Ready for Action: Direct-to-Network and Faster to Value

Networks (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover) are the ultimate data source in card payments. They have the most context of anyone in the payments ecosystem, and they set the technological standards for digital transactions. They can be a wealth of information and resources for you, but you have to know how to best use their services: Network Tokens, Account Updater, BIN lists, and more. You may have also seen these types of services offered by your gateway, processor, or another payment service provider (PSP), each with varying degrees of functionality and network coverage supported. So which way do you go? What’s best for your business? 

Networks are a two-sided connection to issuing banks and PSPs, so they can leverage the information of all parties to drive value for your business, including knowing your customer better, improving authorization rates, and reducing fraud, chargebacks, and transaction costs. Let’s start by looking at how to best use them.

What Are Network Services and How Do You Access Them?

Network services—like the ones mentioned above—are products with a direct connection to network data to provide some benefit to your payments ecosystem. 

Let’s walk through a few examples:

• BIN Lists: This provides issuing bank, card product, interchange information, and more for all the BINs owned by a particular network. Accessing BIN data and getting to know your customers will reap tons of benefits for your company. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this blog post.

• Network Tokenization: This is a security standard to tokenize card data and link business context which improves authorization rates, reduces fraud, and reduces interchange fees

• Account Updater: You increase the likelihood of an authorized transaction by using updated card details for your customers. This is a program to get the most up-to-date information about your customers' card details.

While the value to your payments’ stack might already be clear, you may be wondering, “Do all networks have individual programs? Does that mean I have to be in contact with four or more networks to reap the value?”

The short answer is yes. Extremely large companies may be able to integrate directly into the networks individually, else you must use a PSP to access any network services that they provide. Of course, if you have multiple PSPs, you may need to sign up for network services with each PSP; this, of course, depends on whether they offer them to begin with and the functionality and ease of use meet your needs. Because this can take business and engineering resources and may duplicate network services fees, sometimes the ROI isn’t quite there to maintain all of the necessary relationships to effectively use network services. Perhaps more importantly, this complexity can create a poor checkout experience for your customers and result in abandoned carts.

Enter: Pagos' action suite.

Ready for Action

At Pagos, we offer access to direct-to-network services via one API integration for all networks. That means, you integrate with us, and we do all of the hard work to maintain connections and relationships with the networks on your behalf. Rather than having multiple network integrations—or multiple PSP integrations for the same network service—you can manage one relationship and one integration to reap the benefits of all the networks' data. This gives you more reach faster, is easier to maintain, and gives you control of how you build your customer experience.

It takes time—typically many months—to build direct connections to networks. You can integrate with Pagos, start using our services within a few days, and get back to the work that really matters: driving optimal performance across your payments stack. 

Our Direct-to-Network Services

Let’s walk through the network services from above and how Pagos provides them differently. 

• BIN Lists: Our product, Parrot, provides updated BIN lists weekly from Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, EBT, China Union Pay, JCB, and many other regional and local networks. BIN lists are updated weekly, which our customers then retrieve via an API call. It’s the easiest way to maintain updated BIN information for cardholder and payments performance analysis.

• Network Tokenization: Toucan by Pagos is a one-stop-shop for all your tokenization needs. Tokenize Primary Account Numbers (PANs), fetch cryptograms, and manage your tokens via one API. We currently support Visa and Mastercard, with AMEX and Discover on the way!

• Account Updater: Our product, Loon, is a network-independent account updater service that supports Visa, and soon, Mastercard, AMEX, and Discover. With Loon, you can manage one PAN list to receive account updates from any network.

At Pagos, we know that your data belongs to you. That’s why whenever you register cards with us, you can always get the information back via your API integration.

Our product pipeline is always growing! Be sure to check back for more information.

Interested in learning more about Pagos and our payments solutions? Connect with our team today!