BYO:UI – How FinTech API’s are driving the next generation of user experience

Bring Your Own Bottle, or BYOB as we know it, started as a means to provide an additional incentive for customers to enjoy their beverage of choice at their favorite restaurant without overpaying or being subjected to limited or no selections. While the population of restaurants and dining establishments that offer BYOB has changed drastically over the years, what hasn’t changed is the fundamental reason for BYOB: offering a better, and more consistent customer experience.

You may be asking yourself: “What’s this have to do with payments?”. Good question. Over the years, organizations have strived to place the customer at the center of their operations – with mixed results. To achieve this customer-centric goal, many businesses have gone to great expense to deliver an effective online and mobile app experience. But when it comes to payments, customers are often redirected to another website or app that does not maintain the consistency and branding of the original website or mobile app. This can be very confusing and disruptive for customers and ruin a otherwise positive user experience. While large enterprises have the budget and bandwidth to build the payments flow into their sites and apps, this capability has been out of reach for many other businesses.

But now that is changing.

Bring Your Own UI (BYO:UI) drives the Omni Channel Experience

With the rise of easy-to-use payment API’s, all enterprises, businesses and retailers can now “BYO UI” to quickly and securely add complex payment flows while leveraging their investment in their UI/UX.

When an organization defines customer experience as it’s a differentiator, and with a heavy emphasis on an “Omni Channel” experience, the BYO:UI strategy is a must. Deemed as difficult or almost unimaginable in the past, with respect to technology and especially payments, businesses are now accustomed to extremely fast turn-around and response times, high data security; and obviously, a smooth and hassle-free customer experience – taking to the roots of BYO “Anything”.

While mobile, web and speech technology have progressed by leaps and bounds in the last 2 years, consumers now expect an almost urgent, consistent and personalized experience – which bubbles up to the ever-changing necessary convenience. In terms of payments, consumers are now used to streamlined user experiences and payment flows. With the rapid improvement of speech recognition technologies, an entirely new set of “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices are quickly replacing older IVR technologies and even newer mobile apps with the human voice as the new user interface. With Alexa, Bixby and Siri paving the way for the new wave of IoT payments as well as other emerging Artificial Intelligence -powered (AI) chatbots, payments API’s that enable BYO:UI are an imperative for an Omni Channel use experience. It is interesting to note that web and mobile are now inching towards becoming a “traditional” mode for payments and we’re in an age where innovation is constant, so it is only natural for businesses, and billers in this context, to constantly think of ways to let their customers pay how they want and when they want. Failure to deliver can cause customer confusion and potentially attrition, which many organizations have learned the hard way.

Consumers are not necessarily concerned with the “how” of the convenience of an Omni Channel experience, but more with the “what” and “when”. And this convenience is extremely important in the field of electronic bill pay and presentment, where time and accuracy are of the essence. To provide a truly consistent Omni Channel experience, organizations usually tend to build complex, internal technology silos – which usually don’t “talk” to each other. Furthermore, to maintain a great brand image, organizations also need to focus on their overall look-and-feel to ensure consistency with other products, and the industry as a whole. Due to this need of being “consistent” from a UI and UX perspective, organizations are now looking at partners and alternatives to building their own APIs and instead focusing on this look-and-feel aspect. Here is where the BYO:UI strategy plays an important part, since it essentially lets businesses focus on what experience they want to deliver to their customers, be it a snazzy UI, IoT or AI chatbot payments, without having to worry too much about how all the magic happens at the back-end.

Bring Your Own UI (BYO:UI) drives the Omni Channel Experience

At Aliaswire, we understand that merchants, enterprises and recurring billers have different needs, which is why we have architected our DirectBiller® API Product Suite to enable the BYO:UI strategy. To support complex business process flows and multiple disparate accounting and ERP systems, DirectBiller® API’s provide customers with a powerful set of tools that can generate a unique user experience across multiple user interface channels. For large enterprises, having the right toolset and a partner that understands the business will not only supplement growth and add new customers, but can also drive operational efficiencies. Aliaswire’s API Product Suite does exactly that – and it can be the key differentiator that can scale and connect your business units across the board.

Here at Aliaswire, we believe in a true Bring Your Own UI model where our web-service APIs provide full-service payment capabilities to the Enterprise market that solve unique payment challenges and can be plugged into new or existing biller UIs. Additionally, our DirectBiller offering comes pre-packaged with an easy to use UI, built over this API Product Suite, which allows billers to be up and running in no time.

Aliaswire’s integrated API solutions provide all essential payment processing capabilities combined with back office integration, complex remittance processing and interchange cost controls to provide a true Omni Channel experience across web, mobile, voice and in person.

DirectBiller’s Omni Channel API’s go beyond basic authorization and settlement and include:

  • Multiple divisions with complex payment remittance rules
  • Customized payment workflows
  • Rule-based convenience fee processing
  • Consolidated reconciliation and settlement reporting across multiple divisions
  • Advanced ACH processing with exception handling
  • Interchange cost management
  • Limited Acceptance for specific market segments
  • Payment plan processing for recurring payments with blackout dates
  • Event-triggered payment workflow with automatic payment processing
  • Secure customer support portal to support inbound and outbound call center operations
  • Customizable end-user payment workflows with responsive page design
  • Back office integration

What Makes Us Different?

While there are many payment service providers that offer simple, basic payment processing APIs, these solutions do not fit the need of enterprises that have more complex payment needs. Aliaswire’s web service APIs, as highlighted, provide full-service payment workflow combined with back office integration, complex remittance processing and interchange cost controls. Enterprise billers with their own UI and UX can utilize the power of these APIs to build an entire bill payment and bill presentment solution, while maintaining their customized user experience – and enabling the power and security of a Aliaswire.

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