Clarity's President and CEO Chris Reddick and Vice-President of Sales and Marketing Ron Halversen discuss popular payment hub solutions and how they can save money and increase customer satisfaction.

Part 1 of a 5-part series

CHRIS REDDICK: Hello, and welcome. Today we're going to be covering payment hub solutions. And this is Chris Reddick, and I'm joined by Ron Helversen. Ron, why don't you tell us what payment hubs are, and why we started working in this space, and what the value is just in general behind having a payment hub?

RON HALVERSEN: Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, payment hubs are pretty interesting. What ends up happening is you have a lot of companies out there that have...they're trying to move online, right? They're manufacturing, their business is on the back end, they do a lot of B2B. But what ends up happening is in the storefront, if they sell anything online, the storefront captures the credit card token. They register the card either at the time of checkout or they have a wallet. Right. They store their credit card for PCI compliance, they store the token. And so the eCommerce solution has the token. They might even authorize and put a hold on the funds, and then they order this part to be manufactured. So it now sends this order down into the ERP payment system. Well, most of these authorizations can only hold funds on a card for 72 hours to up to a week. And that's it. And it's different by card. Most of them are only 72 hours.

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RON: Well, for a significant number of our larger clients, manufacturing takes a lot more than three days. So it might take them anywhere from one to six weeks to produce these things. And now all of a sudden they're producing these $20,000, $30,000 pieces of equipment and then they go to ship them out, and they have no guarantee that that credit card can be charged. And when they try from their ERP to batch process all these things once they've been manufactured, they have no connection to the third party payment processor gateway. They have no token. They can't charge the card. And they didn't do an authorization on the card and do a pre-auth to know if the charge is even there. So they're trying to now manually take care of all these payments.

So theoretically, what an ERP payment hub does is it abstracts the ability to have that user have a wallet in between their applications, where they can store their credit card for ExpressPay so there's a token there. And now a sales rep could go into a CRM to issue a refund, and it could be sent to the hub. And the hub could issue the refund to their credit card. The manufacturing officer accounting could three weeks later, ship the item mark it as shipped so they want to capture those batch process payments. Those could be shipped up and done that. Clients could sign up for subscription payments. And every month, instead of manually calling back to get a new token or making the end user going in every month and repaying on their credit card, we can reuse that token over and over to make those monthly subscription payments.

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CHRIS: So let me see if I'm getting this right, Ron, and this sounds really interesting. So basically this is a really simple, but very capable application when it comes to B2B payment processing. And it sounds like the space here that we're working in is allowing businesses to basically not have to have a complex eCommerce system. And they can process payments easily for their customers, and integrate that payment information, and the payment processing with their ERP payment system and/or CRM system.

RON: Especially of those ad hoc payments, subscriptions, and refunds and batch processing, where their ERPs and CRMs and EMRs and point-of-sale systems can't capture those funds, that's where this comes in and can handle all that third-party payment processing.

CHRIS: Okay. Got it. One of the things that I've seen too, is a lot of our clients run into issues use where they might have a point-of-sale system, like you mentioned. And this can include things like they could be out in an event, and they need to process payment information and every B2B invoice. Or they may want to use a mobile card reader, a mobile credit card reader, or possibly a mag tech device, for example, to swipe cards or a similar option. So what you're saying is this payment portal from a functionality perspective, it's simple to install. It's an off-the-shelf offering and it lets them have a great solution just that's made for this, that's turnkey. So they can work with other, whatever payment provider they want, and then do all of these things.

RON: Yeah. And the great part it's whatever payment hub provider and whatever CRM, whatever ERP. Right. And part of the benefit of why we can do this is because Clarity, as you know, we specialize in integrations. We've literally done 3000 integrations over the last 15 years. So we have connectors, and already talked to all of these different ERPs and CRMs. So it's very easy for us, from this integrated payment hub, to use our Connect technology to simply slide in a connector. So clients can be on QuickBooks today, and three years from now swap it out for NetSuite. And all we have to do is swap out the connector and the payment hub persists the information, the B2B invoicing, the payments for their clients.

CHRIS: That's awesome. Yeah. One of the things that I've seen in this space is that a lot of our clients, they end up needing a specific feature with a particular B2B payment gateway. And the payment gateway, for whatever reason, their team doesn't have an integration to do a particular ERP, or a point-of-sales system, or a card reader or et cetera. And that that makes it a challenge for merchants, who are trying to help their customers continue to work with a payment gateway, or the payment gateway team that's trying to retain a customer. The solutions that are out there they're are ad hoc. So this is just a... this works with pretty much any payment gateway is what I'm hearing you say. Is that correct?

RON: Yeah.

CHRIS: Yeah. That's awesome. What all does it do exactly? I mean, we talked about a few of the things, but maybe you can elaborate on some of the other features.

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