Congrats on the launch anyway, I'm convinced that your solution makes sense for early stage company. You'll have to provide more value in the future to keep enterprises in the long run I guess.
Are you planning to support saved payment methods across multiple providers? Thats always seemed like the touchiest area for me, especially since it would seemingly invalidate a lot of the fraud protection that payment providers use to keep lock-in.
We're PCI compliant so can use saved payment methods across multiple providers, however in our case it does not invalidate the built-in fraud protection that providers use. Additionally, you could also use third party fraud providers at any point within your processing flow.
> however in our case it does not invalidate the built-in fraud protection that providers use
Thats pretty neat! Even Stripe Radar? My understanding was that used their client side fingerprinting when the card is inputted, but its been a little bit.
A provider routing middleware with the goal of increasing authorization rates is likely not even an attractive business in markets like the US and Europe where you probably can defer to a single payment provider like Stripe for maximum checkout reliability.
This is not the case in Latam. Authorization rates are way lower and anti-fraud heuristics and models by local payment providers are less sophisticated. Most growing business in Latam end up in a situation where they neeed to re-route payments to increase their authorization rates and sometimes in the need to build very strict checkouts that harm conversions but that are needed to avoid a high volume of rejected transactions.
Plug is an API to manage multiple payments providers. Through a single integration, businesses can connect to multiple providers and route transactions between them.
It’s hard to know who the right payments provider for your business is. In the early stage you may care most about a fast integration, later you're looking for lower fees and more payment methods, and finally for better acceptance rates and fail-over options. We built Plug so companies could focus on their core business. With our multiple connections, provider-agnostic vault, and routing engine, our users always work with the best provider, on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Working with multiple providers means you can optimize costs and acceptance rates through routing and retries, and that you will be able to avoid lock-ins.
Brazilian merchants in particular change their payment provider frequently. They do this to support multiple local payment methods, to try and improve the worst acceptance rate in Latin America (77% according to Visa), and to reduce their costs, which in some cases can be 10% or more of the transaction.
Alex was at Braintree, Marcel was at Gympass, and Thiago was at Medicinae. We got the idea from seeing our best clients, companies like Uber, AirBnb, and iFood, build their own payment abstraction layers to work with different providers. We've built software that allows any business to do the same: one integration for multiple connections, and the ability to always transact with the best provider without having to write extra code.
Rei do Pitaco has been using Plug to reduce their costs and support multiple payment methods through different providers. CartX has been using Plug to offer multiple providers to their client base without having to integrate each provider. Simplix uses our product to optimize costs by routing to the least expensive provider for each transaction. We're looking forward to hearing your comments!