Enhance Your Payments Optimization Strategy With Clean and Comprehensive Data

In our previous blog series on payments optimization, we outlined the five key objectives of any optimized payments strategy. In pursuit of these objectives—be it attempts to increase revenue, decrease costs, or fight fraud—you need easy access to your comprehensive payments data. Only with this data, can you perform the in-depth analysis necessary for identifying opportunities for growth and optimization.

Accessing usable payments data presents a unique challenge due to the disparate nature of data originating from different sources. Each processor presents your data differently and in their own preferred formats. Instead of building out excruciatingly manual processes for harmonizing disparate data into a usable form for analysis in your preferred tools, we recommend Puffin by Pagos. This revolutionary tool gives you direct access to our payments data warehouse and will streamline and optimize the management of payments data; in other words, it’s a data engineer’s dream tool. In this blog post, we'll explore the many benefits of Puffin and how it empowers data engineers to unlock the full potential of payments data!

Understanding Puffin: A Game-Changing Solution

At its core, Puffin addresses the fundamental challenge of harmonizing disjointed payments data from multiple processors. Every processor treats payments data differently, leading to inconsistencies, discrepancies, and headaches for data engineers. Puffin solves this problem by normalizing fields and creating a consistent, clean data stream. This harmonized data stream is then passed back to users, ready to integrate with existing systems and workflows. With Puffin, data engineers no longer have to suffer the complexities of mapping and time delays, and can instead focus on gaining actionable insights and integrating payments data into more decision making and operational workflows.

Key Benefits

Puffin offers a plethora of benefits that make it indispensable for data engineers:

• Simplified Data Integration: Puffin's no-code data connectors enable the effortless creation of interoperable data. Send all your payments data to Pagos from any processor and we’ll take care of the rest—all without any coding required on your end!

• Normalized Data Streams from Multiple PSPs: Puffin normalizes data from various payment service providers (PSPs), ensuring clarity and consistency across data streams. Say goodbye to reconciling different decline codes from providers like Braintree or Adyen—Puffin automatically categorizes and provides detailed responses. We don’t hide anything either, so you can still access the original processor-provided codes and details if you want them!

• Comprehensive Data Details: Puffin uniquely offers both aggregated and detailed transaction-level data downloads, catering to the diverse needs of customers. Whether you need high-level insights or granular details, Puffin has you covered.

• Data Enrichment: Puffin enriches transactions with additional data points at no extra cost. This includes normalized issuer bank names, transaction details, card types, network and payment method types, and potential alternative processing routes. These enrichments leverage Pagos' sophisticated BIN database, providing users with actionable insights and detailed BIN information.  

• Native Support for Labeling: We also let you drive complex custom enrichment  by allowing you to override default values or add new data based on your own rules.

• Adaptable Integration and Comprehensive Data Lifecycle Management: Puffin seamlessly manages shifts in API or data formats from your processors, ensuring uninterrupted data integration even as external platforms evolve. Similarly, its datasets capture transactions and other entities in their latest stages, simplifying lifecycle management challenges when PSPs lack unique identifiers.

• Customizable Deduplication: Tailor deduplication rules to suit your needs based on card details, customer IDs, or specific metadata columns to ensure a clean and precise dataset.

• Flexible Data Delivery Options: Puffin supports delivery via SFTP or directly to AWS S3 buckets, facilitating easy integration with existing data transformation tools like Fivetran or direct plug-in to your data warehouse.

How Puffin Matches Up Against the Alternatives 

In comparing Puffin with other solutions, several key advantages become apparent. First off, remember those no-code integrations mentioned above? Puffin offers these simple, no-code connections for most of the popular processors in the market, including Adyen, Amex, Braintree, Chase, DLocal, Fiserv, Paypal, Stripe, and Worldpay. While other data warehouse tools offer no-code connections, their networks don’t match up. Similarly, Puffin’s out-of-the-box deduplication capabilities extend way past any alternatives  in the market. Puffin can help you clean up your data by building deduplication rules around custom flags and PSP-specific logic, thus reducing complexity for your payment analytics teams.

Behind the scenes, Puffin incorporates sophisticated error detection and handling mechanisms to ensure data integrity and reliability. This proactive approach to managing discrepancies and anomalies helps maintain the quality of data streams—a feature that can be less comprehensive in other no-code platforms. Additionally, Puffin's scalable architecture ensures high performance even as data volumes grow, making it an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. With Puffin, data engineers can tackle the inherent challenges of using payments data with confidence, knowing that they have the most robust and reliable solution at their fingertips.

Elevating Your Payments Data Integration with Puffin

Puffin by Pagos isn't just an ELT (extract, load, and transform) tool for syncing raw data from various processors into a single data lake; it’s an unmatched solution for accessing harmonized payments data to simplify and enhance any payments optimization strategy. With its intuitive functionality, comprehensive data details, adaptable integration, and customizable features, Puffin empowers data engineers to unlock the full potential of any payments data integration. Say goodbye to data inconsistencies and hello to actionable insights with Puffin by Pagos! Contact us today to get started.