Chris Reddick and Ron Halversen from Clarity Ventures discuss popular payment hub solutions and talk about why data accuracy is so important in a payment hub solution. 

Part 4 of a 5-part series (Return to Part 3)

RON: One of the things that a payment hub also helps with is data accuracy. I have a lot of people asking me about the accuracy, and they think it's just a technical thing. Do you want to explain briefly where the data accuracy benefits come from in a portal like this? 
 
CHRIS: Absolutely, it's really interesting. Logistically, there can be huge challenges at any scale, but especially at a significant scale with providing a self-service portal and being able to operate with a really high level of support at scale. So just imagine the scenario where somebody is trying to make a payment and their payment information is wrong. Maybe their address is wrong in the ERP system. Well, they should be able to update this and it should be reflective of their billing information if their address is changed, for example, Or if their card has changed, we ought to be able to pull from the payment. The payment gateway in many cases has auto-updates for card information. We ought to be able to pull that in as a convenience for the end-user.  

These are things that, with a really robust and integrated payment hub, payment portal, customer service portal, all of these titles apply to this solution. We really want to be able to leverage these things for the end-user. And so by having by having a robust solution that takes advantage of giving the end-user self-service to manage their address information and has intelligent integration to back office so that it can intelligently update from the ERP and update to the ERP based on your business rules and based on what your clients need. As well as integrating with the payment portal so we can pull in auto-updates of credit card information or billing address information, where we can get it.  

These are all things that make a lot of sense, because otherwise the payment may get rejected, the payment may be denied. In a similar way, We also do a lot of work with being able to manage the actual address information and address validation. We can also integrate with tax providers, etc. So there's a lot of work that your internal team may otherwise have to do manually, that we can really drive a third-party payment processor in an automated fashion and in a self-service fashion. 

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CHRIS: And this is what customers want. You know, they want a convenient, easy-to-access resource so that they can execute on the piece of the transaction they need to execute on, and they can provide you with information without having to interact with somebody. 
 
Don't get me wrong, a lot of customers love interacting, but at the end of the day, if they need something done, they don't want to wait for a human being. They want to be able to go in, log in securely, know that they can trust that this is a secure resource, and that they can self-service. 
 
RON: That's funny you mentioned that. It reminded me of something you said. That's a real big benefit for the end-user. And I agree because it allows them—I can keep my name, my phone number, my email, my address, I can keep everything up to date, my card, and that all gets pushed to the ERP portal. So the data accuracy for the accountants at the business is tremendous. 
 
So, what it reminded me of is the benefit for the business is there's a thing called PCI-level three data, and most people don't know what that is. But basically what it means is when you sign up—let's say I'm a business and I sign up with authorized dot net to take credit card payments online for most of the time they are going to take between, let's say, 2.5 and 3% of every transaction. I mean, that's typically what we're seeing on these standard rates. However, there are some of these larger providers: CardConnect, First Data, PayTrace, Heartland, right? You've got these bigger providers that are also the payment hub gateway

Because they're both the merchant account and the gateway, they can charge lower rates. What they are discounted rates for business-to-business eCommerce transactions. So let's say, for example, if I went on your website and I paid for something and my wallet, I have two cards. Remember the ones I said a minute, ago, runs Visa and I had the Clarity corporate card. If I pay with Ron's Visa and it goes through the credit card merchant account, they should charge roughly, let's say on average, 2.7% for that transaction. 
 
However, if I would have paid with the Clarity corporate card, if I put the level three data together and send that to the merchant, the merchant drops a full point off that and only charges the company 1.7%. [That's] on every transaction. Now the key here is the data. So this data accuracy is not just keeping contact information up to date, it's having all the information about the company we're doing business with. So if Ron decides to pay with the company card instead of sending the credit card company six pieces of data, I need to send 26 pieces of data. But if I have those 26 pieces of data, it can qualify for what they call level three PCI rates, which drops to below 2%. And I can save a ton of money on my credit card rate. 
 
So data accuracy is a lot more important than just simply making sure we have phone numbers and email addresses up to date, right? 
 
CHRIS: Yeah, that's a really good point. Just so I understand, what you're saying is, if we're processing $100 million a year in revenue through our payment provider or eCommerce payment gateway, and we switch to a level three compliance for the data, it's possible that we can save around $1,000,000 a year. 
 
RON: That's exactly right.  

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Data Accuracy is Vital

Whether you're keeping your existing ERP or moving to a new one, accuracy of the data it transmits to your payment hub is vital. We're happy to explain the steps we take to make it happen.

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Continue to Part 5 to learn more about efficient portal use.