Interview with WLPayments on the company's new payments platform

Your former platform was not very old. Why did you decide to launch a new one?

Sunil Jhamb: Market developments have been the driving force behind the inception of this new platform. We, at WLPayments, believe that if you do not compete with yourself, then somebody else definitely will. Hence, we want to keep innovating and keep delivering the best possible solutions to our clients. 

Chinmay Jain: In fact, we see incoming advancements in technology, like machine learning analytics for tracking customer behaviour or better success rates. Also, we are experiencing expeditiously faster learning curves because of the feedback we get from our clients and partners. The fundamental idea is to continue building a payments ecosystem that can cater to our clients’ present needs and be well-equipped for the demands of the future. 

What are the highlights of the improvements introduced in the new platform? 

Chinmay: For the tech-savvy people reading this interview – we have containerised our architecture and are using microservices across the board. We have also become server agnostic, which has immensely reduced the possibility of us ever going down. The result is a three-dimensional characteristic improvement leading to the extreme flexibility, quick deployment, and robust performance. 

Sunil: We now build new solutions, independent from the platform, that cater to specific tasks or needs in general. We test and add them to our platform without interruption. A great example is the development of our Flex3DS & Routing solution. As substantial proof of our performance, this has led to up to 9% higher success rates. 

What do you think are the most critical challenges that your clients face today? How does the new platform help them in overcoming these challenges? 

Sunil: Our clients’ single most significant objective is to shift from a legacy platform to a platform that allows them to outcompete the payments fintech companies of today. Look, our clients are banks, payment service providers (PSPs), and acquirers. They want to serve both the mom-and-pop stores and the big merchants with international operations with the same expertise and efficiency. Our platform essentially provides them with the simplicity of a no-code payments platform in their look and feel that can serve the masses and the big merchants. 

Chinmay: Also, if needed, our clients get bespoke solutions for big merchants on top of our platform. We also provide separate routing engines and card vaults, for clients that are not PCI compliant. In particular, merchants with more extensive operations want integrations of new payment methods and a robust fraud detection and prevention system that is fast and secure. Our streamlined back-end operations are both efficient and well-equipped with more data points and better analytics. Our clients get what they require to elevate themselves to the next level. 

Another issue that payment companies confront is the need to comply with new rules and regulations. They need to be addressed quickly and incorporated into their payment solutions. We are now entirely capable of accomplishing this and, most importantly, without adding any friction for the end consumer. These things can generally take months if your platform is rigid. With our new platform, we minimise the time frames to days and hours rather than a few months – and we intend to further build upon this. 

You talked about a more user-friendly and tailored experience. Would you like to elaborate on that? 

Sunil: We are introducing the concept of acquirer agnostic open banking that will be very innovative compared to anything in Europe. We also made simple improvements – like providing merchants with the opportunity to accept wire transfers in a new country. Now they begin selling before they even receive confirmation from the acquirer for the local payment methods. We also made more complex improvements – for instance, our fully customisable reporting. This helps different people within our clients’ organisation obtain information that is relevant to their specific needs. However, stay tuned; there’s more to come! 

Chinmay: We ensure that customers have a personalised checkout experience based on criteria like location, risk level, and merchant loyalty. We even give our merchants the ability to tailor their customers' checkout experiences based on location, currency, risk score, website, and a variety of other factors. They can choose between different payment methods, page designs, risk checks, and checkout flows. Offering these options has resulted in a considerable decrease in cart abandonment and features like the instant retry option have helped them increase their revenue by a significant margin. We are looking at an improvement of up to 15% in the success rates across the board with our platform. 

We have further made the process of onboarding straightforward and quicker. Sometimes banks or PSPs are afraid of switching their merchant when moving to a new platform. However, we affirmatively guarantee zero downtime for the merchants during the switch. The process is entirely hassle-free, both technically and logistically. 

Do you think that the platform is future-ready as well? 

Chinmay: Given the nature of our architecture, the adoption of Microservices structure, successful Containerization, and a Serverless approach, we are as ready as we can be. Furthermore, adding new features quickly to our platform without jeopardising the present architecture has been made much simpler. So, we can definitely affirm that our clients’ businesses are in very safe hands. 

Sunil: I am sure that we have just got started with the innovations we can expect in payment methods, regulations, and risk management. We are not only ready but are a proactive forward force to further introduce developments in the realm of the payment industry. 

With the new platform being ready for the launch, how do you plan on taking it directly to the clients? 

Sunil: We use both online and offline marketing channels. Our website covers various areas related to our products, our objectives, and even online payments in general. However, we immensely value one-on-one conversations. Besides the online demos we also attend conferences to show our platform. So, if people want to meet us, we will be at Money 20/20, from 21 to 23 September, or visit our booth (J52) at iGBLive on 29 and 30 September. Both are in Amsterdam, where our head office is located. We invite everyone interested in our platform to visit us to have an in-person demonstration. 

About Chinmay Jain 

Chinmay holds an Engineering Degree from NIT Uttarakahnd University. He is a Gold Medalist and UK State winner for his academic accomplishments. As a CTO of WLPayments, he oversees the teams running all aspects of the IT infrastructure and application development. Chinmay has the end responsibility for product development and the Payments Platform. 

About Sunil Jhamb 

Sunil is the CEO and Founder of WLPayments, a trusted white-label global payments platform. With over 20 years of experience in consulting and sales, Sunil is an authority on international payments. Before this, Sunil founded Newgen Payments and worked at GlobalCollect as the director of global planning and strategy – developing corporate strategies and driving revenue opportunities globally.

About WLPayments

WLPayments offers a white-label payment gateway platform with secure plug-and-play fintech solutions for ISOs, PSPs, acquirers, banks, and online merchants. Our advanced orchestration of payments is integrated into a single-layered architecture with many innovative features, such as Intelligent Transaction Routing, Automated Reconciliation, and Smart Retries.