want this to seem like a knock on R and SAS, which are great at what they do. But using models trained in a specialized language would mean translating them into a production-friendly language like Java before they were deployed — an extra step that creates significant engineering overhead and introduces another opportunity for errors that could degrade our model performance.Python, on the other hand, works in both development and in production. Using Flask or Django, Python allows machine learning models to be run as isolated web services which can be dynamically spun up to handle more requests easily.Python is also a very capable machine learning language in its own right. Most necessary functionality is provided by powerful libraries like NumPy, SciPy, SciKit-Learn and Pandas. At WePay, we use SciKit-Learn, which implements most popular algorithms through a uniform API interface. One may treat SciKit-Learn trained models as black box that can be used anywhere, in the same way, regardless of the algorithm.In other words, the entire model development and deployment cycle is self-contained in Python. Just copy the model files to production instance and import the same libraries in production as in development, and you are almost good to go! Of course, migration from development to production may still involve conversion of data pipeline code, depending on how the machine learning pipeline is designed. With that in mind, we use a unified Python code base for both model development and production. Basically, every step in data processing pipeline is abstracted as a class. Those classes can can be run for both batch processing a file in development and for single record scoring in production without having to change a single line of code. This means there is almost zero migration of code from model development to production. In practice, the only material difference is whether we loop through many lines of a file in development, or just do it once for a single line of signals in production.<h2>Putting it all together</h2>We’re able to do daily, incremental refreshes of the models running in production thanks to the efficiencies provided by our approach to machine learning. These refreshes add up to a constantly refined machine learning system, with total retraining happening over a time window of a few months. Of course, there’s still the matter of how to deal with false negatives in the most recent training sets — recall that we may not know a given transaction is fraud for several months. This is actually an easier fix than you might expect. When we’re training our models, we simply exclude transactions flagged as good in the most recent time period while including every transaction flagged as fraud that we can. This lets us train on data that includes the most recent fraud patterns while also not contaminating our model with bad data.<h2>Conclusion</h2>Automation has not only made our fraud detection better by enabling the models to keep up with the constantly changing attacks we’re targeted by, it’s also made life a lot easier in the data science department. We’re not spending as much time on routine training and deployment tasks, which has freed us up to work on more interesting, higher-value work. And that’s key because, again, fraud doesn’t stand still. If we’re to be successful in fighting crime and protecting our customers’ money, we must constantly be working to improve our approach, explore new techniques, and create new systems that let us tackle newer and more sophisticated attacks.

Automating machine learning for platform fraud detection

In this first in an occasional series, we’re taking a look at machine learning initiatives at WePay — the kinds of problems we use machine learning for, how we build technology to address them, and how the unique challenges of the payments industry shape our approach.We thought the best introduction would to be to look at an actual fraud problem we face, shell selling, and how we built the algorithm we’re now using to solve it.<h2>What is shell selling?</h2>While fraud is a concern pretty much anywhere money is exchanged for a good or service, there are certain types of fraud that are unique to platforms — those services that act as an intermediary in a transaction for the purposes of making it easier. Whereas a traditional buyer or seller just has to worry that the other party is a fraudster, platforms need to be worried about both sides of the transaction. If either of them is committing credit fraud, it will often be the platform itself that will be footing the bill for the refund if/when the real cardholder finds out and reverses the charges.Shell selling is one of the types of fraud that’s of particular concern in this situation. Basically, it’s what happens when both sides of a transaction are fraudulent — there’s a criminal with two accounts paying themselves with a stolen credit card. Once the real cardholder finds out, the fraudster disappears with the money they’ve stolen and the platform is left to foot the bill for the chargeback.Shell selling can be tough to spot, because these fraudsters keep a low profile. They don’t generally have many “real” customers, so you can’t rely on user feedback scores the way you can with more traditional scammers. And while it’s obvious when a merchant gets a bunch of payments from different cards at the same IP in a short amount of time, the fraudsters who perpetrate this crime tend to be more&nbsp;sophisticated than that. They often&nbsp;employ all manner of techniques to hide their identity and evade detection.Since shell selling a common problem, and one that’s difficult for humans to spot, we decided to build a machine learning algorithm to help us catch it.<h2>A note on how we build machine learning algorithms</h2>At WePay, we build our entire&nbsp;machine learning pipeline in Python, using the popular, open-source <a href="http://scikit-learn.org/stable/" target="_self">scikit-learn machine learning package</a>. If you haven’t used scikit-learn, I highly suggest you check it out. For things like fraud modeling where you need to retrain constantly and deploy quickly, it offers a lot of advantages:<ul><li>Scikit-learn uses a uniform API for model fitting and prediction across different machine learning algorithms, making it really efficient to reuse code from algorithm to algorithm.</li><li>Scoring web services can be directly hosted with Python using Django or Flask, making deployment much simpler. One need only install scikit-learn and copy the exported model file and necessary data processing pipeline code to the web service instance to start.</li><li>The entire model development and deployment cycle is self-contained in Python. This gives us an advantage over other popular languages for machine learning like R or SAS, which&nbsp;require converting the model to another language before it runs in production. In addition to simplifying development by eliminating unnecessary steps, this gives us more flexibility to try different algorithms, because there are many that don’t handle this conversion process especially well and thus would be more trouble than they’re worth in another environment.</li></ul><h2>The algorithm: Random Forest</h2>Getting back specifically to shell selling, we tested several algorithms before we settled on the one that gave us the best performance: Random Forest.Random Forest is a tree-based ensemble method developed by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler, and first put forward by Breiman in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Machine Learning in 2001 [1]. Random Forest trains many decision trees on random subsets of the training data, and then uses mean prediction from individual trees as the final prediction. The random subsets are sampled from original training data by sampling with replacement (bootstrapping) on the record level, and random subsampling on the feature level. Random Forest gave us the best precision at fixed recall of the algorithms we tried, followed closely by neural networks and another ensemble method, AdaBoost. Compared to other algorithms, Random Forest had a number of advantages for the kinds of fraud data we work with, which are ultimately why it won out:<ul><li>Tree based ensemble methods can handle well both non-linearity and non-monotonicity, which are quite common in fraud signals. By comparison, neural networks handle non-linearity quite well, but get tripped up by non-monotonicity, and logistic regression cannot handle either. For the latter two methods to deal with non-linearity and/or non-monotonicity, extensive and proper feature transformations are required.</li><li>Random Forest requires minimum feature preparation and transformation and it does not require standardization of input variables the way neural networks and logistic regression do, nor does it require binning and risk-rating conversion for non-monotonic variables.</li><li>Random Forest gives the best out-of-the-box performance compared with other algorithms. Another tree based method, Gradient Boosted Trees, can achieve comparable performance, but requires more parameter tuning.</li><li>Random Forest outputs feature importance as a by-product of model training, which is very useful for feature selection [2].</li><li>Random Forest has better tolerance for overfitting compared with other algorithms, and it can handle a large number of variables without seeing much overfitting [1], since overfitting can be reduced with more trees. Variable selection and reduction are not as critical as they are for other algorithms.</li></ul>Here's how Random Forest performed vs. the competition:<img asset_uid="bltc7ed97b83127ae3e" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltc7ed97b83127ae3e/62bd4bdb85b5856bca542bd5/Performance.png" height="auto" alt="performance"/><h1>Training the algorithm</h1>Our machine learning pipeline follows a standard procedure, which includes data extraction, data cleaning, feature derivation, feature engineering and transformation, feature selection, model training, and model performance evaluation:<img asset_uid="blt3e91fd593e41649d" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt3e91fd593e41649d/62bd4bc64aa5a8255f025e96/Machine-Learning-Workflow.png" height="auto" alt="performance experience"/><h1>Insights</h1>After an extensive period of training, our random forest algorithm for shell selling identification is now live and actively stopping fraud. It was a lot of work to&nbsp;select, train and deploy this algorithm, but it has made our risk processes even more robust and capable of catching more fraud with less manual review. At the same fraud recall rate, the model precision is about 2 to 3 times higher than constantly tuned and optimized rules.In addition to the obvious benefits of having the algorithm live, we also learned a lot about our data and our approach in the process:<ul><li>Through feature selection process, we found that the most predictive features for this kind of fraud are velocity-type variables. These include things like transaction volume by user, device, true IP, and credit cards. We also found that account linking features by device ID, bank accounts, credit cards are quite useful, like multiple accounts logged on to one device, and multiple withdrawals to one bank account.</li><li>Risk ratings of some categorical variables, such as email domains, application id, user country, and hours of the day, also proved highly predictive.</li><li>Digital footprints such as&nbsp;browser language, OS fonts, screen resolution, user agent, &nbsp;and flash version were somewhat useful in fighting fraud. &nbsp;Somewhat more predictive were the presence of practices people use to hide their digital footprints, like VPN tunneling or the use of virtual machines and TOR.</li><li>We also found that model performance deteriorates quickly. This wasn’t really a surprise — fraudsters change their methods constantly to avoid detection so even the best model will eventually become outdated if it doesn’t change as well. But we were surprised at how quickly this happens. For shell selling, precision drops by one half in just the first month after the model has been trained. Hence, refreshing model frequently to maintain the high detection precision is crucial to the success of fraud detection.</li><li>Unfortunately, frequent refreshes present their own problems. While refreshing the model as frequently as possible is ideal, one needs to be careful&nbsp;when&nbsp;using the most recent transaction data for training models. Fraud labels can take as long as a month to mature, so using data that’s too recent may actually contaminate the model. Despite what we initially assumed, online learning with the most current data doesn’t always deliver the best results.</li><li>Random Forest is a superior machine learning algorithm in producing high performance models, however, it is mostly used as a black box method. This is an issue, because we’re not trying to cut humans out of the process entirely, and probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Human analysts always want reason codes that tell them why things were flagged to guide their case review. But random forest, by itself, can’t readily provide reason codes. Interpreting data from the model is difficult, and may involve digging into the structure of the “forest”, which can significantly increase the scoring time. To combat this problem, WePay’s data science team actually had to invent a new proprietary method for generating reason codes from random forest algorithms, which we’ve filed a provisional patent on</li></ul><h2>Conclusion</h2>At WePay, risk management technology is the core of what we do. It’s the thing that lets us bear the considerable fraud risk we shoulder on behalf of the more than 1,200 platforms that use us to settle funds between their users.That being said, Risk management isn’t just about technology, it’s about a seamless partnership between human and technology. It’s still largely humans that have to think of the ways that fraudsters can attack a payment system and write rules to block them, and it’s still an experienced professional that has to make the judgment call whether to block a transaction when it falls in the gray area between “obvious fraud” and “obviously legitimate,” as it so often does.And that’s why we’re so excited about machine learning and artificial intelligence. That might seem a bit weird if you’ve been raised on a steady diet of movies where the robot overlords enslave the human race. But it makes perfect sense when you think of what these technologies let you do.This isn’t Terminator II. When WePay thinks about machine learning, we’re not trying to replace human beings — we just want to make the machines they work with better. We want machine intelligence to be smarter so we can focus human intelligence on the hard problems where it makes the most difference.If you’d like to hear more about what we’re doing with machine learning, drop us a line at api@wepay.com.Citations:[1]<a href="http://link.springer.com/journal/10994" target="_self">Machine Learning, October 2001, Volume 45, Issue 1, pp 5-32</a>[2] <a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00755489/file/PRLv4.pdf" target="_self">Robin Genuer, Jean-Michel Poggi, Christine Tuleau-Malot. Variable selection using Random Forests. Pattern Recognition Letters, Elsevier, 2010, 31 (14), pp.2225-2236</a>.

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