The Green Sheet Online Edition

November 13, 2017 • Issue 17:11:01

Readers Speak
Stripe challenge follow-up

In the Readers Speak feature of our Oct. 9, 2017, issue, we published a note from Ryan King, of Guardian Payment Systems Inc., in which he asked for information about available gateway options. In seeking to compete directly with Stripe in certain vertical niches, he has encountered developers who have said the code for the gateways he showed them was way out of date.

We provided a helpful response from Matt Hyde, Vice President of Marketing & Partner Development at NMI. The question and answer can be found here: www.greensheet.com/emagazine.php?article_id=5508. While King appreciated Hyde's generosity in taking time to respond with pertinent information, King said his question wasn't answered completely, so he provided some follow-up thoughts, as follows:

• My question was based less on the aggregation model and management tools; I am pretty familiar with that. I was asking more along the lines of how robust Stripe's technology is. The ease of integration for developers, integration tools being easy-to-understand, up-to-date code in all major programming languages, etc. That portion is where I feel the technology is lacking.
• The reason for Stripe's growth isn't the aggregation portion, in my opinion. They realized that the developers are the ones really making this decision, not the merchants, and they catered their growth strategy around making it easy for developers. Developers are outgrowing Stripe for free, no rev share, and merchants tend to take the advice of their developer when building an ecommerce site.
• I haven't found a gateway that ISOs and MLSs can resell that lives up to Stripe when presenting our solutions to developers, and their concerns have nothing to do with aggregation and the benefits associated with it.

We will welcome perspectives on this issue from payment pros who have expertise on payment gateway technology, as well as experience working with developers.

Ask us!

Have you encountered technology challenges while seeking to maintain a competitive edge in the payments world? How have you solved them? Do you have unresolved tech issues? Tell us at greensheet@greensheet.com and we'll look for industry veterans who can provide informed insights.

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