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Payments provider FIS Inc. on Wednesday began rolling out Access Worldpay, a suite of application programming interfaces intended to make it easier and quicker for merchants to implement new payment capabilities, such as mobile payments or tokenization, without having to work with multiple payment partners.
Access Worldpay provides a single point of integration for merchants to accept more than 300 payment methods in 126 currencies across 146 countries. The availability of native APIs, such as mobile payments, within Access Worldpay allows merchants to be nimbler when it comes to adjusting to changing consumer needs or market conditions, says Jason Pavona, FIS’s general manager for North American e-commerce.
“Access Worldpay isn’t so much about payment methods as it is about simplicity and quick implementation,” Pavona says. “Whether a merchant wants to expand globally, add a new channel or a new payment method, Access Worldpay makes doing so easily accessible.”
FIS says Access Worldpay leverages the company’s cloud-based global failover network to provide global scalability and reliability.
One benefit of the native APIs built into Access Worldpay is that they remove many barriers to application development for merchants, thereby making in-house application development more intuitive, Pavona says. “One of the things we’ve seen during the Covid-19 pandemic is an increase in fraud rates,” says Pavona. “A merchant that wants to add tokenization or fraud screening can do so quickly with Access Worldpay, as that functionality is native to it.”
The APIs also provide merchants access to Pazien, FIS’s reporting and analytics engine that merchants can use to better understand their business performance. For example, merchants can input performance metrics into Pazien, such as which countries or sales channels are seeing a more than 5% spike in fraud rates, and instruct Pazien to generate an alert when that threshold is met. Once alerted to the fraud spike, merchants can dig deeper into why the spike is occurring.
Having a better understanding of why fraud is occurring or why authorization rates are declining in a certain country, can help merchants identify the problem sooner and respond with a solution quicker, such as adding a new fraud screen. “Access to performance data has to be measurable so merchants can make use of it,” Pavona says. “Our goal is to help merchants in every region of the world to understand performance data so they can increase authorization.”
One merchant already using Access Worldpay is Etsy. The online marketplace is making Access Worldpay available to its sellers to offer new payment options and increase authorizations by reducing fraud.
“We need to protect every payment for our sellers and buyers to shop with confidence,” says Austin Taylor, director of payment operations for Etsy. He lays emphasis on the new service’s ease of integration, tokenization capabilities, and data-analytics capabilities. Also critical, he adds, is “the ability to see and understand our payments acceptance rates across all markets, and what steps cold be taken to optimize authorizations.”
