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Do You Need an All-in-One Payment Platform?

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedFeb 20232 min read

Simplifying and streamlining the payment process is a priority of many businesses. If it’s the case for you too, then you’re probably wondering about all-in-one payment solutions.

In this post, we’ll explain what an all-in-one payment platform entails and the advantages it offers. That way, you can decide for yourself if it’s something your business needs.

What is an all-in-one payment solutions provider?

Merchant service providers offer a number of different solutions for businesses. These include online payment solutions, the ability to accept a variety of payment methods, the ability to support payments in different currencies, among many others.

An all-in-one payment solution provider will, as the name suggests, provide everything merchants need relating to payments, in a single software. This can help simplify billing and reduce costs as businesses don’t need to sign up and pay a fee for a range of different services.

All-one-payment providers will offer the following:

Gateway - A payment gateway is a merchant service that transfers credit card information from either an e-commerce or brick-and-mortar store across to the payment network to be processed. It then returns transaction information to the merchant. Whether you need a payment gateway in the US or one that can handle international payments will depend on the location of your customer base.
Integrations - Seamlessly integrated solutions are essential for allowing customer data to be easily transferred across platforms and programs. All-in-one payment providers always have an integrations team on hand to make sure integrations run smoothly.
Online payment portals - Being able to take payments securely online is important for many businesses. It’s therefore imperative that your payment solution provides a safe online payment portal, enabling customers to checkout and pay for orders securely and easily.
Data security, tokenization, encryption - One of the most important aspects of a payment solution is its security measures. Indeed, businesses should only use payment solutions which are proven to prioritize data security in their services. This isn’t just important for image’s sake, being non-PCI compliant can get costly for merchants. All good all-in-one payment solutions will offer tokenization, encryption and up-to-date security features as part of the payment gateway and the payment solution overall.

Should you get an all-in-one payment platform?

You might be wondering if getting an all-in-one payment platform is worth it for your business. To help you make that decision, see below some of the perks for opting to go all-in-one:

Save on costs - Carrying out business through a single payment solution can mean you avoid the extra costs of signing up with different providers for different payment services.
Greater efficiency - A single gateway helps to simplify certain payment procedures, such as processing refunds and API (application programming interface) management.
Consistency - With all-in-one payment platforms, the payment process is always consistent - for both you and your clients.
Data access - using multiple gateways can make it hard to get insight into consumer data and figures, as data is gathered and presented separately. With a single gateway, you can easily gather data across different channels.

Collecting payments with GoCardless

If you’re looking to simplify the payment process in your business, GoCardless can help.

GoCardless enables businesses to collect payments directly from their customers' bank accounts. This puts businesses in greater control of incoming payments as it is pull based i.e. the business controls payment amount and date.

This means businesses can get paid up to twice as fast when accepting GoCardless payments on their online invoices. Plus, it’s quick and easy to set up and comes with no set-up fees.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.