Today, our post comes from our API Technical Consultant, Nathan Verrilli, for his perspective on what makes XTRM payments different, if not unique, when it comes to, as Nathan says, “enabling companies to make payments to anyone, worldwide.” From the desktop of Nathan Verrilli:
XTRM Payments for B2B and B2C Use Cases
Where other payment platforms may focus on consumer payments, XTRM is focused on business payment use cases: business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) money movement.
Consumers rarely need to concern themselves with anti-money-laundering (AML), with know-your-customer (KYC), regulatory tax compliance around the world, or even currency exchange on a day-to-day basis. Businesses do. The primary onus of compliance falls on business, not the consumer. Thus, B2C & B2B payments are different.
Compounding the complexity for certain B2B and B2C use cases are third-party payments: companies that manage B2C & B2B payments on behalf of their customers or partners such as payments for rewards, incentives, spiffs, co-marketing, and other accounts-payable transactions.
Handling Other People’s Money
Holding money for other entities is closely regulated, and requires permits, permissions, and regulatory compliance. XTRM takes on the regulatory burden of being a third-party payment settlement organization — so our customers don’t need to!
XTRM allows our users to manage payment programs for their customers without taking on that administrative burden. XTRM’s customers do not hold monies for their customers — XTRM holds the funds. XTRM’s unique connected architecture allows XTRM to manage due diligence and global compliance as the third-party settlement organization while still allowing managing companies full control over making payments.
Funds are handled only by the end-customer and XTRM.
Once a managed company is onboarded, the managed company sends funds (by wire, by ACH, or check) to XTRM, and it goes into the managed company’s account. The managing company never touches those funds directly.
Paying from a Digital Wallet
You can only make payments from a funded digital wallet. If you are managing spiffs or rebates or payments on behalf of your own company, this is attractive!
How does that magic work?
It’s not magic; it’s design. When one of XTRM’s customers brings a customer onboard, one of the first steps is for XTRM to onboard that entity as a remitter. Our customer (or the entity in question) answers a few questions, supplies a few documents attesting to their identity, and usually within a business day, that company is set up in our system.
Connectedness
XTRM allows our customers to make payments and move funds on their connected customer’s behalf, without the regulatory stumbling block of actually holding the money. Instead, XTRM enables a managing company to make payments from funded wallets and move funds as if they were their customer. Although this might sound like a distinction without a difference, it’s not. It’s one of those legal oddities — and more importantly, it allows XTRM’s customers to manage their client’s payment programs with full regulatory compliance.
Verifiable Compliance Makes Auditors & Regulators Happy
Happy regulators make for happy auditors and finance officers; happy finance officers make for happy companies, and happy companies make for happy employees. And happy employees are highly correlated with happy customers. A win-win-win.
Making Payments…
As a developer, I have a strong bias for automating things as much as possible. I know that embedded solutions make for a better user experience, so I like to start with APIs. But I know customers can’t always automate everything all at once. That’s why XTRM has three ways to make payments which I like to think of as crawl-walk-run. The faster we can move a customer along toward running an embedded solution, the sooner they can improve their customers’ user experience and lower their costs of operation.
… Via the XTRM Console
By logging into the XTRM web application, you can make payments to anyone with an email address and a name. Or, you can do more sophisticated actions, such as sending a gift card, or a debit card. Of course, once you start paying four or five or six or even several hundred persons, that gets a little inefficient.
… Via a Spreadsheet
XTRM provides a spreadsheet template with the names, addresses, programs, amounts, currencies, and other information for mass payments. Upload the spreadsheet to XTRM — and XTRM does the rest. Of course, that isn’t immediate and requires someone to compile the spreadsheet and process it. Generally, XTRM expects a one-business-day turnaround for spreadsheet payments without any issues.
… Via the API
By far the most convenient method of making payments is via the XTRM Payments API (please see apidoc.xtrm.com). With your API credentials, you can make payments, create wallets, users, connect your users to banks for transfers and ACH transactions … everything you need to white-label a payments application of your own, for your clients, or just to integrate with your own processes.
Making Payments… On Behalf Of
Even better, anything you can do for yourself, you can do for your customers. In the console, the advanced manager menu allows you to create users and payments as if you were the managed company. Our spreadsheet template allows you to specify for whom you are making a payment, and even what programs and wallets should be used to pay. For the API, you can use pseudo-credentials (likewise available through the Advanced Manager menu in the console application).
Psuedo-credentials are unique to the manager account, and the managed account, allowing XTRM (and you!) to differentiate between API transactions authorized directly by the managed company, and API transactions authorized by the managing company.
On behalf of XTRM, thanks for reading this, and if you have any questions or comments, by all means, please drop us a line.
