Paya Connect Promises Increased 'acceptance Capabilities' Like Apple Pay To B2B Merchants

A payment solutions vendor called Paya on Wednesday launched a platform it said will make it easier for B2B merchants to accept Apple Pay, Android Pay and other point-of-sale and transactional options from their customers.

Paya, which is based in Atlanta, is aiming Paya Connect at enterprise developers in health-care, the non-profit sector and other markets. The platform, which is based on a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and code libraries, will allow software teams to create systems for managing everything from mobile payments to complex fund transfers in a secure way without having to install additional hardware or other software products, the firm said.

Besides click-to-pay invoicing and recurring payment capabilities, Paya said the four products within Paya Connect will be able to accommodate credit and debit cards, automated clearing house (ACH) or electronic funds transfer (EFT) transactions, electronic benefit transfer (EBT), and flexible spending account (FSA) transactions. Global data enrichment features, meanwhile, will be important for particular B2B scenarios, according to Greg Cohen, Pay’s CEO.

“Paya has developed a proprietary formula for optimizing purchasing card transactions to not only qualify for the lowest rates available, but also pass key data elements to the business,” Cohen told B2B News Network via e-mail. “In addition, we have created additional fields in our API’s to capture and push data to our clients for everything from complex reconciliation to tracking of PO’s and inventory.”

Paya has been delivering solutions to manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors for years both in a stand-alone fashion as well as thru deep integrations with client’s ERP systems, Cohen said. As it continues to develop its suite of ERP integrations, he said the firm will be able to expand the reach of B2B clients that can take advantage of its more specialized services.

Part of the problem in many B2B organizations is that the developers it employs are typically focused on applications to enable productivity or information exchange. They don’t necessarily have deep expertise in payments, a space that has evolved rapidly and is highly influenced by behaviors in the consumer market. Paya said Paya Connect will mean they can turn around projects more quickly and easily, and integrate them more readily as regulations or protocols change.

Part of the value in Paya Connect will come with the way it eases certain aspects of financial transactions. The platform has been designed to securely store and ‘tokenize’ all cardholder information, for example, to allow merchants to store it for recurring payments, and automatically updates expired credit and debit cards for increased approvals.

This kind of user experience is particularly critical given who tends to be leading the change in terms of how B2B firms integrate payments into the customer experience, Cohen added.

“Key decision makers often sit within the finance department but as payments really becomes part of the user (buyer and/or seller) experience, the decision-making team often expands to the marketing department,” he said.