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Why POS VARs Need to Be Hosted Payments Services Providers

Do you partner with a hosted payments services provider? Becoming a hosted payments services provider is a practical way to offer solutions that address what today’s merchants need to provide the types of payment experiences their customers want.

Hosted payments services include authorizing payments for e-commerce businesses, online retailers, physical retailers, omnichannel retailers and merchants’ unattended payment kiosks and other devices. You can think of a hosted payments services as the virtual equivalent of a physical payment terminal, which can enable your clients to manage business on multiple channels and build a total view of customers and their activities.

What Do Hosted Payments Services Do?

Hosted payments services can manage numerous tasks related to payment card transactions:   

  • Accepting payment data from the customer at a terminal, online, using a smartphone, at a self-service kiosk, or using other technology or devices to make a payment.

  • Transferring data to a payment processor for transmission to the card issuer

  • Receiving the response from the issuer, via the processor, and communicating it with the merchant’s website, payment terminal, kiosk, or other device within just seconds.

Hosted payments services also allow merchants to accept more than credit and debit cards. They enable your clients to accept contactless cards and mobile wallets, checks, electronic benefits transfer (EBT), flexible spending or health savings accounts (FSA/HSA), gift cards, and loyalty transactions. In addition, hosted payments services give merchants the ability to set up payment plans or recurring billing.

Hosted Payments Services Help Keep Data Secure

Since hosted payments services serve the digital world as well as payments at physical locations, they make security a high priority. Some of the security measures hosted payments services take to protect data include:

  • HTTPS for secure communications over a network.

  • Signed requests from merchant to gateway to validate the payment page result

  • IP verification of the requesting server

  • Virtual payer authentication such as 3D Secure, which sends a code to the consumer’s phone or email to prevent fraudulent use of the account

Leading hosted payments services also use state-of-the-art technologies to keep card data protected and minimize fraud. Your payment gateway partner should support EMV chip card technology that creates a unique code for each transaction, making cards almost impossible to counterfeit. Also look for a hosted payments services partner that offers PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE), which ensures clear-text card numbers are never readable or accessible to anyone on the network — whether they’re authorized users or cybercriminals — and tokenization which replaces card data with randomly generated tokens merchants can use for follow-up transactions or recurring billing.

Your hosted payments services partner’s solution should also be validated to show they’re compliant with PCI’s Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS).  

Why You Need to Be a Hosted Payments Services Provider

If you have established a partnership with a payment processor to give brick-and-mortar merchants the ability to accept electronic payments, you may not be doing enough. Nearly all types of merchants are expanding their capabilities to give their customers the convenience of online, mobile, unattended, and automatic recurring payments.

With hosted payments services, your clients can accommodate their customer by accepting their preferred payment types and mode of payment — and manage them all from one platform. This is not only a more efficient way to work, but it also provides payment data from all channels, giving merchants a better understanding of their customers’ behaviors and how to tailor experiences to meet their demands. An omnichannel payment solution based on different services from different partners will be inherently less efficient and less valuable to your clients.

ISVs and VARs that choose to partner with hosted payments services providers also avoid locking themselves into direct processor certifications, which add cost and may limit sales opportunities to only what a single processor offers. A channel-centric hosted payments services provider will also help you protect margins and arm you with the resources you need to provide payment services successfully in today’s omnichannel world.