At Payment Magnates, we believe in speaking to those who know. The payment industry and the choices that merchants make for their businesses can be confusing and overwhelming. It is because of this that we encourage e-merchants to educate yourselves as much as possible in order to figure out what services and which providers would best serve you.
We hope to contribute to this process by presenting first-hand information from experts within the payment world.
We have, most recently, spoken to Paymill’s Managing Director Kilian Thalhammer, to answer some questions for you about various elements of processing such as Tokenization and chargebacks.
Payment Magnates: Tell us a little bit about PAYMILL and what PAYMILL does.
Kilian Thalhammer: PAYMILL offers the fastest and easiest way to accept Payments online. The developer-friendly REST API is flexible and easy to integrate. You can customize the check-out process the way you want or use the PAYMILL PayButton which enables an even easier integration. PAYMILL provides super-fast onboarding within a few days only and top-notch customer support. The API supports subscriptions and Mobile SDKs for iOS and Android are available. The company is active in 39 countries across Europe so far.
PM: You list tokenization as one of your service offerings. Can you please explain exactly how you handle the tokenization process?
KT: Tokenization is another way of saying ‘data substitution’. It is the act of using a substitute value, or ‘token’, which has no inherent value, in the place of data that does have value.
We use it for replacing sensitive credit card data with a token and store the sensitive data in our PCI compliant and secure environment. We are offering a vault for our merchants to store credit card data in a very secure way and then are able to process payments with just using the token (and so on realize an optimized check-out experience).
PM: How do you deal with merchant chargebacks?
KT: We made the process as transparent as possible for the merchant. Our vision is to bring the “offline” chargeback process to an easy and integrated process (including a pre-warning system for the merchant that he can act before a chargeback is definitely in place (not after)).
PM: How can merchants, in your professional opinion, best avoid chargebacks?
KT: Upfront, it is essential to have a transparent and easy check-out. And with integrating some fraud checks upfront (which we can provide also to small merchants) like excluding some BIN ranges and countries and some velocity and “pattern” checks to recognize professional fraud. Merchants should also use device fingerprinting to recognize fraud related computers and work with fraud identity providers as an enhanced service.
PM: What are the available “plug-ins and extensions”? What kind of merchant would benefit from this product? How is it different from other payment solutions?
KT: Plugins and Extensions are tools we provide to our customers to make the integration as easy as possible. We do not charge for them. They are just an enabler for the merchant and for us. Some of them are developed by the community, which makes us very proud to see “what is going on outside PAYMILL”.
PM: How do you see the future of online payment processing?
KT: Payment processing will become way easier for the end-customer. The value chain will change. Different players will “merge” and offer an integrated solution rather then this “piece by piece” approach we have today.
PAYMILL, which opened its doors in August 2012, is a German based payment processing company that has expanded to 39 countries and offers payouts in 23 currencies. It lists its specialties in Online Payment Solution, Recurring Payments, Credit Card Payments, Direct Debit, Mobile Payment (iOS, Android), Subscription and Payment for startups.
