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ReadersSpeak

Stripe challenge

follow-up

n the Readers Speak feature of our Oct. 9, 2017,
issue, we published a note from Ryan King, of
Guardian Payment Systems Inc., in which he
I asked for information about available gateway
options. In seeking to compete directly with Stripe in
certain vertical niches, he has encountered developers
who have said the code for the gateways he showed
them was way out of date.
We provided a helpful response from Matt Hyde, Vice
President of Marketing & Partner Development at NMI.
The question and answer can be found here: www.green-
sheet.com/emagazine.php?article_id=5508. While King ap-
preciated Hyde's generosity in taking time to respond
with pertinent information, King said his question
wasn't answered completely, so he provided some fol-
low-up thoughts, as follows:
My question was based less on the aggregation mod-
el and management tools; I am pretty familiar with
that. I was asking more along the lines of how robust
Stripe's technology is. The ease of integration for de-
velopers, integration tools being easy-to-understand,
up-to-date code in all major programming languag-
es, etc. That portion is where I feel the technology is
lacking.
The reason for Stripe's growth isn't the aggregation
portion, in my opinion. They realized that the devel-
opers are the ones really making this decision, not
the merchants, and they catered their growth strat-
egy around making it easy for developers. Develop-
ers are outgrowing Stripe for free, no rev share, and
merchants tend to take the advice of their developer
when building an ecommerce site.
I haven't found a gateway that ISOs and MLSs can re-
sell that lives up to Stripe when presenting our solu-
tions to developers, and their concerns have nothing
to do with aggregation and the benefits associated
with it.

We will welcome perspectives on this issue from pay-
ment pros who have expertise on payment gateway
technology, as well as experience working with devel-
opers.
Ask us!
Have you encountered technology challenges while
seeking to maintain a competitive edge in the payments
world? How have you solved them? Do you have unre-
solved tech issues? Tell us at greensheet@greensheet.com
and we'll look for industry veterans who can provide
informed insights.

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