The payment industry is currently going through tectonic shifts, and innovation is happening rapidly, with most countries boasting of real-time payment systems. It helps reduce cash flow pains by allowing merchants to receive their revenues quickly.
It is through the usage of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
APIs allow systems to interact better with one another, making everyone in the ecosystem securely transmit data.
APIs are the “new normal” in the payments space, where businesses can tap into your APIs and quickly build their solutions to add value to the end-user.
API-based payment systems are used for accepting payments, P2P transfers, testing new revenue channels, and integration with multiple partners.
Efficiency, flexibility, and speed are the three key benefits that API-based payment solutions provide.
Efficiency and speed – API-driven software ensures that there are fewer bugs and better stability of the products. You can add new functions by merely adding APIs, and it significantly reduces cost and time in your product development.
Flexibility – API-based products differentiate between the frontend and backend and due to which they are easily customizable. It is often possible to allocate multiple services, and they can be tailor-made.
Payment APIs
Payment APIs ensure frictionless onboarding, make it secure, and provide rich functionality and flexibility.
Most banks are also opting for open banking infrastructure through which they onboard their customers to accept payments easily. APIs typically power open banking solutions.
Stripe, PayPal, Dwolla, PayTM, RazorPay, Payoneer, and LevelUp are significant players in the API space. In India, most digital payment providers and aggregators use the UPI platform, which is entirely API-driven for their real-time payments.
Besides, there are a bunch of Payment API enablers. With the growth of the real-time payments ecosystem powered by APIs, it becomes imperative that there is a seamless onboarding of payment providers.
This onboarding is what is enabled by API testing and accreditation of providers.
API testing platforms should ideally be cloud-hosted, allowing multi-user and multi-tenant validation and testing of the APIs to onboard them. This onboarding can be a part of a payment scheme’s initiatives, a UPI-platform initiative, or a bank’s initiative.
API testing platforms can help you onboard payment providers and service providers quickly within a week. All they have to do is write up the test cases based on your business process and workflow, and define the validation library. The entire process of API testing can be enabled on the platform anywhere between 48 hours and a week. This timeline is assuming that the test plans are already in place.
Once this is done, the platform can be used to perform API testing and analysis with automated type approval for the onboarding of providers.
