Acquiring-as-a-Service: How Modern Payment Technology Can Prepare Financial Institutions for New Possibilities

The dash towards digital banking is picking up pace across Asia. A majority of Southeast Asian consumers use online banking (52%) and mobile banking (69%) at least once a week, according to a recent Visa study.

The rapid shift to digital banking and payments has major implications for banks, merchants, and any other businesses that need to manage high volumes of transactions in a swift, affordable, and secure way.

Globalisation and digital transformation have driven a surge in payments innovation with the emergence of new technologies, products, and business models, according to a recent policy brief from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Acquiring-as-a-Service is one such innovation.

What is Acquiring-as-a-Service?

Acquiring-as-a-Service (AaaS) allows banks to outsource the development and maintenance of every aspect of their acquiring needs. Banks and other businesses with growing payments needs can save time, resources, and costs by using an AaaS provider that handles a range of acquiring activities in a more efficient and scalable way. For example, new merchant onboarding, authorization, transaction processing, settlements, and transaction reconciliation can all be radically simplified by partnering with an AaaS provider.

Why Banks Struggle With Acquiring

Let’s take a closer look at why AaaS is needed in the first place. Traditional banks and their international counterparts have long faced challenges modernising payment gateway services to offer their business, personal, and merchant customers a better experience.

• Contemporary payment technology has lacked the technical ‘plasticity’ to support a growing number of accruing needs and diverse set of new requirements coming from customers, partners, and regulators.
• As Capgemini noted many years ago, the global acquiring industry has been dominated by a few large players. This consolidation has restricted competition and meant many acquirers still run multiple legacy technology systems.
• Until recently, the technical solutions available to banks and many fintech companies have been rigid. They have been built only to support long-established businesses in a limited way.

Lastly, banks wanting to deploy the right features and functionalities have needed to resource an extraordinary amount of in-house technical work, just to ensure they can handle a limited number of merchant acquiring and payment processing activities.

Rapidly Elevate Your Merchant Acquiring Services

Opn’s Acquiring-as-a-Service platform has been built to address these longstanding problems.

Manage Every Step of Acquiring

From merchant onboarding and compliance management to fraud prevention and reconciliation, Opn has transformed numerous elements to meet the evolving needs of modern acquiring. Opn can provide configurable solutions across B2B, B2C, and business-to-government (B2G) models, including:

• Merchant management: Onboarding, underwriting, account configuration, fraud management, dashboards, value added services, various fulfillments and activations, among others.
• Transaction management: Tokenization, authentications, fraud management, routing and orchestration, authorization, clearing and settlement, payouts, and various others.
• Back office management: Automate reconciliations to simplify your accounting, monitor merchant accounts around-the-clock, and use the developer sandbox to continuously improve your offering.

Bundle Valuable Banking Services

The modularity and configurability of the Opn Banking product make it a powerful solution for large merchants, banks, independent software vendors (ISV), and growing fintech companies alike. Each component can be used independently or combined with other acquiring services, providing businesses with the freedom to customise their payment solutions according to their specific requirements. This adaptability makes Opn’s platform future-proof, easily moldable into the use cases that banks, fintechs, and ISVs need both now and in the future.

Future-Proof Your Platform

Our technical adaptability means we can offer a range of features that cater to both known — and undiscovered — use cases. Businesses can:

• Innovate quickly: By working with pre-built technology instead of building from scratch, you can speed up time-to-market, and always work with technology that is up to date.
• Get global coverage: Gain full acceptance and connection with global card schemes and major regional networks and accept multiple alternative payment methods.
• Add revenue streams: Gain control over the pricing model and enable greater levels of growth by streamlining merchant onboarding and account management.

We have a decade of experience in merchant acquiring, which can help local and international banks to redefine every aspect of their payment gateways, ensuring commercial success for their merchants and their merchants’ customers.

Moving to Modern Merchant Acquiring

Asia generated nearly half the global total of payments in 2019 and in 2020 payments providers accounted for 44 percent of the region’s aggregate banking revenues, according to McKinsey estimates. Harnessing AaaS may hold the key for banks and other businesses that want to earn a greater share of such revenues. Talk to an Opn expert today to get started.

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