Nowadays, everyone has a credit or debit card. Also, when it comes to company purchases, it is indispensable to have a bank account and a belonging card that you and your employees can use to pay. Not only in physical stores, but also for online purchases.

What is behind the integrations?

Credit and debit cards have been making our daily life easier for several years now. In some digitalized countries, such as in Denmark, the population almost forgot how to pay by cash since it is so much more convenient to pay by card. Especially when it comes to B2B transactions.

Online purchases are mainly built around online payments, which are built on integrated credit card processes. That being said, there are still some places where you can place an order and pay for the product upon arrival. Nevertheless, if you are planning to buy something from the web, you should be ready to pay for it online as part of the order placement. And as a business, if you wish to sell your products or services online, you should be ready to integrate with credit card payments. However, integrated payment systems can support your business with much more than simple credit and/or debit card processing.

Before we jump into what these integrations can really do for you and how they work, let us introduce some terminology first.

Integration

Generally speaking, it means unifying different things or matching them. In the programming world, integration refers to the action when data is united from different sources. This is a commonly used interaction, allowing easier information sharing and data processing between individual systems. 

Payment system

Based on Wikipedia, a payment system is a phrase used to describe any system supporting financial transactions or transfer of monetary value. Including any technology that makes value exchanges possible can be considered as a payment system.

Card processing

To phrase it simply, it is a process involving multiple technologies in order to allow card payments and data transmitting through individual systems. Therefore, it is considered a complex service. Different quality systems are provided by different companies.  

Credit card payment

Any transaction issued from a credit card is considered a credit card payment. This payment is based on the cardholder’s actual debt. Value transfer can take place in order to pay for any goods or services.

Debit card payment

Similar to credit cards, we talk about debit card payments whenever a transaction has been made from a debit card. In this case, however, the value of the goods or services is covered from the cardholder’s actual checking account.

Payment for sins can be delayed. But they can’t be avoided.

Shawn Ryan

Why do you need an integrated payment system?

By now, it is clear why you can’t allow your business not to support these payment methods anymore. But there is a lot more you can do through integrated credit card processing than improve your payment methods.

You probably know, that whatever happens digitally, involves data. Data that can be important and useful for your organization. With integrated credit card processing, you can cross-connect different systems and speed up your business flow. With this, you can achieve a lot more with way less effort. After all, that’s the point of integrations and digitalization. 

What can you actually do with integrated payment systems?

In a nutshell, these integrations push the data automatically between the connected systems. Here comes the question: What’s your benefit in that? We listed the main advantages of integrated payment systems below, but the main idea behind using integrations is that you can eliminate manual work or access information that otherwise you couldn’t. This data can help you optimize your business processes. 

For example in wholesale; order placements, your inventory level, shipping and invoicing details, accounting information can transmit data at once. Allowing you to connect the dots and speed up your customer service and your business in general.

How does an Integrated Payment System Work?

As we said, the main idea is to reduce the amount of manual work for you. Therefore, the way these integrations work is based on data fetching from different systems you are already using. Therefore, the integrated payment system will communicate with your other digital programs and fill in information that you have been doing manually. 

Each system has its own software behind it, based on coded programs supporting these interactions and making sure that the information is transmitted correctly. Here, it is important that you make sure that the integration system you decide to go with has matching data security protocols to your needs and expectations. 

The main idea behind the integration is that the system recognises which payment belongs to which customer and through this connection, it can cross-fill in information about the order or the customer itself. Therefore, you don’t need to manually enter the same information about the same customer again and again on different platforms.

How Integrated Payment System Solutions Help Your Business?

Another way integrated payment systems can save you time is by setting up recurring and scheduled payments. Through these features, your billing can step to the next level, while you can have ease of mind.

Limiting Errors

Connecting to saving time, one other amazing benefit of integrated payment systems is that with limiting the amount of manual human data entry, the number of errors is also reduced. How much do you usually spend on double-checking if everything is registered correctly? How much time do you “waste” on redoing tasks because of a silly mistake? 

Well, with an automated system, hopefully, no time is wasted because of mistakes. 

Limiting the errors is also beneficial when it comes to service providing. You might sell physical products, but there is always some sort of interaction between you and your customers. Through this interaction, you leave an impression that will influence how satisfied your customer is with your product and the likeness of them reordering. 

These payment processing methods will make sure that all information is registered correctly on time. So you can just relax and focus on providing the best product possible. 

Tracking and finding Information

Analysing crucial Data

You can not only gain access to data that you couldn’t before starting to use an integrated payment system. You will be also able to analyze this information and draw conclusions that can help you improve your business, or understand your customers better. These are advantages that can make the difference between you and your competitors. Therefore, you should never underestimate the importance of data and what can it be used for. 

Furthermore, you can also help your customers to understand their activities better, which can help them change their customer behaviour. Or it can help you to offer better deals. 

These are just a few examples of what you could take out of the information registered and analyzed by the integration systems. But the list is actually endless, depending on your organization’s needs and ways of doing business. 

This brings us to the conclusion of this article and our main message. You can, of course, find more benefits of using an integrated credit card processing solution.

Key Takeaways

At Turis we are big fans of digitalization, and we love everything that is remotely connected to automation, especially if it is implemented in order to support B2B activities. However, we know that what makes sense to one company might harm another. It is hard to say that you should just do what everyone else does. If for nothing else, then for the sake of doing it. You should make conscious decisions when you choose between system providers and when you decide which part of your workflow you wish to digitalise first. As we mentioned, data security is a crucial and sensitive part of all integrations. As a business owner, besides your own safety, you also have to take care of your customers’ security, which is a lot of responsibility. However, avoiding digitalisation is definitely not the right thing to do when it comes to data protection.

You are not alone in making these decisions, though! We are here to support you if you need advice or if you want to hear how other companies faced their challenges.

Furthermore, in case you are running your business internationally, then accepting foreign payments is a key part of your day-to-day work. SEPA scheme was invented to support international transactions in Euros. This is something you can definitely benefit from.