There are a growing number of one-stop shop solutions out there for payments as the payments ecosystem becomes more and more complex. But, are those one-stop shops the right way to go for your payments operations? If you’re a large enterprise looking to turn payments complexity into a competitive advantage, it’s not. The control you lose when working with a one-stop shop solution is devastating to your business and customer experience. Modo has a different solution - payments orchestration.
In a recent webinar, Modo Chief Revenue Officer, Brian Billingsley, explained that Modo allows you to take control of your payments operations and save money in the process. You can check out the webinar recap here.
We fielded a lot of relevant questions about Modo’s payments orchestration platform during the webinar, and decided to get those FAQs answered on paper (or at least virtual paper).
Let’s get answering!
What is payments orchestration?
Brian gave an analogy to a conductor of an orchestra to sum up payments orchestration - the conductor isn’t the one playing any of the instruments, but they are telling the players when to play, get softer, faster, etc to create a beautiful collective sound. Modo is doing the same with payments. We do not hold, touch, or move money ourselves, but we are allowing you to route between payment providers, instruct how much volume should be going to each, and make real time decisions about your payment operations. An example would be if you want debit transactions to go to Processor A unless they are from a certain Bank B. You are able to set up those routing rules in our portal. You can decide to send credit to one provider, have credit options appear in the POS when transactions are over a specified amount, or pick specific regions to show credit options.
Modo’s payments orchestration platform handles the compliance issues and allows you to move between different payment partners based on what’s best for your business.
Is Modo both in-store and online?
Modo’s focus for the last few years was ecommerce and online, but we’ve been diligently working on our in-store capabilities and can now demo ISO 8583 in our API. Card present transactions can be managed in our portal in the exact same way (and in the exact same place) as card not present (CNP) transactions.
Can you explain Modo’s pricing structure?
Modo is priced as a flat, monthly SaaS fee instead of a per-transaction fee, like many payment service providers. Since we don’t hold, touch, or move money and aren’t getting in the money flow, you would still have to contract with and pay for the processors you want to use. Modo is a fee on top of your other payment partner agreements, but Modo in many cases enables you to go directly to different acquirers and payment methods, which allows you to get rid of gateway fees. Since Modo acts as an orchestration platform, we allow you to put different players in competition with each other for your business. You can use the best payment provider out there for each transaction - see who is the best by region, the best per payment method, etc - and are able to drive those costs down.
Our flat fee is based on a couple of things:
- Number of instances you have (example: If you’re based on North America but want to turn on payments in a new country where data privacy laws require you to keep the data within the borders of that country that would require another instance of our platform)
- Overall throughput
It’s a flat predictable cost, and the more you use Modo the cheaper the per unit cost gets. You can check out our transparency pricing at www.modopayments.com/pricing.
How does Modo handle loyalty?
In Modo’s Modal (our embedded checkout form), you can offer loyalty and any other proprietary methods of payment. You get to control the burn rates for those loyalty points and we can help you convert those loyalty points into a currency. Modo can present the loyalty points to your customer in different ways and can enable split tender transactions between loyalty points and other forms of payment such as a credit card.
Can I add a Point-of-Sale (POS) lending offering to the stack using Modo?
Absolutely, whether that’s a proprietary payment method or Affirm, Klarna, AfterPay, etc. Modo can add those payment methods to your payments stack both in-store and online. You can see all of the connections Modo can offer here. If you don’t see a connection you need on our list, let us know! We can typically integrate new partners within a few sprints.
Watch the full webinar
If you have any additional questions about Modo’s enterprise payments orchestration platform, we’d be happy to answer them. Reach out to us at www.modopayments.com/contact!
