Why We Are Building Pagos

Why We Are Building Pagos

Payment processing can no longer be a checkbox for running your business well; it is a critical part of long-term growth strategy and execution. We believe that demystifying payments via consolidated data and insight APIs can accelerate business growth and create long-term customer relationships or even enable new companies/business models. 

Simplifying the Complex

Pagos is here to give you the building blocks to supercharge your business. Untether yourself from legacy systems, inflexible platform providers, and payment processor limitations; don’t let payments get in the way of commerce.   

After many years in the payment industry, we have heard the same type of questions, needs, and operational limitations expressed over and over by so many businesses. Companies of all sizes need more data, more tools, and more knowledge to better optimize their payments infrastructure. That is why we started Pagos.

The payments landscape is complex and getting more complicated: 

• Customer behavior changes 

• Digitization of commerce

• Infrastructure moving to the cloud, unbundling architecture and enabling easier orchestration and vendor relationships 

• More and more payment channels (in-person, online, mobile web, iOS/Android SDKs, partner websites, etc.)

• Many companies going global faster and sooner

All these aspects require businesses to become more dynamic in how they get paid and establish long term customer relationships. Payments can enable new business models—consider Uber, where making payments disappear from the experience was key for their early success. Or payments can block the execution of new ideas, even very important ones for a company.

Engineering API Building Blocks 

Payment processing is fundamental to customer relationships, revenue, and the bottom line, yet most companies do not have the tools, data, knowledge, or support to develop and execute an optimized payment strategy. This results in higher operating costs, lost revenue, and unnecessary friction, making execution of business strategy a lot harder than it should be.

You should not have to build an in-house team of experts on all dimensions of the payments environment to thrive as a business. That’s what we're here for. We’re building API-driven microservices—what some are now calling primitives—via one platform focused on delivering data and insights you need to scale better and faster while focusing precious resources on what is unique to you and your business. The Pagos platform consolidates and ingests commerce and payments data from your current payment stack and partners through a simple setup and no code. Once the data’s ingested, our platform provides immediate awareness and clear, actionable advice as well as tools for you to deliver world class payment strategies and results. And if you crave greater customization and flexibility in how you receive and use that insight, use our APIs to optimize your flows further. It also benefits your vendors and processing partners: if businesses execute more effectively, both parties grow revenue together.

Delivering Awareness and Advice for Action

Our core areas of focus are all about functioning as a customer centered, data powered, and tech enabled company:

• Awareness: provide clear data insights and visualizations across payment processors, channels, and technology stacks to make the right decisions for your business.

• Advice: enable understanding and tailored insight of your specific context.

• Action: deliver easy to use tools to drive and execute decisions which enable your business to thrive.

The services that we are working on in the short term are:

• The Pagos Platform to connect your existing payment processors and pull in all your commerce data with no code needed. We pull historical data and update automatically as you transact.

• APIs for customization and innovation.

• Immediate visualizations of your payment data so you understand how you are performing in all the ways that matter. We call this service Peacock (currently in closed pilot).

• Automatic notifications—plus the option to configure your own—on payment trends or problems, no matter how complex your setup. We call this Canary (currently in closed pilot).

• Up-to-date BIN details to help you manage your customers, migrate to 8 digits, or track your costs. We call this Parrot.

We will soon add:

• Network Tokenization Service: the easiest way to enable Network Tokenization for your business, separate from your processing partner so you can implement it more freely: get access to this powerful capability with a simple API and start to see the benefit for your top line. 

• Account Updater Service: keep your customers’ cards on file and updated independently from your processing partners with a simple API with data direct from the networks.

Our services will help you better understand your payments environment, enable you to execute on strategies, and unlock new revenue more quickly than ever before without having to change the providers you work with.

Building a Culture of Community

When my two co-founders and I started Pagos, our decision to be a remote-first company was influenced first by our own locations: East and West Coasts of the US and in Singapore. We also have and want to maintain a global focus on companies’ needs and help them solve complex problems more easily wherever they’re located. For this we need local views and experiences mixed into the strategy from day one. 

Building easy to use APIs and services to enable others to do more with less is not easy, and we need to hire the smartest and most experienced payments experts wherever they live to help deliver on our mission. If we’re restricted to hiring people within commuting distance of a physical location, we not only miss out on talented people who choose or need to live elsewhere but on the broader range of backgrounds, identities, and perspectives you get when hiring from different regions and countries. Doing so will also help us create better services and outcomes as more diverse thinking and backgrounds are added to the mix.

A large part of our mission is focused on fostering a community of learning and growth across the payments industry. We have to focus on our culture from the start to deliver on that: the environment we promote within our company impacts what that community will look like externally. So it’s critical to embody practices which open doors to make us more equitable and diverse, promote advocacy for each other and our customers, and strive to make the industry more transparent. We know this comes with many challenges and are committed to learning and iterating as we go. We welcome your feedback and insights, as we are growing fast and want to stay accountable.

Contact us to learn more about what this could mean for you and your company or come join our team to build better commerce for everyone.