You can't standardize the developer experience across different processors. I'm not trying to be negative here, just practical.

You are going to run into things like TSYS closing out batches every three days regardless of what happens.

The handling features for them and their customers thing is going to be a herculean task over even a couple different platforms. Not impossible, but it's big and you would do well to see what's out there before committing to a standard interface. Take a look at https://datacapsystems.com/ to see it done well.

Also, adding another layer like this, you better have an early plan to staff a support desk.

Oh, also, you are gateway, not a processor.

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agreeahmed 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Oh, also, you are gateway, not a processor.

Technically right now we are a value-added payment acceptance reseller. Eventually we'd like to become a payfac. And maybe with the new regulations that came out in Georgia, a chartered merchant acquiring bank. But that's down the road.

You're totally right about standardizing the devex across processors. We want to go as "close to the metal" as we realistically could as soon as we could. That's why we very deliberately built our own billing engine from scratch. We could have gotten to market faster by just mapping onto Stripe Billing, but we would have foregone valuable experience mapping processor lifecycle events to our data model. For a while that's going to be much of the work on our plate, standardizing how we map their lifecycle to ours.

We took the past year basically studying the prior art and developing / testing a data model that we feel is well on its way to describing the general case. I was frankly surprised how long it took to really hammer out the primitives.

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mbesto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We want to go as "close to the metal" as we realistically could as soon as we could.

All of the value in payments is on the top (acquiring payfac side)...all of the value on the issuing side is only made via extremely high volume and requires a ton of tech that just schleps data (no fun). I'd recommend getting this idea out of your head.

	▲	agreeahmed 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unless I'm misunderstanding, I think you might have gotten sides mixed up? Issuing side (the side that "issues" the cards) is usually the one that people describe as "all of the value", while acquiring (the side that "acquires" merchants) usually is that one that needs to bring substantial volumes to market. For context to anyone not familiar with payments, about 60-70% of the card revenue in a transaction goes to the customer's / issuing side because they are the side that assumes credit risk for the consumer. The merchant's / acquiring side has significantly tighter margins and usually needs substantial volume before it can become an interesting business. One way that entrants on the merchant side of the stack monetize is by bundling value-add software. E.g. Stripe does this with Billing (+.7%) and Connect (+.25%). Fwiw I agree that most people will find this tech extremely un-fun. But I'm a "payments rail guy" in the way that others might be "train guys". My inner child lights up at the thought of payment rails. My Substack, Vivid Leaves, is basically a bunch of essays about historical payment systems - some we worked with in Kenya, and others I studied from the USSR. I wrote all this before I had any idea I'd be starting a payments company: https://agree.substack.com We know it's going to be a schlep, and we're going to have a blast schlepping through it. * vocab fyis for anyone reading this not familiar with payments.

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jfyi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Technically you are a wrapper api, but you are acting as a gateway. Though, if you were to claim to be a gateway you'd need pa-dss/ssf validation and that would cost a good chunk of that yc money, so I understand.

	▲	agreeahmed 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. One of our advisors who previously an exec at one of the card networks says that currently we are technically a "value-added gateway reseller". Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but that's the most precise way to describe us right now. And not necessarily where we will stay.