Sweet baby cash. It’s hard to part with, and when you do spend it it comes with lots of analysis and reasoning. We know how important it is to keep as much money in your pocket as you can. That’s why we have broken down how Modo can help save money in your payments operations.
There are three buckets that most basic payment operational expenses fall into: maintenance, capital expense, and headcount.Maintenance
Most large enterprises have at least 8 payment service provider (PSP) connections around the world whether that be to processors, acquirers, payment methods or another payment service. For a high volume organization, maintenance on those integrations is going to cost millions of dollars every year. We are simply focusing on technology maintenance for this basic analysis and not looking at back office expenses. When a PSP changes their API? That’s maintenance. When something breaks in the code? That’s maintenance. We’ve heard from some payment methods that they are dedicated to updating their APIs every three months. That is going to require a lot of maintenance.
Capital Expense
Now, what happens to your expense when you need to add a new PSP or significantly modify one? That is going to add significant capital expense. We’re assuming here that you’re only tackling one major project each year. This could be related to the barrage of new compliance requirements merchants are facing or because you want to get connected to a new customers around the globe using a local payment method. A very large international ecommerce player we were speaking to in early 2019 told us it was costing them $3-5 million to integrate 5 new PSPs. And that number makes sense because integrations are big lifts! You have to certify each and every connection. They have to be wired into all your support systems from ERP to CRM to your eCommerce and order management system.
Headcount
Headcount is the last piece of the puzzle. Since we don’t live in the age of Terminator (yet, we’re working on it) we still need to have humans in the loop alongside our technology. The headcount we’re referring to here includes back-office employees managing the settlement process and ensuring your fees from your PSPs are correct for each and every transaction. The number dedicated to handling this process largely depends on the number of payment services you’re using. Many of the organizations we’ve seen have required one employee per PSP to manage settlement.
Here is a very simple example of what your payments expenses could look like:
|
Basic Expenses |
Maintenance |
Capital Expense |
Headcount |
Total Expenses |
|
Mega Enterprise |
$1,000,000 |
$2,000,000 |
$450,000 |
$3,450,000 |
|
Enterprise |
$500,000 |
$1,000,000 |
$270,000 |
$1,770,000 |
|
Middle Tier |
$300,000 |
$750,000 |
$180,000 |
$1,230,000 |
There are a variety of other expenses that we did not include in our basic analysis. Other expenses you should be thinking about include additional implementation costs, security costs (as well as the cost of a potential breach), any PCI or other regulatory certifications you’re required to have, and any additional orchestration you’ve added into your payments operations like switch functionality.
How Modo Steps In
Maintenance
Modo makes connector maintenance a thing of the past. Every time there is an API change from a payment service it’s on Modo to make sure your connection is stable and ready to go.
So let those payment services switch up their APIs and requirements! We’ve got you.
Capital Expense
Modo already has connections to dozens of PSPs and payment methods around the world, and are working towards hundreds more. With one connection to Modo, you can have access to all of those current connections AND any connection that we make in the future. If we don’t have a connection you need, we can get it done within 2 to 3 sprints (that’s 4 to 6 weeks for the non-agile people).
Headcount
With Modo’s settlement process, you could easily get through your reporting with half of your current full time employees managing settlement. Modo automates settlement and reconciliation by giving you a unified view of your transactions regardless of which PSP or payment method that was used for that transaction. Our management portal ensures you know which transactions are out of the ordinary and should be given special attention, and which ones are are in line with your current PSP contracts.
More opportunities to save
Because Modo has the functionality of a payments hub, gateway, and switch all in one you will also be able to utilize our routing options like least-cost routing, failover, Assurance, tier balancing, and more. Using Modo, you will have the power to switch between processors with the click of a button (literally) which puts you in a much better position to negotiate your rates. And if one of your providers fails on you (which happens: Example 1, Example 2) you won’t be out tons of money! You can quickly route transactions to a backup provider.
Modo Pricing
Modo offers pure payment technology. We don’t play in the actual money movement, and offer our product for a flat monthly fee. That’s right. You will know every month what you’re going to be paying. No per transaction fees that can go sky high. The more you use us, the more value you get. You will get use of our payments platform, all the payments connections you need, access to a dashboard with one view into all of your transactions, configurable routing options, and unified settlement and reconciliation reporting among other features.
Check out how much Modo would cost you using our pricing tool at www.modopayments.com/pricing. We’d love to hear from you about how we can help optimize your payments operations and save you money!
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