What to expect from your payment service provider?
Payment service providers (aka PSPs) deliver services that allow business owners to accept digital payments like credit or debit cards and digital wallets.
They are essentially the middlemen between merchants and consumers. They also provide a link between card networks and financial institutions to complete these digital transactions.
You might have also heard PSPs referred to merchant service providers or payment processors, too. These titles all refer to similar functions when it comes to processing electronic payments.
What do payment services providers do?
Your payment service provider will facilitate your electronic payments throughout the entire transaction.
In the PSP landscape, companies can vary significantly in the services that they offer. For instance, some companies may only offer one piece of the puzzle while others will deliver more comprehensive services. These often encompass security and fraud management, customer service and scalability options to account for business growth.
You’ll also find that some payment service providers only deal with either card-not-present payments (e.g. online payments through e-commerce platforms) or card-present purchases (e.g. in-store).
Conversely, others might offer a more comprehensive suite of services to accommodate businesses with both physical and digital presences.
While you may not utilise everything right now, it’s worthwhile partnering with a PSP providing a complete service offering to ensure they can deliver on everything you might need into the future.
Let’s have a look at some of the things you should look for in a reputable PSP.
1. Comprehensive merchant tools
When working out whether a payment service provider is right for your business, consider what other tools and services they offer that could integrate with or supplement payment processing.
For instance, Latpay offer merchants with services such as a fraud management engine and reporting tools to allow for streamlined payment monitoring.
Services like these add value to the merchant and mean they don’t have to onboard another
third-party to facilitate regular tasks.
2. Heightened security
With the prevalence of identity theft and data breaches at the forefront of consumer concerns, offering premium security is another attractive trait to look for in a PSP.
Of course, PSPs must adhere to PCI DSS standards relating to their size and other mitigating factors. What you really want is a PSP that goes above and beyond to keep you and your customers’ information secure.
At Latpay, we adhere to the stringent guidelines associated with Level 1 PCI DSS compliance. This is the highest security level, covering everything from network security, data protection and risk management to access control, monitoring and maintenance.
Beyond this, we also use a process called tokenisation (a form of encryption) to descope cardholder data within the merchant environment. This essentially means that customer data is scrambled and can only be decoded with a unique token. So even if customer data were somehow breached, unauthorised parties would be unable to use it.
Learn more about the risks of cybersecurity for your business here.
3. Dedicated customer support
Customer support is another critical element of a tier-one payment service provider. Whether regarding account set up or systems errors, you want to be confident that someone will be there to help you if and when you need it.
Our team are dedicated to providing technical support to ensure any issues that arise are resolved efficiently and with minimal impact to your business. We also understand that not all businesses operate between 9 am and 5 pm. This is why we make ourselves available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – including public holidays.
4. Platform stability
Platform stability is arguably the most crucial aspect to consider when choosing or reviewing your payment service provider.
As a business, nothing is more important than offering your customers a consistent and reliable service – and that includes the ability to pay when and where they need to.
Latpay has built a solid reputation around this premise and have proudly delivered over 99.99% up-time to our customers over the past 18 years.
Give your business a platform to flourish with merchant services from Latpay.
Find out more here.
