As a payment scheme, your role is to enable vendors to get their products certified and start running transactions in the field.

You will have to be agile in doing this. This would make it successful both for the vendors and the schemes.

Look at the success of UPI transactions in India. The success can be attributed to the ease of use and ease of implementation of the infrastructure.

How do you bring this kind of ease to every form factor?

This is a question that most payment schemes are grappling with, except for the big boys like MasterCard, Visa, Discover, Amex, and JCB.

How do you get to managing product deployment easily?

The payments industry is a regulated one. Every product before they are introduced in the market needs to be certified to perform transactions.

This means there is an extensive certification process the payment scheme will have to follow, which is both time-consuming and complex for the vendors.

How do you ease the certification process for vendors?

Vendors will have to:

1. Register themselves with the payment schemes
2. Access the specifications document
3. Ensure they have the required infrastructure
4. Book a certification slot with the payment scheme
5. Test their products
6. Submit the test logs to the payment schemes
7. Get the letter of approval
8. Deploy the product in the market

There are two main challenges that a vendor faces:

1. It takes a lot of time before the certification slot is allotted
2. If anything fails in the certification process, the vendor will have to go through another iteration, which means booking another certification slot and paying for it.

This invariably results in lost time for the vendors.

How do you avoid lost time and related opportunity costs?

Payment schemes can provide test simulators that vendors can use to debug their products before booking the certification slot with the scheme. This will ensure they get the certification in the first iteration itself.

Besides, they should have a certification management system to be on top of the certification process – both the payment scheme, as well as the vendors, will have visibility on onboarding, certification status, pass/ fail scenarios, and timelines.

We have a platform that can:

• Handle the entire certification management process from onboarding to LoQ.
• Support different versions of scheme specification – payment scheme can manage certification of different versions of specifications without any difficulties
• Simulate acquirers, issuers, networks, and terminals - making it easy for the vendors to debug and certify
• Handle both debug and certification scenarios
• Be deployed both on-premise and on the cloud
• Be integrated with third-party simulators and other debug and test tools

Would you be interested in knowing more?

We are putting together a Webinar on the topic, “The why, what, and how of simulators in validating acquirers, issuers, and networks.”

This webinar was held on the 12^th of April, 2023.