Payments Consulting Network Technical Director, David Lunt, caught up with Scott Lingard, Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of payFURL to discuss their purpose-built Australian payment orchestration platform. An emerging way of conducting payments, Scott, shared valuable industry insights through his unique perspective.

Within the payments industry, over the last few years, there has been a rise in the understanding and use of payment orchestration platforms. Payment orchestration platforms connect to multiple payment providers, acquirers, and banks to provide customers with the ability to checkout with their payment method of choice. In times gone past, merchants would have had to individually integrate each provider into their store front – orchestration allows for a ‘plug and play’ style solution for all merchants.

payFURL is an Australian-based, purpose-built payments orchestration platform and supports dozens of payment providers, servicing over 50 countries, payFURL provides merchants, platforms and even payment service providers a new way to manage their online payments. A central management platform simplifies the reconciliation and management process of accepting payments online – once a complicated task, payFURL has truly streamlined the operations.

Scott emphasises that payFURL was born out of a desire to build a capable solution to the growing international payments space. Combining the knowledge and experience of three industry professionals, united over their passion for business growth, technology, and payments – the team has worked closely for three years to develop the ultimate suite of tools to ensure all businesses are maximising their payments infrastructure.

“We are a capable team of passionate individuals, our goal for the payments space has never been more clear.”

payFURL is an Australian-based company which provides a purpose-built next generation payment orchestration platform and supports many payment providers, servicing over 50 countries. The company focuses on providing payment solutions to large, complex merchants, online service providers (such as platforms, ERP and accounting packages) and payment service providers and acquirers.

DL: What payments services do you offer merchants and not-for-profit organisations in Australia?

SL: Our systems and platform are incredibly versatile and can be used by a majority of Australian businesses, should they conduct payments online. Our core focus has never been clearer – payFURL is redefining how we manage payments in Australia, and globally. We offer a ‘plug and play’ style solution – reducing development related headaches. No matter what your business does, the benefits of our orchestration technology will dramatically change the way you conduct business.

DL: Are there any industry sectors or client types that you focus on for merchant services?

SL: We don’t limit our focus to just one market segment. We are an orchestration platform for all. payFURL enables any merchant to re-engineer their online payments ecosystems into something that otherwise was unrealistic, or simply too expensive to even contemplate.

Many discussions about payFURL start with the simple question – “if you could design your online payments in a utopian manner, what would it look like?” payFURL can help merchants realise that vision.

We view our target clients in three categories:

• Online Merchants – payFURL can help them accelerate growth and provide their customers a seamless payment experience.

• Online Service Providers – payFURL helps providers (such as ecommerce platforms, accounting packages and other SaaS platforms) a way to manage the multitude of payment connections they need to have to service all the different markets they offer their services in.

• Payment Gateways and Acquirers – the unique and powerful tools payFURL’s platform offers can help enhance the offering of many payment service providers and acquirers, helping them retain and attract customers who are looking to expand their payment offering.

DL: What do you see as your key strengths with respect to merchant services?

SL: By implementing payFURL’s orchestration platform, merchants leave the complex API integrations to our experts and focus on the growth of their business. Our intuitive system can process transactions in the most cost-effective way and manage all PCI compliance challenges. payFURL allows merchants to:

• Reallocate developer resources away from gateway implementation – allowing their developers to focus on increasing the customer experience in other ways.
• Enter new markets previously unattainable due to time and resource constraints.
• Maximise revenue through transaction optimisation and Dynamic Smart Routing.

With payFURL, a merchant’s development team can be focused on improving their core offering rather than maintaining payment infrastructure.

DL: What do you see as your key differentiators with respect to merchant services?

SL: Purpose Built Technology – payFURL’s orchestration platform has been purpose built, utilising the latest best practices and designs with no legacy in its platform’s history. This fact is critical to the scalability and efficiency of the platform moving forward.

• payFURL API – Is the engine room of the payFURL platform using the software architecture best practices to develop a secure, scalable, and adaptable API.
• payFURL Self Service Interface – Is the User Interface (UI) for payFURL clients to access their account and transactional data. The security on this is not only level 1 PCI Compliant but also a Multi Factor Authorisation login.
• payFURL SDK – Software Developer Kits (SDKs) are tools created to assist payFURL clients to connect to the payFURL API in a self-service manner. This is critical to the longer-term payFURL objective of being mostly a SaaS solution.
• payFURL Hosting – The platform is currently on AWS, designed to scale based on load, resilient against most failure scenarios and secure from the ground up.
• Platforms – Use the SDKs to connect to payFURL’s API to access all the PSP connections.Platforms log into payFURL through the payFURL UI to manage their account, manage workflows, enter PSP account details. Platforms can even enter their Clients PSP Account details and pipe transactions down that path. The control once connected to payFURL is the Platform’s.
• PSPs – Although the PSP keeps the commercial agreement directly with the platforms, the PSP no longer has multiple clients to maintain and update their API connections with.
• PCI Compliant – The Global Payment Card Industry’s governing body (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/) has its own certification for security and business practices; Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI). payFURL is level 1 PCI Compliant passing a certified penetration test by a compliance officer, as well as having all supporting documentation required for level 1 PCI compliance.

Scalable technology – payFURL is designed to be able to scale in the following critical areas:

• Transactional throughput.
• Expansion into different regions.
• Number of API connections.
• Number of different payment methods.

Online payments are payFURL’s core business, the platform has been designed for exactly that.

DL: What were your key achievements over the last 12 months in merchant services?

SL: The last 12 months for payFURL have been nothing but monumental – our core vision and drive for success has grown exponentially with the achievement of key milestones and the creation of new ones. To list only a few significant achievements in the previous calendar year would diminish the magnitude of what we’ve done. Our standouts are:

• The development and implementation of our Dynamic Smart Routing product.
• The development of our Vault – allowing our clients to securely store credit card details.
• The constant rate of new payment service provider connections we are adding to the platform, the number of connections we have has grown faster than any other player in our space.

DL: What merchant services innovations do you have on your product/service roadmap for the next 12 months?

SL: The next 12 months will see us further refine our offering to the market, but key to this will be continuing to add new payment service provider connections to our platform. This will include a focus on local payment methods globally. As the move to paying for goods and services online is not slowing down anytime soon.

DL: What industry changes or trends to do you see occurring over the next 2-3 years that will have a major impact on your business and/or your clients?

SL: The pandemic has led to an acceleration in the shift towards paying for goods and services online, and this trend is expected to continue. This requires local payment methods to be available online and merchants to be prepared to adopt new payment technologies more quickly. Australia has already seen the introduction of new payment methods and other countries are likely to follow suit. A low-code or no-code orchestration layer that allows quick integration of new payment methods is becoming increasingly important to keep pace with these changes.

DL: What key criteria or features should a business consider when evaluating payments service providers?

SL: When looking at a payment orchestration platform the key features we see that clients need to look at are:

• Ease of integration of the API and the tools to integrate the API quickly.
• Number of connections and speed at which additional connections can be added. An orchestration platform won’t have every option, but it is how quickly they can add it which is important. It should be a matter of weeks – not months.
• Look for the strength of the value adds – having a myriad of connections is incredibly important, but tools such as Dynamic Smart Routing and a Vault are important to add more value and give you greater control on how your payments are processed.

Author: David Lunt, Technical Director, Australia, Payments Consulting Network.

David Lunt has spent over 25 years working in the emerging payment technology space.He is globally recognised as a leader in payments combining a deep understanding of the payments industry with innovative technical expertise. Over his career, he has advised numerous FinTech startups, product vendors, high street retailers, and global card schemes on how to adapt to emerging payment technologies and legislation.

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