<h2>Why digital payments?</h2>The way customers pay is changing fast. And though it may sound harsh, businesses that haven’t enabled digital payments are at real risk of being left behind.It all starts with consumer expectations. Today, almost 90% of Americans are using some form of digital payment, a trend that’s only poised to accelerate.¹ Additionally, nearly 75% of customers prefer digital payments to more traditional methods.²There are a wealth of other advantages to enabling integrated payment processing for your business. Digital payments save time and money on manual processes, such as paper invoices and checks, streamline cash flow, and help owners to focus on growing their business instead of chasing payments. It’s hard to get business owners to align on anything, but a full 68% agree digital payments have made their operations more efficient.³The takeaway is clear. Digital payments are ubiquitous and popular, and both business and individual buyers expect them. If you haven't enabled the option, the time is now.<hr/><h3>Jump to section:</h3><ol><li><a href="#digital-payment-advantages" target="_self">Four advantages of enabling digital payments</a></li><li><a href="#long-view" target="_self">The long view: Digital payments generate (really) valuable customer data</a></li></ol><hr/><h2 id="digital-payment-advantages">Four advantages of enabling digital payments</h2>You make it easier for your customers to pay while creating efficiencies across your business.Meet the expectations of your customersDigital payments support online, mobile, and card-present payments seamlessly – giving your customers the frictionless experience they’ve come to expect and giving you a higher conversion rate.For example, <a href="https://go.wepay.com/customer-stories/touchbistro-testimonial-video/" target="_self">TouchBistro powers its restaurant management</a> platform with payment processing tools, including POS systems and web-based tools that support online ordering, reservations, loyalty services, and more.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltb872b9b5e182c5bd/645a77d4f6d4ab4694def10b/Global_cashless_payments.png" height="auto"/>Improve cash flow and receive faster payoutsSince digital payments are made electronically (and no bank branch visits are required), funds are transferred much faster than with checks. And that means more cash available to run your business.Take <a href="https://go.wepay.com/customer-stories/mystudio/" target="_self">membership-based management software MyStudio</a>, for instance. By leveraging <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">Clear</a>, a fully integrated payments solution, MyStudio lets gym-goers buy fitness classes and packages without having to leave their platform.<img asset_uid="blt37452bc0b2424f2e" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt37452bc0b2424f2e/6447f4fa5773c9110e451e47/FINAL_Unlock_growth_graphic_2.png"/>Reduce the cost of payment processingDigital payment methods are typically less expensive to process than cash. So when you incorporate integrated payment solutions, you’ll see savings on your invoices.Consider <a href="https://www.freshbooks.com/?ref=ppc-fb&campaignid=17255718952&adgroupid=139737503474&targetid=kwd-4905150006&crid=648028869727&dv=c&geo=9026803&ntwk=g&source=GOOGLE&qgad=648028869727&qgterm=freshbooks&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhZeJsrDF_gIVt9XjBx3skgF3EAAYASAAEgI_6fD_BwE" target="_self">all-in-one accounting and invoicing software, FreshBooks</a>. We power their payments allowing their customers to set up subscription billing for recurring payments and get paid 2x faster.<img asset_uid="bltf94b0d121f2f638e" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/bltf94b0d121f2f638e/6447f4fb7fbb1e0c982fd070/FINAL_Unlock_growth_graphic_3.png" height="auto"/>Save time with automated processesProcessing payments traditionally takes a lot of time for businesses to manage. With digital payments, many repetitive and manual tasks are automated, giving you more time to focus on other vital areas of operations.<a href="https://go.wepay.com/customer-stories/b2b-payment-processing-buildertrend/" target="_self">Construction management platform Buildertrend</a> integrates our APIs<a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self"> </a>to allow builders, remodelers, and contractors to manage their finances and move money without wasting time on tedious tasks like manual reporting and tracking.<img asset_uid="blt5e72ba49f35fa15a" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt5e72ba49f35fa15a/6447f4fb398bc14b3cffee2b/FINAL_Unlock_growth_graphic_4.png"/><h2 id="long-view">The long view: Digital payments generate (really) valuable customer data</h2>In addition to providing convenient payment options, digital payment technology also gives businesses like yours another way to capture valuable customer data. This data can be used to gain insights into your customers' preferences, behaviors, and needs – so you can better serve them.Ready to enable digital payments? Talk to your software vendor about their digital payment solutions and how they can help you. To explore your options, learn more about platforms that partner with <a href="https://go.wepay.com/" target="_self">WePay by J.P. Morgan</a>.<div class="fullWidthBannerWrap"><div class="full_width_banner"><div class="container mx-auto"><div class="row py-5"><div class="mx-auto col-lg-9 col-md-12"><h3>About WePay</h3><a href="/" target="_self">WePay</a> technology empowers platforms and software innovators to grow, diversify revenue and create custom payment processing experiences. All backed by J.P. Morgan’s global scale and security plus Chase’s small businesses expertise.</div></div></div></div></div>Sources“Majority of customers prefer digital payments.” RetailCustomerExperience.com, Feb. 22, 2022. retailcustomerexperience.com/news/majority-of-customers-prefer-digital-payments/“Consumer trends in digital payments.” Lindsay Anan Serves, Jeana Chen, Deepa Mahajan and Marie-Claude Nadeau, McKinsey & Company, Oct. 21, 2022. mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/banking-matters/consumer-trends-in-digital-payments“40% of Middle Market Firms Say Digital Payments Innovations Have Improved Customer Satisfaction.” PYMNTS, Jan. 31, 2022. pymnts.com/news/payments-innovation/2022/40-pct-of-middle-market-firms-say-digital-payments-innovations-have-improved-customer-satisfaction/.“Payments 2025 & beyond: Navigating the payments matrix.” PwC. pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/publications/financial-services-in-2025/payments-in-2025.html“What is driving the adoption of digital payouts?” Sara Khairi, Tearsheet, Dec. 20, 2022. tearsheet.co/payments/what-is-driving-the-adoption-of-digital-payouts/“Digital Payment Services: The Importance of Fast Payments.” Seamless Chex. seamlesschex.com/blog/digital-payment-services-the-importance-of-fast-payments.“Accounts Payable Automation, And Succeeding With Its Implementation.” Peter Nesbitt, Forbes. forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2023/01/23/accounts-payable-automation-and-succeeding-with-its-implementation/“24 Buy Now, Pay Later Statistics for 2023.” Brigitte Hodge, Fit Small Business, Feb. 10, 2023. fitsmallbusiness.com/buy-now-pay-later-statistics/“Alternative Methods of Payment (AMOP).” Lucas Downey, Investopedia, Jan. 24, 2022.. investopedia.com/terms/a/alternative-methods-payment-amop.asp“Consumer trends in digital payments.” Lindsay Anan, Jeana Chen, Deepa Mahajan and Marie-Claude Nadeau,, McKinsey & Company, Oct. 21, 2022. mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/banking-matters/consumer-trends-in-digital-payments

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Unlock growth with fast and frictionless digital payments

Integrated payments are transforming the way goods and services are purchased – and have rapidly become a cornerstone of modern, effective customer experiences.There are twin forces that are driving this sea change: elevated customer expectations and a demand for optionality.Among B2C and even B2B buyers, expectations for frictionless and often single-click experiences are prevalent. Further, customers expect payment options that cater to their habits and the specific ways they prefer to transact with vendors. This preference materially impacts behavior. Customers are 63% more likely to shop with merchants that offer their preferred payment options.¹ And according to one study,² nearly a quarter of customers abandon transactions if their favorite way to pay isn’t available.The evolution in consumer preferences – and corresponding platform innovation – has put pressure on merchants to broaden their payment offering, which in turn has made it more essential than ever for platforms, which enable their merchants to transact online, to choose the right payment partner. Platforms typically include Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), SaaS companies and ecommerce platforms.At WePay by J.P. Morgan, we’re proud to be leading the charge.<hr/><h3>Jump to section:</h3><ol><li><a href="#understand-payment" target="_self">Understanding integrated payments</a></li><li><a href="#payment-fit" target="_self">How a payment partner fits in</a></li><li><a href="#right-choice" target="_self">Why WePay is the right choice for integrated payments</a></li></ol><hr/><h2 id="understand-payment">Understanding integrated payments</h2>Integrated payments refer to the integration of payment processing capabilities directly into a platform or app, allowing users to complete transactions without leaving the platform.Think Amazon and its omnipresent “Buy Now” button, the ease of confirming a ride with Uber or ordering ahead within the Starbucks app.Platforms who leverage integrated payments provide merchants and their customers with a frictionless payment experience, which results in higher customer satisfaction and greater customer value.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt39b5d8a92cb281ef/64390f2e70368e118fdf1789/Graphic_body.png" alt="blog-image"/><h2 id="payment-fit">How a payment partner fits in</h2>Integrated payments providers do the legwork of building partnerships with banks and creating APIs to help companies quickly adapt integrated payment products and services. They can get you up and running affordably in weeks or months, rather than the years it would take to build.Backed by J.P. Morgan’s global scale and security and Chase’s small businesses’ expertise, we partner with many platforms to enable direct bank payments through simple API integration. This allows you to streamline sending, requesting, and reconciling payments with data-rich, safe, and efficient tokenization technology.<h2 id="right-choice">Why WePay is the right choice for integrated payments</h2><h3>Fast integration</h3>Embedding payments into your ecosystem will reduce the time it takes to underwrite and onboard merchants to your solution. At WePay, we make it easy to enable payments from your platform – with <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">full customization</a> or by leveraging our pre-built hosted solutions.<h3>New revenue streams</h3>As your merchant users accept integrated payments through your software’s payment gateway integration, you have the opportunity to get a cut of the revenue earned through all transactions processed (this is known as payment residuals). Based on the revenue projections, this will likely be very lucrative for platforms.Integrated payments revenue is set to exceed $59 billion worldwide by 2027, representing a growth of 84% from the $32 billion projection for 20234.WePay by J.P. Morgan offers the ability to reduce your total cost of payment processing, control merchant pricing and add a markup on top if the buy rate. This way you can adjust the end-user rate and maximize your payment margins.<h3>Improved security</h3>Integrated payments can improve security by reducing the risk of data breaches and fraud. This is partly because the payment information is transmitted directly within the application, rather than being passed through multiple third-party websites.The right payment provider would offer insight through real-time threat analytics and visibility into even the most sophisticated fraud patterns, using big data and advanced machine learning.When you choose WePay, you can rest easy knowing there are around 3,000 cybersecurity professionals working to <a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/take-charge-how-to-navigate-fraud-and-chargebacks/" target="_self">keep your payments safe</a>.5<h3>Increased valuation</h3>According to Market Research Future (MRFR), platforms market valuation will rise from $202.85 million in 2019 to $408.15 million by 2026 (review period 2020-2026).6 Cloud-native payments functionality and the additional revenue streams provided help position your ISV platform for a more attractive bid should you decide to go to market.By leveraging WePay’s “backed by the scale and security of J.P. Morgan” branding, you can also add instant credibility to your payment processing capabilities.With the scale of a bank and the efficiency of a SaaS provider, WePay provides a complete suite of solutions for payments, banking and more.<h3>Are you ready to take advantage of the integrated payment revolution?</h3>If you want to learn more, <a href="https://rstage.wepay.com/getting-started/" target="_self">schedule an appointment</a> and we’ll show you how integrated payments are right for your business.<div class="fullWidthBannerWrap"><div class="full_width_banner"><div class="container mx-auto"><div class="row py-5"><div class="mx-auto col-lg-9 col-md-12"><h3>About WePay</h3><a href="/" target="_self">WePay</a> technology empowers platforms and software innovators to grow, diversify revenue and create custom payment processing experiences. All backed by J.P. Morgan’s global scale and security plus Chase’s small businesses expertise.</div></div></div></div></div><h3>Sources</h3><ol><li>“Consumers Want More Payment Flexibility in Their Shopping Experience.” CIO, Chris Nerney, Aug 22, 2022. <a href="https://www.cio.com/article/405162/consumers-want-more-payment-flexibility-in-their-shopping-experience.html" target="_blank">cio.com/article/405162/consumers-want-more-payment-flexibility-in-their-shopping-experience.html</a></li><li>“Study: Shoppers want frictionless pay or they'll bolt.” RetailCustomerExperience.com, May 5, 2021. <a href="https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/news/study-shoppers-want-frictionless-pay-or-theyll-bolt/" target="_blank">retailcustomerexperience.com/news/study-shoppers-want-frictionless-pay-or-theyll-bolt/</a></li><li>“Fintech Scales Vertical SaaS.” Andreessen Horowitz, Kristina Shen, Kimberly Tan, Seema Amble, and Angela Strange. <a href="https://a16z.com/2020/08/04/fintech-scales-vertical-saas-2/" target="_blank">a16z.com/2020/08/04/fintech-scales-vertical-saas-2/</a></li><li>“The Rise of Embedded Payments.” Peter Lucas, Digital Transactions, Jan. 1, 2023. <a href="https://digitaltransactions.net/magazine_articles/the-rise-of-embedded-payments" target="_blank">digitaltransactions.net/magazine_articles/the-rise-of-embedded-payments/</a></li><li>JPMorgan Chase Q4 2021 Earnings Presentation</li><li>“Revenue from Embedded Payments to Reach $59B By 2027.” Connie Diaz De Teran, PaymentsJournal, Feb. 23, 2023. <a href="https://www.paymentsjournal.com/revenue-from-embedded-payments-to-reach-59b-by-2027/" target="_blank">paymentsjournal.com/revenue-from-embedded-payments-to-reach-59b-by-2027/</a></li><li>“Research Reveals Surge in B2B Embedded Finance Demand.” Roy Urrico, Finopotamus, Oct 4, 2022. <a href="https://www.finopotamus.com/post/research-reveals-surge-in-b2b-embedded-finance-demand" target="_blank">finopotamus.com/post/research-reveals-surge-in-b2b-embedded-finance-demand</a></li><li>“Benefits of an Integrated Payments Ecosystem: ISVs, Merchants, and End-Users.” PAYARC, Jan. 16, 2023. <a href="https://payarc.com/benefit-integrated-payments-isv/" target="_blank">payarc.com/benefit-integrated-payments-isv/</a></li></ol>

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Why industry leaders are integrating payments with WePay

<h2>Navigate Chargebacks and Reduce Fraud Risk With WePay</h2>Fraud happens every day, all over the world. And when it comes to internet fraud, it’s no longer restricted to emails from someone posing as a prince, asking for your credit card number to help unlock untold wealth. We’re now dealing with countless scammers seeking to defraud unsuspecting platforms and merchants.On a positive note, corporations continue to prioritize their investment in fraud-prevention technology and expertise leading to encouraging results. In fact, according to the latest J.P. Morgan annual <a href="https://www.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm/commercial-banking/insights/cybersecurity/highlights-afp-2022-payments-fraud-and-control-report.pdf" target="_blank">Payments Fraud and Control Report</a>, the percentage of organizations that become victims of payments fraud attacks is on the decline.There’s also the pesky chargeback. Your bank contacts you to say there’s been a dispute on a transaction, and you must return the money to the customer, AND, you’re also being fined. In other words, customers can get a refund from their bank without having to check with the merchant or platform they purchased from.<h2>Partner Up: Share the Risk with a Payments Provider</h2>So you’ve started working towards becoming a payment facilitator (payfac), but you’re not quite ready to take on all the risks, yet. What you need is a payments provider that creates a roadmap to help you become a payfac. One with the right solutions that can take those risks off your plate. A provider that offers a full range of solutions to meet your needs at any stage of development and allows you to monetize payment under your own brand without risk. A reliable payment processor that mitigates risks and seamlessly moves the money for you.The right payments provider has expertise and mechanisms in place to deal with risk. When it comes to chargebacks, this is particularly vital –&nbsp;reducing chargebacks can be extremely complex, given how many scenarios can result in chargebacks. Not only should your payment provider implement sufficient safeguards to prevent fraud and recognize suspicious activity, they must also implement processes to manage and resolve disputes between buyers and sellers.<a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/one-question-ask-evaluating-payment-processors/" target="_self">Look for a payments partner</a> that offers insight through real-time threat analytics and visibility into even the most sophisticated fraud patterns. One that creates fully-integrated fraud solutions within payments processing and minimizes chargebacks in real time. This, coupled with big data, advanced machine learning/Artificial Intelligence and experts, who intervene on flagged transactions.<h2>Be Informed: Understanding Chargebacks and the Fraud Behind Them</h2>You are now a payfac, so you may be held responsible for chargebacks – which means you must recover that money from the merchants who generate them, or chalk it up as a loss. And for chargebacks resulting from card-not-present transactions, the issuing bank recovers the funds from the merchant’s bank (the acquiring bank), and the acquiring bank recovers those funds from the merchant. In addition to recovering funds from merchants, payfacs are also responsible for notifying merchants and providing a means by which merchants can defend themselves against chargebacks.Knowing what causes chargebacks is critical to understanding your risks – and navigating them. The four types of fraud that most commonly result in chargebacks are:<ol><li class="ms-sm-4">Merchant Identity Fraud, where someone falsely establishes a merchant account for a seemingly legitimate business, then makes purchases with several stolen credit cards and disappears.</li><li class="ms-sm-4">Merchant Credit Risk, where a legitimate merchant defaults on its obligation to fund chargebacks.</li><li class="ms-sm-4">Buyer Identity Fraud, where a fraudulent customer uses a stolen credit card (or a card established with a stolen identity) to purchase a product from a legitimate merchant.</li><li class="ms-sm-4">Friendly Fraud, which is similar to Buyer Identity Fraud, but the actual cardholder committing the fraud.</li></ol><h2>Insider Info: Here’s the Scoop on Handling Chargebacks</h2>Unless you concede, a chargeback request must be contested. Some are pure fraud; others happen when a merchant or sales platform makes a billing error; some are simply misunderstandings. In any case, you will need to have systems in place to document the process thoroughly. This includes having sample invoices, itemized receipts, proof of usage, and more – all with one single goal: to help protect payments.When funds land in your account, and they are paid to a merchant in a separate transaction (called “aggregation”), that makes you susceptible to chargebacks – and the bank expects you to recover those funds. One solution is requiring all of your customers to have a merchant account.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt084f45fe1d5df893/63ef1a3e00a00111216807a2/Fraud-chargeback-blogbody-560x339_(1).png"/>Some payfacs have productized the dispute-resolution process to preempt formal chargebacks. In this scenario, buyers will dispute payments through the payfac before filing a complaint with their issuing bank. The payfac then attempts to resolve the dispute between the buyer and seller directly without involving the issuing bank or the acquirer. There is significant operational overhead associated with this method. Still, it can dramatically reduce chargebacks, especially in cases of “accidental” friendly-fraud (i.e. the cardholder authorized the payment but does not remember or recognize the charge when it appears on their statement).Another solution: have a candid conversation with a potential payments partner about how they assist with tackling chargebacks. It’s not just about fees. Some companies will offer discounted prices, which seems attractive until there’s a complex chargeback. Look for payments partners with extensive experience working with payfacs and ask how they help handle the resolution process. The last thing your merchants want is a cash flow issue due to a clunky process.<h2>Be Proactive: How to Get Ahead of Chargebacks</h2>It’s important to note that chargebacks and refunds are not the same. A refund is much less of a headache, so it’s worth communicating that customers can contact your merchants directly if they are frustrated or want to reverse a charge. A chargeback requires more time and effort, so avoiding this process is worth the extra effort.As with most things in business, thoughtful customer service goes a long way. Optimize the payments experience for your merchants' customers through a user-friendly interface, making it as smooth as possible for them to make payments. A good payment processing partner provides customized payments integration and the ability to build custom checkout pages.It’s important to encourage your merchants to communicate openly with their customers, offering multiple points of contact (phone, email, online chat). If they have questions about a payment, your merchants can promptly address the issue. It’s also a good idea for everyone involved to keep tracking numbers of all shipments. Watch out for suspicious email addresses or payments split across multiple credit cards. These can be red flags for dubious chargebacks.<h2>Why You Should Choose WePay</h2>Using a payments API (Application Programming Interface) that works efficiently and is prepared for the worst can have a meaningful impact on your company’s bottom line. A robust API that has your back –&nbsp;even in times of trouble –&nbsp;can help boost profitability and the future success of your business.At WePay by J.P. Morgan, we protect the platforms we work with by shouldering the risk of fraud and chargebacks. And as part of J.P. Morgan, which spends more than $700 million in cybersecurity annually, WePay has built a robust platform to manage risk and compliance behind the scenes.WePay offers solutions that easily integrate payments and grow revenue by leveraging our pre-built hosted solutions and powered by Chase branding to add instant credibility to your payment processing capabilities. We also create <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">seamless payment experiences</a> by forging your brand with our white-label solution and our easy-to-integrate API. These solutions enable you to gradually grow into a payment facilitator, ready for more control and financial upside –– all backed by the global scale and security of J.P. Morgan and the small and mid-sized business expertise and brand trust of Chase.We'd love to help you grow. <a href="/getting-started/" target="_self">Schedule an appointment</a> to discuss the best payment solution for your needs.

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Take Charge: How to Navigate Fraud and Chargebacks

Not all payment processors are equal when it comes to providing customer support, which can be especially critical during crisis situations. What should you look for? One that’s responsive? One that provides dedicated account managers that know you by name? One that’s fully invested? One that can evolve with your company’s changing needs and goals?The right payment processor delivers relationship-driven customer service and long-term partnership capabilities to help your business grow to scale––creating a positive impact on your bottom line. Let’s break down what that looks like.&nbsp;<h2>Personalized Support Right from the Word Go</h2>With the right payment processor, you would have everything needed to successfully navigate implementation. That means having a dedicated support team, including an easy-to-reach implementation manager who answers your questions and promptly addresses concerns. You’d be advised in weekly meetings and updated every step of the way with the progress of the implementation.A successful implementation process could also include setting up a managed pilot program focusing on key metrics such as TPV growth and tracking transactions. This would offer transparency into your payments to ensure they go through end-to-end or, if any are held up, insight into why and how to most efficiently clear the blockages.You want a team that’s easy to get in touch with instead of your concerns sitting in a general support inbox.<h2>Structured Levels of Responsive Support</h2>When an issue comes up, it should be addressed and resolved quickly. No one likes getting stuck in a customer service pool or queue.&nbsp;That’s why a great payment processor has structured levels of support systems available to both partners and merchants.Once implementation is complete, that personalized support would continue via a support API and a dedicated relationship manager, who already knows everything about how well the pilot and implementation went.As the first line of defense, a customer delight team would answer the initial call, work to identify the problem and find a solution with a quick response time––typically within 24 hours on weekdays. If it’s a complex issue, it would be expedited to the relationship manager and/or technical account manager.Some accounts would also be assigned a technical account manager, to handle any tech-related issues. And both the relationship manager and technical account manager would be on-hand in weekly client meetings to discuss your company’s needs, offer solutions and strategize.<h2>Beyond Just Customer Service</h2>From technical help to walking alongside you through upgrades, the right partner will be there in every step of building your payments business, providing feedback, data and expertise. This equips partner platforms with the right support to get relevant payments API capabilities, meet certification requirements and get the latest provider’s risk engine and methodologies applied to their model. They will find the best solutions, no matter your business model or what stage of growth you’re currently in.But relationship managers should provide far more than problem solving. They should ask questions about your company’s roadmap and create high-level strategic plans for it including how to market to prospective merchants. They should give you ample face time and solicit feedback––making you feel inclusive, valued and excited about where your company is heading.The right partnership will make you feel like it’s just that: a partnership.<figure style="margin-top: auto;margin-right: auto;margin-bottom: auto;margin-left: auto;text-align: center;width: auto;"><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blt24196237e770e7ab/6410db02b70b5c1064dd4dc6/Customer-Service-illustration.png"/></figure><h2>In It for the Long Haul</h2>You want a payments partner that is invested in your success for the long haul––a powerful payments processor that has the breadth of services and the experience to scale with you as your company grows and its needs evolve. One that can seamlessly add new features or new devices to help you outpace the competition. One that has the bandwidth to remain committed and supportive throughout the entirety of the partnership.Having direct access to a dedicated relationship manager makes all the difference in this partnership. Look for a partner who provides human-centric customer service, one that gives hands-on support throughout the lifetime of the partnership.With the right partner, a relationship manager works directly with the tech team to make any necessary adjustments and meet your company’s ever-changing needs. That constant, one-on-one dedicated support sets you and your company up for long-term success with payments.<h2>What WePay Can Do for You</h2>At WePay by J.P. Morgan, we meet all of these expectations and more. Our team of experts builds <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">personalized solutions</a> for your company, no matter the business model or what stage of growth it's in. And we continually test new products and functionalities and innovate our processes to meet your evolving needs. We’re committed to building long-term partnerships that scale over time. Because we are invested.With the agility of a SaaS provider and the scale of a leading financial institution, WePay will be with you every step of building your payments business. From activating a new payments revenue stream with minimal development and <a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/take-charge-how-to-navigate-fraud-and-chargebacks/" target="_self">outsourcing risk</a>/regulatory overhead to growing into a payment facilitator ready for more control and financial upside. We have you covered.Are you ready to take the next step and partner with WePay? <a href="https://go.wepay.com/getting-started/" target="_self">Schedule an appointment</a> to discuss the best solution for your needs.

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Dedicated Support + Long-Term Partnership = the Right Payment Processor for You

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 payment 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 credit card payment processor 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 <a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/dedicated-support-long-term-partnership-the-right-payment-processor-for-you/" target="_self">technical help</a> 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 payment processing 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.<figure style="margin-top: auto;margin-right: auto;margin-bottom: auto;margin-left: auto;text-align: center;"><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltde272862e90efa03/blta8f9702f12994de3/6410dc249a3afb6a24ebb01c/HowPaymentsImpact-560px.png"/></figure><h2>Is Your Payment Processor 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 <a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/dedicated-support-long-term-partnership-the-right-payment-processor-for-you/" target="_self">personalized support</a> 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 a payment processing 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 <a href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">seamless integration</a> 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.<a href="https://go.wepay.com/getting-started/" target="_self">Schedule an appointment </a>to learn more about the business and technical benefits of working with us.

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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 <a href="https://go.wepay.com/blog/take-charge-how-to-navigate-fraud-and-chargebacks/" target="_self">take on the liability</a>, 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 href="https://go.wepay.com/clear/" target="_self">A robust API </a>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.<a href="https://go.wepay.com/getting-started/" target="_self">Schedule an appointment </a>if you want to learn more about the business and technical benefits of using a payments API.

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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

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>

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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

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 in-person payments are 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 payments 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): Person-to-person payments 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 payments, 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. Person-to-person payments, 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

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

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

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

<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>!

20190222_111628

The Power of Us – A Watermark Conference Recap

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

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

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>.

newgrowth

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.

saasgrowth

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>.

adjust

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.

growth2

SaaS and software platforms: Moving from Startup to Growth

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

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

One of the common questions we often get here at WePay is about offering escrow&nbsp; or delayed payments— understandable, since many of our platform partners are services uniting a buyer and a seller who don’t know each other, and escrow offers a way for both sides to be comfortable with a transaction even with that unknown.Yet like a lot of things in the payment industry, escrow is something that seems like it should be simple but is actually surprisingly complex when you really look at it. Given that, we thought a little primer might be useful.<h2>What is Escrow?</h2>Here’s the first bit of hidden complexity, because when people ask about “escrow,” that’s not always what they mean. Oftentimes, what they’re really talking about is the ability to delay payments.There are any number of situations where a platform might need to do this. An obvious one is where a payer is buying something from a seller that can’t be readily evaluated for quality. Take a marketplace for concert tickets, for example. In this instance, the product could ship immediately, but until the buyer actually brings the ticket to the venue and is actually let into the concert, it would be very hard to say whether they got what they paid for.The ticket platform therefore might charge the buyer but only release the funds to the seller after the show, and only if they don’t get an angry message from the buyer saying the tickets were bogus. That cuts down on fraud, because unscrupulous types know they won’t get any money from just printing out and selling fake tickets. It also might increase conversion rates for the platform, because buyers might be more comfortable using the service if they’re getting some guarantee that the things they buy will be genuine.This might look like an escrow. Or, it might look like a money-back refund policy that the platform helps to enforce.And that’s an important distinction, because escrow agents are actually something that is regulated at the state level, meaning anyone who wants to offer escrow services needs a license from the states they’re accepting funds in. There’s good reason for this regulation. Since the escrow agent is holding other people’s money, there’s a lot of potential for wrongdoing. Licensing requirements help prevent the escrow agent from just disappearing into the night with the buyer’s money, or from saying they are holding something in escrow when they’re really using it to play the stock market, or any other potential abuses you can think of.Here’s how California law sees escrow with regard to Internet companies:"With regard to Internet escrow companies, ‘escrow’ also includes any transaction in which one person, for the purpose of effecting the sale or transfer of personal property or services to another person, delivers money, or its Internet-authorized equivalent, to a third person to be held by that third person until the happening of a specified event or the performance of a prescribed condition, when it is then to be delivered by that third person to a grantee, grantor, promisee, promisor, obligee, obligor, bailee, bailor, or any agent or employee of any of the latter.” — California Financial Code 17003(b).<h2>So wait, does that mean that ANY platform that delays payments has to be licensed by the state?</h2>The short answer? Probably not, but maybe.You’ve probably noticed that definition looks very close to what our hypothetical ticket platform was doing in the earlier example — it was a 3rd party that was holding on to funds until a transaction could be verified to have occurred satisfactorily. But there are a couple of differences that might be relevant, legally speaking. For one thing, the escrow it’s providing here is not its primary service — rather, it’s the technology that lets ticket sellers find ticket buyers and vice versa. It’s also not the buyer or the seller that’s choosing to put the funds into escrow, but rather the platform itself that’s choosing to hold onto funds as a part of its normal efforts to fight fraud and keep everyone using its service honest.That might make the ticket platform materially different enough that it can essentially hold funds in escrow without actually being an escrow agent. Or it might not. Like a lot of legal issues, once you get outside what’s clearly spelled out in the law it becomes more a matter of probability and risk assessment than hard and fast rules.What is clear is that, if the platform is holding the money, regulatory compliance is a burden that would fall on the platform. If the ticket platform were found to infringe, the regulators would be sending angry letters to them, not the company processing their payments. &nbsp;That could be true even if the platform holds the money in a bank account “For the Benefit Of” (FBO) its customers, or if the platform uses a third party payment processor to hold customers’ money for the platform. &nbsp;If the customers’ money appears on the platform’s balance sheet, the platform is exposed to regulations that apply to that money, such as the California internet escrow law.<h2>How WePay handles delayed payments</h2>At WePay, we hate legal ambiguity. Our promise to our partners is that they will never have to concern themselves with the regulatory risk and compliance, because we will cover that all for them. They expect us to keep everything on the up and up, so that any potential downside is minimized. Consequentially, we’re very cautious about anything that introduces additional risks.That being said, we offer our partners a way that they can do delayed payments and ensure that they don’t have to worry about hard legal questions about escrow.It starts with the way we process our payments: our platform partners never hold customers’ funds. &nbsp;WePay assures that those funds go straight from the buyer to a special bank account, then to the seller, without ever being held by the platform or appearing on the platform’s balance sheet. That means that WePay, and not the platform, is on the hook if the states ever do decide that marketplaces (or other types of platforms) need to be licensed escrow agents to provide delayed payments.We also offer two options that act like escrow, but which we think are compliant:<ul><li>Delayed Payouts: This works in a straightforward manner: collect a payment from the payer, but then hold onto the funds for a short time before sending them on to the payee. Because this looks the most like escrow, we currently set a limit of 14 days as the maximum time the payment can be held. We’ve generally found it to be the case that the longer you hold onto a payment before sending it to its eventual destination, the more nervous the regulators get. So we felt that this limit struck a good balance between a level of risk we were comfortable with and a level of flexibility needed by our partners.</li></ul><ul><li>Tipping Point Payments: For this method, the platform collects the credit info from the payer at the time that the transaction is initiated. However, we don’t actually charge the card until a later date when a given condition is met. It’s flexible enough to be used as a practical alternative to a delayed payment, but doesn’t present as much risk, because the platform is never actually holding on to funds for any length of time.</li></ul> If you’d like to learn more about delayed payments, contact our API team at API@wepay.com

Delay Payments - Escrow

Want to delay payments? Here's what you need to know about escrow

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Partner Success

Fintech trends for succeeding at the business of payments, today and in the future.

Fintech Trends

Ideas to help ISVs and SaaS companies succeed with payment processing, monetization, fintech, security and more. From WePay, a Chase company.