Seamlessly combining payments solutions and third-party services, PPaaS empowers acquirers and Independent Software Vendors to enable merchants to create compelling commerce and payment options for their customers, bringing instore what has up to now only been possible online

Ingenico, a Worldline brand, announces the full commercial launch of PPaaS, its Payments Platform as a Service solution to its clients and partners. Built on a completely new cloud-based technology stack, PPaaS is a key component in the evolution of the Point of Sale (POS) into an ecosystem enabler.

PPaaS is a suite of payment and commerce services that combines proprietary solutions for managing terminals with third-party applications and alternative payment methods such as Alipay. The cloud-based platform is developer-focused and device agnostic, meaning it can work with any payment terminal, beyond the 35 million Ingenico POS around the world. Acquirers, Payment Service Providers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can choose, integrate and manage the services their merchants need for instore payments. The platform’s design makes this a far quicker and easier proposition than any current technologies available. In a world where customer segmentation is increasingly reflected in how customers pay for what they buy, agility in incorporating these services is a key differentiator in the payments value chain.

Although online payment orchestration[1] has developed extensively for online retailing in recent years, instore orchestration and the ability to create seamless, omnichannel commerce solutions for customers has yet to fully materialize. PPaaS, with its unrivalled ability to connect to instore POS terminals, will enable this and change the way we pay. PPaaS also goes further, integrating with retailers’ online commerce and payments services to enable a true omnichannel customer experience and turn the payment experience from a point of transaction to a point of interaction.

For example, with PPaaS as part of the payment transaction, a customer can pay using a combination of a gift card and a local wallet; earn loyalty points on the transaction without showing their loyalty card and be prompted at the terminal to purchase product insurance before finalizing their transaction. Then, depending on the merchant’s and payment scheme’s terms and conditions, they could return the goods they bought from home for a full refund onto each of the payment methods used without having to return to the store.

Giulio Montemagno, SVP and Managing Director PPaaS at Ingenico, a Worldline brand explains: “Much of the recent innovation in payments has been focused on online payments and the instore experience hasn’t changed much over the years. With PPaaS, our clients can finally enable their merchants to make payment a real point of interaction with their customers, and the ecosystem of third-party service partners can easily bring their services to a wider audience. As we engage with clients and solution providers, we realise that the use cases for PPaaS are very significant as our customers envisage using it to facilitate a whole range of new services and payment methods to their merchants. We have started working on those use cases with clients already - including using PPaaS to enable APMs and a loyalty programme in Asia as well as in enabling vertical-specific services for an acquirer in Europe - and we are looking forward to seeing their new offerings using PPaaS live in action.”

Concrete use cases

• Alternative Payment Methods (APMs)

There are over 900 alternative payment methods around the world catering to different markets and segments but very few of these are accepted for instore payments. APMs such as Alipay increase revenues for merchants by enabling and enhancing demand from specific demographics. PPaaS facilitates APMs for retailers without the need for complex development and software updates.

• Loyalty & Omnichannel commerce

With Tokenization as a Service, PPaaS provides the missing piece in the omnichannel payments puzzle and creates new possibilities in customer loyalty. The payment card can become the customer’s unique identifier in a fully secure and compliant environment, expanding the ability to interact with the customer at critical moments in their purchasing journey.

• Enhanced reporting and data analytics

An important, and much requested, feature of PPaaS is its ability to provide significantly enhanced reporting and data analytics in a fully compliant and secure environment. This is because PPaaS consolidates information from the terminal and uses this to provide the insights and data merchants need to manage their business.

• Smart routing

Thanks to PPaaS’ connections to acquirers, the solution can optimise acceptance rates and costs by routing transactions to specific acquiring platforms based on pre-defined rules.

Supporting the complete payments ecosystem

In a payments environment where 34% of merchants say they would change their provider if they don’t get access to easy to use and quick to set up services from their acquirer, and 80% are prepared to pay 20-30% higher rates for better payments performance provided it measurably improves business,^[2] the market for providing such services is vast.

For this reason, PPaaS addresses a variety of actors in the payments ecosystem: banks and dedicated acquirers, PSPs, payment gateways and ISVs. It creates many-to-many connectivity, generating a network effect that benefits all parties as it continues to grow.

Adapting to customer needs – constantly

As an ‘as-a-Service’ offering, the PPaaS platform will evolve constantly, adding new features and onboarding new partners as part of a continuous dialogue with existing and future clients.

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