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Spotlight Innovators

eadquartered in Troy, Michigan, award-winning North
American Bancard is an industry leader in credit card pro-
cessing, providing a variety of merchant services that help
H client companies of all sizes develop solutions for payment
processing, including credit, debit, EBT, check conversion and guaran-
tee, gift & loyalty cards, and much more. As an MSP/ISO since 1992,
North American Bancard is dedicated to offering the highest service
levels, exceptionally competitive pricing, and the latest technology to
its client companies, including Pay Anywhere, its proprietary point-of-
sale (POS) solution. With over $34 billion worth of payments processed
for more than 250,000 businesses every year, North American Bancard
is determined to help American business prosper.

What’s New:

Offering maximum value in a merchant portal

erchant information portals have been around for decades. They were initially designed as standalone appli-
cations that a merchant could use to track and retrieve information about customer credit card transactions,
nightly batches and the source of an occasional chargeback. The information in the portal also served as a
M merchant’s detailed source for reconciling monthly transaction activity against their merchant statement.

“Transaction portals were invented to give the merchant a daily snapshot of what is flowing through their point of sale
equipment, and also a way to manage how authorizations are batched and submitted to their bank,” stated Jim Parkinson,
Chief Information Officer at North American Bancard (NAB).

Since the advent of the merchant portal, significant strides have been made in the areas of automated POS software and
the integration of transaction data into popular business accounting applications. While the need for the standalone
merchant portal has changed, it is still a valuable tool for merchants, especially those who manage multiple remote
locations through a non-networked environment.
More than a data source

Over the years, many merchant portals have evolved into applications that provide users with even more capabilities. For
example, merchant portals can provide access to a virtual terminal for keying in customer payments received by phone
or mail. Other enhanced features might include deposit monitoring or supply fulfillment.

Generally, these additional features were built onto existing architecture, leaving much to be desired in the area of
usability. “These applications were initially built for the simple purpose of storing transaction information, and it wasn’t
always easy to enhance them,” Parkinson continued. “Many legacy merchant portals have become antiquated and clunky
by today’s contemporary technology standards.”

According to Parkinson, this was one of the motivations behind the rebuild of North American Bancard’s merchant
portal. While their legacy application offered many features other portals did not, the NAB team saw the rebuild as an
opportunity to bring in additional features that could not easily be accommodated through the old portal’s architecture.
The team also felt a re-skin of the portal’s user interface was in order to give it familiar graphical and navigational features,
making it easy to use. Their answer was a fully reconfigured merchant portal the company dubbed Payments Hub.
Everything at the merchant’s fingertips

Perhaps the most striking feature of Payments Hub is its modern look and feel. The screens are graphically enhanced and
very easy to interpret at a glance, mirroring common navigational and graphical interface features found in other well-
known business portals. Merchants view transaction activity in dashboards and charts, and even have the ability to filter
and change variables on the fly, such as dates and transaction types. The portal was also made fully responsive, meaning
it is optimized for mobile viewing, making it easy for any merchant to check transaction detail, process a supply order, or
accept a mail or telephone transaction conveniently from anywhere on a smartphone or tablet.

“We were striving to create a go-to dashboard that merchants would not only feel comfortable using, but one that would
also peak their curiosity like so many contemporary dashboard applications do,” explained Parkinson. “People love
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