B2B payments start-up PayMate acquires Zaitech

PayMate, a start-up in the business-to-business (B2B) payments space, has acquired Zaitech Technology, a digital lending platform, signaling its continued interest in the fintech sector.

Rajat Yadav, Founder, Z2P Technologies, said: “Technology and data-driven actionable insights for lending, along with machine learning, is what Z2P has built over the past few years.”

The data is gathered using proprietary analytics and AI technologies.

PayMate, which is backed by Lightbox Ventures, Mayfield Fund, among others, is riding the alternative lending wave sweeping the industry as a host of new start-ups are tying up with traditional financial institutions such as banks.

PayMate claims it has 20,000 registered businesses on its platform and this acquisition will help it reinvent its payment operations, cash-flow and access to growth capital.

As part of the acquisition, it gets a payment gateway, which can ensure visibility of cash-flow through the supply chain and on-time payment to SMEs by large enterprises. The firm also plans to partner with banks and NBFCs.

The emerging fintech sector has the blessings of the government and regulators. Recently, the GST Council announced its decision to offer 2 percent GST concession on digital payments. According to Abhishek Jain, Tax Partner, EY India, the move will help widen the tax base.

American Express Company vs. Visa: Which Is the Better Buy?

Both American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) and Visa Inc (NYSE: V) are well-recognized, ubiquitous brands, and most people would probably think that because their logos are emblazoned on the plastic rectangles residing in our wallets, the two companies run similar businesses. While there are obviously some similarities, investors might be surprised to learn that the two companies feature some striking differences in their business models as well. Let's take a closer look at these two companies' business models, what they are doing to grow their business, and their valuations to determine which one might make a better investment today.

The case for American Express

American Express operates a closed-loop credit card system, essentially meaning that no third party is necessary for the relationship between the cardholder and the company. In other words, American Express issues the credit card, adorns the card with its branded logo, and lends money directly to the consumer. Two huge advantages to this model are that the company collects the interest on its loans, gets to keep it for itself, and is able to carefully collect and utilize the spending and borrowing data of its customers. Before retiring, former CEO Kenneth Chenault noted the advantages this model gave American Express:

The primary drawback to this model is that it exposes the company to credit risk, of which credit card debt is one of the most hazardous. This risk, no matter how well-managed, will always be a compressor of the company's valuation multiple.

Still, in American Express' case at least, the benefits seem to outweigh the cons. The company consistently puts its data to good use in two primary ways. First, Amex uses that data to make excellent lending decisions when it decides to make loans and, as a result, the company consistently sports one of the lowest write-off rates in the industry. In the first quarter, its write-off jumped to 2%, much lower than its credit card-issuing peers.

Second, American Express understands what its customers want. The company offers rewards that it believes differentiate itself from the competition, including perks such as Uber rides, airport lounge access, and free bags on flights. The strategy must be working, as the company consistently ranks high on customer loyalty and satisfaction surveys.

During the quarter's conference call, management said it now expects to hit the high range of its full-year earnings guidance of $6.90 to $7.30. Using $7.20 as a base point gives the company a forward P/E ratio of 13.7. The company pays a quarterly dividend of $0.35, giving it a dividend yield of 1.42% and a forward payout ratio of only 19.4%!

The case for Visa

In contrast to American Express, Visa runs an open loop credit card system, meaning it doesn't directly lend money to consumers. Instead, Visa serves as a payment network intermediary between its cardholders and their banks. While Visa obviously doesn't make money on the interest of its users' card debt, it also doesn't face the credit default risk American Express has to deal with, either. Rather, Visa makes money by taking small slices -- just fractional percentages -- of each purchase facilitated with its network and based on the number of transactions and payment volume.

Since that's how Visa makes its money, it's good that these two metrics continue to show strong growth. In its first quarter, the payment network saw an 11% increase in payment volume, the amount of money traveling over Visa's network, and a 12% increase in processed transactions, the number of times a Visa account is used to facilitate a transaction. This, in turn, powered robust top- and bottom-line growth: Net revenue grew to $5.1 billion, a 13% increase year over year, and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) rose to $1.11, a whopping 30% increase year over year.

While all of Visa's divisions shined, it had a particularly strong showing in international markets. One of the biggest challenges facing new CEO Al Kelly when he took over in December 2016 was how seamlessly the integration of Visa Europe with the parent company could be completed. Thus far, it has been a raging success. In the company's second-quarter conference call, Kelly said the technical migration of Visa Europe was on schedule and would be finished later this year. This is important because, once complete, Visa will be able to sell its European clients the same security and loyalty tools as it does its other card-issuing customers.

Based on its trailing 12-month earnings per share of $3.95, the company is currently valued with a P/E ratio of about 32. While that's steep, it might be entirely justified based on its 30% EPS growth rate this past quarter. The company pays a quarterly dividend of $0.21, giving it a yield of only 0.65%. While that's pretty meager, it also represents a double-digit percentage hike from last year's payout, the latest in a long line of healthy increases from the company.

The final verdict

I believe both of these companies offer compelling cases for investors, and I would not be surprised to see both outperform the market from this point forward over the next several years. In an expensive market, American Express is a rare company that is showing growth at a valuation far below the market average. Its growing dividend and peerless write-off rates make it, perhaps, the most attractive credit card issuer. That being said, I personally prefer the stronger growth of Visa and it's business model that doesn't include any credit risk. In my mind, those two attributes more than make up for the premium valuation it earns.

How To Accept Virtual Credit Cards For Your Small Business

When it comes to the credit card processing your business does have you ever considered using virtual credit cards? This is simply a digital number that represents a plastic credit card. With the right card, your customers can often decide in advance the maximum amount that can be charged to the card. They also have the ability to set an expiration date for the card so that it cannot be used for longer than one year. Many consumers are embracing virtual credit cards because it protects their real credit card number from most businesses.

Since consumers are getting in on the virtual credit card you might be wondering if your business can do the same. Protecting corporate credit card accounts is something that is now being accomplished with virtual cards. Many of the top credit card companies in the world are now using this technology to their advantage.

There is more than one use for corporate virtual credit cards. Businesses are now using them for employee expenses such as travel. They are also using virtual credit cards for invoice payments. These days almost 40% of all businesses that process payments electronically are using virtual credit cards for this purpose.

Depending on the size of your business it may greatly benefit from their use. Most small businesses are finding out that business credit cards give them fewer options than virtual cards do. Issuing a corporate credit card to eligible employees can be quite the undertaking but is made much easier with the use of virtual cards. They provide a great alternative to your employees using their own credit cards for business expenses and eliminate the need for them to submit paperwork to receive reimbursement.

Your business will have more control over its credit cards when you use virtual as opposed to corporate cards. When you have employees that can’t be trusted with a corporate card you can provide them with a virtual card that they won’t have the power to abuse. When your employees pay with a virtual card it automatically submits the information to your company, saving you time on paperwork. Virtual credit cards are especially helpful to your business if you work with independent contractors or freelancers.

Virtual credit cards will make payment processing easier for your business. They allow you to provide the best and most reliable merchant services to all of your customers and remain competitive in your industry.

Understanding Credit Card Processing Works For the Benefits of Ecommerce Businesses?

To face the fierce competition in the E-commerce market, every merchant needs an online payment gateway and online credit card processing that can help the merchant serve the increasing number of customers on a daily basis who like to shop online and use credit cards as a preferred mode of payment. To successfully run an e-commerce business, the merchant needs an online credit card processing that is effective and efficient in fulfilling its purpose.

Benefits of Online Credit Card Processing

IMPROVES ABILITY

To make the website visually effective, a merchant invests a lot of time and money. But most of the merchants do not consider it important to invest much time when it comes to payment processing. However, to improve online transactions for your E-commerce business, it is important to choose the right payment gateway. A system that enables the communication between the merchant processor. Also, a PCI compliant website to share customer’s payment details, bank account, and merchant processor. With this, a business owner can carry out transactions 24 hours, 365 days. The payment gateway is designed to handle data collection, encryption and secure transmission of data to the merchant account.

SECURITY

It is important for every online merchant to consider the security and stability as the key factor of their business. For the long run of business and retention of customers, a reliable online credit card processing service is a must. The technology that is used for security includes PCI compliance standards. This makes it very difficult for criminals to crack the code and obtain customers data. Therefore, the customers gain confidence to use their credit cards to make a payment without hesitation.

CONVENIENCE

The third advantage of online card processing that works in the favor of E-commerce business is speed and convenience of card processing. Unlike the traditional way of carrying out transactions, this is relatively faster and an easier way. With few mouse clicks and entering basic details of the credit card, the customer can easily buy products without wasting much time. If a merchant sets up an E-commerce solution through Host Merchant Services, it will allow the business to accept payments through Visa, MasterCard, and American Express hassle free.

ACCESSIBILITY

To smoothen the process and gain accessibility from any part of the world, online credit card processing service can be configured to facilitate merchant to access the merchant account at any time. No longer bound to geographical location and address of the store, it is easier for the merchant to control and review business transaction from any part of the world with an online access.

FLEXIBILITY

When an online business touches international boundaries, it becomes essential to have a payment processor that can accept major currencies. We, at Merchant Stronghold, create such an E-commerce solution to deal with a variety of currencies. No longer bound by geographical boundaries, limited currency acceptance; the sky is the limit for your E-commerce business.

MEET MERCHANT STRONGHOLD

For more than a decade, Merchant Stronghold has proven its worth by providing excellent customer services, resolving queries of clients. And, providing them with the best solution for the credit card processing. Go through the list of various options available, pricing, after sale service and compatibility before finalizing a payment gateway for your business. So, connect with our professionals now.

The Large Global Payments Processor Unveils Airdropping Campaign Among Users

CoinPayments, a global cryptocurrency payment processor, has announced an airdrop launch of its own utility token – the CPS Coin. The company also plans to lower its transaction and conversion fees for token holders and enhance its user interface in 2018.

Founded in 2013, CoinPayments is a global cryptocurrency payment processor with a reach of over 1,000,000 vendors across 182 countries, says the company’s blog. CoinPayments offers a cloud payment solution allowing merchants to accept Bitcoin and hundreds of other coins through their plugins, APIs and point of sale (POS) interfaces.  

“CoinPayments has created a special place in the world of cryptocurrency users with intuitive digital wallets, which include shopping cart plugins that can be easily integrated by online merchants making it appealing to their customers,” said Alex Alexandrov, founder and CEO of CoinPayments in an interview with Insight Success.

The company is set to launch two mega projects in 2018. Firstly, CPS Coin - the CoinPayments token - will lower transaction and conversion fees for merchants. Secondly, a revamped version of their existing user interface - called CoinPayments 3.0 - will provide online merchants and wallet holders with “even more user-friendly experience” company representatives said.

Airdrop to all users

The CoinPayments team reported to Cointelegraph that the company launched an airdrop of 100 CPS Coins to all current users, as well as new signups on the CoinPayments platform until August 1, 2018. The value of the 100 CPS coins is €10. Any user who purchases CPS coins starting on May 4th will receive two CPS coins for the price of one, or three for one on orders totaling over €500,000 within a 24 hour period.

The CPS Coin is a utility token used within the CoinPayments platform and provides discounts and rebates for using various CoinPayments services. Users wanting to buy CPS Coins can buy directly from CoinPayments at a rate of €0.10 per token.

There is a wide range of discounts and rebates available for CoinPayments services, including merchant fees, conversion fees, withdrawal fees, initial coin offering (ICO) participation and as a preferred payment method in their own decentralized marketplace.

For example, merchant fees may be reduced by half. Merchants have the option to pay the 0.5 percent processing fee with CPS Coin by checking a box on their account. If they choose this option, they will only have to pay a 0.25 percent processing fee in CPS Coins based on a €0.10/CPS Coin rate. If their CPS Coin wallet doesn’t contain enough CPS Coins to pay the fee then the required amount of CPS Coins will be purchased automatically from the CoinPayments pool using the fee collected at the time of the transaction.

As for conversion and withdraw fees, users will receive a 50 percent rebate if they pay from CoinPayments directly into the user’s CPS Coin wallet.

Regarding ICO participation, CoinPayments will negotiate an allocation of tokens from hosted ICOs at a discounted rate from the public ICO price and CoinPayments users will have the option to participate in this allocation using CPS Coin.

 Additional tokens

“As an extra incentive, users can collect an additional 25 CPS Coins every time a new user signs up through their affiliate link,” said a company representative.

The CoinPayments affiliate program pays affiliates 25 percent of transaction fees collected from all referred users for a duration of 5 years. This includes merchant services transaction fees, commercial deposit fees, and ICO signup fees. In the future, this will also include debit card transaction fees, fiat settlement fees and much more.

Users can register at the company’s website and follow the affiliate help link to easily start the referral process immediately.

Single Place For All Your High Risk Payment Processing Needs

Our Online Payment Gateway Solution has been designed with a high standard of innovative services allows us to find a fast, attractive and competitive solution for your online business, We serve merchants worldwide in nearly every genuine industry, Our Application process is quick, easy and simple. Sign up today and start accepting online payments from your customers. Give your customers the options they need!

ACH Payment Processing

Having credit card solution does not give the flexibility to the merchant to collect the payment from all customers. For many merchants, this can be a missed revenue opportunity. HighRisk Gateways flexible ACH Payment Processing and eCheck payment options offer.

High-Risk Merchant Account

HighRisk Gateways always care for our merchant’s business as our business. We think and act like your business partner by serving high-risk credit card processing and eCheck/ACH processing. Opening a merchant account with Highrisk gateways is not.

Payment Gateway

For any online business, reliable and secure payment processing is critical. HRG provides world-class payment processing services for online businesses just like yours, providing a full suite of complimentary merchant services in order to drive maximum payment.

eCheck Payment Gateway

HighRisk Gateways is a well known trusted check payment gateway provider in the Indian market. HighRisk Gateways can place almost every Indian genuine business for E-Check, ACH or Check21. Which allow the merchants to add the check option in their various payments platform. Your business may be a high risk and high volume.

Credit Card Processing

HighRisk Gateways can help you to accept electronic credit card payments quickly in an affordable manner by Credit Card Processing solutions. With a network of proprietary processing platforms and systems by our banking partner, you can rely on these solutions to process all types of payments for yours.

International Merchant

High Risk Gateways is an online international payment gateway service provider, specializing in e-commerce merchant solutions for high-risk merchants. We accept merchants of all sizes and all risk types from low to high risk. Through our online secure, cutting-edge payment technology platform and our.

About High Risk Merchant Account And How You Can Manage Them

A high-risk merchant account isn’t easy. For starters, this label comes with a negative connotation about your business, and assumes you aren’t running a reputable company with good products or services. In layman’s terms, a high risk business is one that banks and credit card processing companies consider risky. Sometimes this is because of ties to your previous businesses, and other times, it can have more to do with the industry you’re in. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t the end of the road for you.

There are many ways you can continue running your business through partnerships with high risk credit card processing companies. Typically, these companies work exclusively with high-risk merchants who aren’t able to get a traditional processing agreement. Because of this, they can often be the light at the end of the tunnel for entrepreneurs who feel they’ve exhausted their options.

Understanding The High Risk Merchant Label

To take the best steps towards being a better business, it’s important that you understand what high risk really means for you and why you were put into that category in the first place. Understanding why makes it easier for you to fix moving forward. Here are some reasons you might be labeled as high-risk:

Too Many Chargebacks: A chargeback is when a bank initiates a refund on behalf of their customer after a complaint. A customer might complain if they’ve never received their product, have an issue with their product, or believe a business falsely represented what they offered.

Low Credit Score: As with any type of business or government agreement, your credit score matters. A credit score that’s too low will raise red flags for banks and processing companies. You may be able to circumvent this with a cosigner who has a high credit score.

New Market: If your business is in a new or evolving industry, you may have trouble getting approved for credit card processing. The cannabis industry is a good example of this.

New to Payment Processing: If you don’t have a payment processing history, credit card processors may opt to hold back until you do. This type of high-risk label can be alleviated with a steady track record. Once you’ve deemed yourself reliable with a high-risk processor, you can re-negotiate or move on to a standard processor.

“Risky” Market: Being relegated to the high risk merchant categories sometimes happens only because of the industry you’re in. Adult services and travel businesses are examples of industries that credit card processors deem risky, even if you have a solid track record when it comes to personal credit and business credit.

Managing The High Risk Label

The first thing to understand is that this isn’t a lifetime label. Don’t worry; rather than consider this a blockade, just think of it as having to undergo a few extra steps before you can start working with traditional processors. The key is successfully managing your business and proving your reliability.

To do this, you have to be careful that there are no chargebacks, which is the most telling sign of a high-risk merchant. High risk merchants have to work a little harder than the average business owner to avoid issues that are common to any entrepreneur, but look bad on an already-labeled business.

One way to avoid chargebacks to provide exceptional customer service. You’d be surprised at the level of patience a customer can have if they communicate openly and honestly. Inaction from the business is a major reason many customers contact their backs to cancel a charge. When that customer can speak with a human regarding their product order or service, they’re less likely to take any actions that harm your business.

Keep customers updated on what’s happening in your business. For example, let’s say you own an eCommerce business that hand knits clothing and blankets. You put out a few Facebook and Instagram advertisements and suddenly, hundreds of orders are placed and you don’t have the product to fulfill it.