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Nate Hughes
CRO / Co-Founder

Nate Hughes is a veteran in the payments industry with over 23 years experience. Nate began his career in payments at Authorize.net, now owned by Visa and a leading payment gateway. He currently serves as the Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder of Zift. 
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Marc Roberts
COO / Co-Founder

Marc Roberts is the COO and Co-Founder at Zift. Marc has over 15 years of experience in the payments industry helping businesses optimize payments and software companies embed payments into their platforms.
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Integrated Payments: Re-Defining The Terms

Integrated Payments

Key Takeaways:

Rapid Evolution in Payment Solutions: The payments industry is undergoing a drastic transformation, redefining how merchants onboard, process transactions, and manage financial technology. The rise of integrated payments, part of the FinTech revolution, is fundamentally reshaping the financial landscape.
Integrated Payments Simplification: Companies like Zift are pioneering simplified, integrated payment solutions. Through concepts like “Zift Payments as a Service” (ZPaaS), they aim to offer a streamlined, technology-driven approach for merchants seeking intuitive applications, instant onboarding, transparent pricing, and user-friendly interfaces.
Tech Community’s Search Challenge: Despite the innovation, there’s a terminology challenge within the tech community. Savvy developers and integrators aspire to offer integrated payment solutions but struggle to identify or search for them online. Establishing a searchable term like “Payments as a Service (PaaS)” becomes essential to bridge this gap.
Shifting Industry Norms: As the industry continues to evolve, the need for an integrated platform for payment solutions becomes paramount. A significant redefinition across the board is imminent, reflecting a profound shift in how payments are perceived and accessed in the digital sphere.

What Constitutes a Fully Integrated Payments Solution?

Recently our Managing Director of Operations was on the web, and he came across a very interesting post (a question, really) about integrated payments on a very well known payment gateway platform’s developer community forum. The question was as follows:

Title: Acting as a CC Processor for SaaS

“…I would like to offer fully integrated payment solutions where the business does not have to have a payment processor or gateway. Does anyone know how this works? How does the money get sent to the business (merchant)? I’ve tried searching for solutions but I don’t even know the correct terminology to use when searching…”
As we sat contemplating this inquirer’s honest question, we had to chuckle a little bit. The reason…not more than 4 months prior to this we were having the exact same discussion about how to properly define the terms pertaining to “payment facilitation”, “payments as a service”, “integrated processing solutions”, “integrated payments”, or a myriad of other terms so that those lost souls searching the web would be able to find out more about it, or even better, find us so we can help them do it!

It’s no question, the payments world as we know it is going through a total transformation in the way new merchants are boarded, transactions are processed, and reported…essentially it’s a total facelift. The world of financial technology “FinTech” is absolutely blowing up, in big and positive ways, and payment facilitation (aka) integrated payments is a big part of that.

Are There Companies that Offer Fully Integrated Payments Solutions Online?

There are a handful of companies, with Zift being a leading provider of these integrated payments services, that are racing to be the logical choice for merchants who want a simplified application, an instant onboarding experience, easy to understand pricing, and a simple streamlined interface when accepting payments. Let’s face it, the draconian days of filling out an 8-page paper application, going through an arduous underwriting process, giving away your firstborn, connecting multiple systems (gateway and merchant account, for example) and signing with blood are going bye-bye.

What’s crazy, however, is there is an entire segment of the market who are savvy developers, software providers, and integrators who know they want to offer an integrated payment solution to their downstream customers but don’t even know what to call it or how to search for it.

To the Rescue: Zift’s Payment as a Service

At Zift, we coined the phrase “Zift Payments as a Service” (ZPaaS). What does that mean? First of all the name alone should help an ISV, developer, integrator, etc. to better understand that if they’re offering Software as a Service (SaaS) products to their customers, and the topic of payments arises, searching online for PaaS providers would surely make logical sense.

It also means that we’re looking at payments much differently than the days of the MLS agent, ISO, or MSP model. The driving force behind this is technology, technology, technology. From an integrated payments perspective, we don’t offer payments coupled with good technology. We are technology companies offering payments as part of its core competency. It’s a total paradigm shift in thinking.

Back to my original point, the inquirer’s question was valid. There is a huge void in the market right now where merchants and developers want a simplified solution that bundles all the necessary components for accepting payments in a more streamlined environment. Those solutions absolutely exist…Zift’s Payments as a Service (ZPaaS) is a great example of doing just that for these folks.

The Online World Will Come to Know Payment Facilitation

The question is what terminology can we “coin” or use so that the tech community, and ultimately all who search the web will subconsciously and automatically choose “Payments as a Service (PaaS, or terms like it) as a searchable word or phrase when looking for integrated payment service providers. As things continue to shift and evolve and more and more are looking for an integrated platform for offering payments, the industry as we know it will be completely redefined across the board, and not just in its attempt to define a few keywords or phrases.

Here’s How We Can Help

If you’re interested in learning more about the ever-evolving world of integrated payments and how a single company (Zift) can help incorporate such technologies to your platform, click the button below to notify our sales & integration team.

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