This is a reprint of the original blog, which you can read on the Stripe website here

Enterprises like Hertz, Shopify, and URBN are increasingly turning to Stripe Terminal to build modern in-person payments experiences. Today we’re excited to announce a host of partnerships that increase interoperability with Stripe, giving more choice and flexibility for integrating Terminal into your existing in-person payment stack and adding innovative checkout experiences. These include a new partnership with FreedomPay, direct integrations with leading point-of-sale (POS) providers, and composable hardware solutions with major Android manufacturers. 

Partnering with FreedomPay to better serve large enterprises

Many of our platform users appreciate the flexibility to integrate their own custom POS app with Terminal. But large enterprises often come to Stripe with existing tech stacks and preferences about which POS and hardware systems they want to use. We’ve formed a new partnership with FreedomPay, a leader among independent third-party gateways, to provide additional flexibility for enabling enterprise-grade payments from Stripe. FreedomPay offers best-in-class commerce orchestration, unifying not just POS and payments, but also loyalty, private label cards and gift cards, and customer analytics. Combining Stripe’s financial infrastructure with FreedomPay’s ecosystem means we can bring unified commerce to more large enterprises and help you build and maintain a competitive edge. Through this new partnership, you can:

• Integrate Stripe with your existing in-person payments stack. Now, you can combine Stripe’s payments suite, including payments, online fraud protection and authorization optimizations, with a large number of FreedomPay-supported POS systems, card readers, gift card flows, and more. You can even use Stripe for in-person payment processing alongside other PSPs. And thanks to this ecosystem, you preserve future optionality to modernize, including switching to other POS and hardware whenever you want.
• Unify reporting at the highest levels. Large enterprises often use multiple payment processors or operate across different lines of business. This could be a hotel that manages a restaurant and a retail shop and has a different POS for each, or a parent company with multiple brands. Now it is possible to get consolidated views of your payments data—across channels, business lines, and payment processors. 

“We are excited for this partnership to combine FreedomPay’s advanced payment tech functionality with Stripe’s industry-leading payments reliability and uptime. Together we can better serve more large enterprises and power their unified commerce needs.” Chris Kronenthal, president of FreedomPay

Contact sales to learn more about using Stripe with FreedomPay.

Imagine a scenario where payments are involved in every part of the business and essential to driving a company’s strategy. Here, merchants are looking beyond payments as just a means to an end, but also as an integrated technology solution informing business decisions and playing a critical role in the consumer experience. This is best described as unified commerce.

What is unified commerce?

Defining unified commerce is not as straightforward as referencing an agreed-upon industry term. Unified commerce is an all-encompassing concept where companies acknowledge the power of connected payment technology and implement it to shape everything from a single transaction to enterprise-level operations.

Simply put, unified commerce is integrating all payment systems into one platform to streamline processes, foster security and create an omnichannel consumer experience.

What does a unified commerce solution offer?

A unified commerce solution like FreedomPay offers a product where every payment solution is seamlessly integrated in one place: the Next Level Commerce^TM platform.

• Unified commerce provides streamlined connectivity with payment processors through the payment gateway.
• Unified commerce offers integrated payments that connect every payment solution, payment type and payment channel to the commerce platform.
• Connecting payment technology offers robust payment security that is PCI compliant, keeping merchants out of PCI scope. Payments are secured with point-to-point encryption (P2PE) with card information also being tokenized.
• A company that has integrated payment technology and a unified commerce platform has access to a business intelligence database filled with payment data and customer analytical information to inform targeting strategies, such as personalization, incentives and loyalty programs. By capturing data at the time of payment, companies can analyze this quantitative data for qualitative insights.
• Unified commerce presents the opportunity for omnichannel solutions that keep a consistent consumer checkout experience across all channels ranging from e-commerce to in-store.
• Having a unified commerce solution is a worthy value proposition to bring to consumers: their checkout process will be frictionless and more secure than ever.

How do I start unifying commerce?

To unify commerce, you must start at the payment gateway. A payment gateway is the secure technology that allows merchants to accept payments from their customers. The payment gateway is your connection to the payment processor.

Integrating a payment gateway into your payment solutions is the best way to ensure security and encryption on every payment transaction.

Learn more about FreedomPay’s unified Next Level Commerce platform and get started on unifying commerce here!

By Chris Kronenthal, President, FreedomPay

The digital payments landscape is rapidly evolving, driven by technological advancements, changing consumer behaviors, and the rise of innovative payment solutions. For merchants, this evolution presents both an opportunity and a daunting challenge. 

To stay competitive, to increase efficiency and profitability, and to meet changing customer expectations, merchants must elevate their understanding of payment processing and technology—and raise their “payments IQ.”

Merchant Centered Acquiring™ (MCA) by FreedomPay is the industry’s first independent referral advisory that takes the pain out of payments by changing the way merchants, ISVs and processors find each other and work together. By leveraging over 20 years of payments experience, data-based evidence, and robust industry relationships, FreedomPay guides merchants through three-step process of education, evaluation, and exploration, delivering a free in-depth analysis and expert advisory, and provides a range of MCA-certified processors to choose from. All at no cost or obligation to merchants.

MCA will help you review your business, payment type patterns, volume, fees and overall fit. Businesses can streamline complexity, increase profitability and operational efficiency, standardize technology, and deliver a superior buying experience.

Merchants who’ve used MCA have reported up to 18% savings on transaction fees. Merchants also described MCA as a valuable learning experience. One suggesting, “I learned more about payment processing in a one-hour phone call with MCA advisors than I did in years of doing business.” Another merchant claims that agreeing to the free analysis was one the best business decisions they ever made.

In an era of rapid technological advancement and increasing complexity in payment processing, it is imperative for merchants to become better informed. By educating themselves on the latest trends, technologies, and regulatory requirements, merchants can enhance their competitive edge, improve operational efficiency, and make better data-based decisions. 

By enhancing their payments IQ, merchants can better anticipate and adapt to future changes, ensuring long-term sustainability and growth. Forward-thinking merchants who invest in ongoing education and technology adoption are better positioned to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Get A Free MCA Analysis

High business overheads and a cash-strapped customer base mean that merchants are seeking opportunities to reduce their outgoings. Merchant Centric Acquiring (MCA) by FreedomPay supports their bottom-line focus by empowering merchants to cut costs and enhance their operational predictability and flexibility. 

MCA is the industry’s first independent referral advisory service. This indicates a historical lack of transparency around the costs and features that differentiate payment processors. MCA’s trusted advisors leverage FreedomPay’s robust knowledge and industry relationships and experience as an independent payment gateway to educate merchants, evaluate their current state, and explore opportunities for cost savings and enhanced efficiency using the best payment processor for their requirements. 

MCA presents businesses of all sizes with a uniquely unbiased opportunity to find the best pre-qualified, certified, and verified payment processor to boost their success. MCA trusted advisors conduct a cost and obligation-free consultative review of a company’s accounts and payment solutions. This includes a data-driven analysis of their transaction volume, processing fees, and payment type patterns as well as their organizational priorities. Finally, the advisors review their findings with the merchant, helping them to navigate the payments industry’s complex dynamics, terminology, and acronyms and identify the right tech investment for their business. 

MCA saves merchants a significant 18% on their payment processing fees. How? Standardized fees and structures strengthen merchants’ bargaining position by benchmarking industry rates. Transparent and locked rates mean no expensive surprises! Simultaneously, it streamlines their operations by empowering merchants to manage their payment acceptance terms and conditions. This gives businesses of all sizes greater operational agility, efficiency, and predictability.

With Merchant Centric Acquiring, transparency unites with cost savings and operational efficiency. Take the pain out of payments processing – try MCA free of charge, and with no obligation!

Start Saving Money and Time

While the jury is out on whether the customer is always right, every successful retailer agrees that the customer must always come first! 

A customer-centric retailer adapts to changing expectations and prioritizes the needs of every consumer: secure, compliant transactions, a flexible, speedy, and streamlined shopping experience, and relevant loyalty incentives. FreedomPay explores how tech innovation is revolutionizing Retail, empowering retailers to set themselves apart from their competitors while ensuring customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention.

Streamlined & Speedy Shopping
Time is money, and customers today are on a tight budget! A fast, flexible, and seamless shopping journey that prioritizes customer convenience boosts conversion rates and boosts consumer satisfaction. 

Just one poor buying experience can cause irreparable damage to a customer’s perception of a retailer and their willingness to shop with them again. Fortunately, retailers can reduce the lengthy wait times at checkout that often lead to customer frustration and even cart abandonment.

How? By integrating with a secure, independent payment gateway that supports shoppers’ preferred payment methods and facilitates a unified, hybrid shopping experience across in-store, online, and in-app. 

Flexibility & Freedom of Choice
Future-forward retailers of all sizes are embracing the evolution of technology by integrating with alternative and digital payment methods to optimize users’ checkout experience. These range from contactless debit and credit cards and Digital Wallets (whose use will overtake plastic in the next decade) to AI-powered self-service kiosks and palm-based biometric payments! 

Cost and timing are shaping shoppers’ purchase decisions and by offering payment across several interest-free installments using Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) or installment loans, retailers make products and services accessible and affordable. This flexible offering can help to increase sales and spend-per-transaction while enhancing the customer experience and earning the retailer a competitive market edge.

A Personalized Approach to Loyalty 
Tech innovation is influencing the way retailers approach loyalty. Forward-thinking businesses are harnessing, interpreting, and segmenting data-driven behavioral insights or Business Intelligence to deeply understand a customer’s habits and preferences. 

The insights empower retailers to reliably target customers using customized communications and incentives that resonate with the individual. By incentivizing the purchase of relevant products across appropriate locations and channels, a data-driven loyalty strategy boosts retailers’ conversions, increases repeat custom, and strengthens brand loyalty.

Establishing Trust and Delivering Data Security.
Whether a retailer operates as a pureplay eCommerce, a brick-and-mortar store, or takes a hybrid, omnichannel approach, a PCI-validated P2PE solution drastically reduces their compliance scope. Customers are reassured that their personal data is secure, and merchants avoid potential reputational damage and hefty penalties for non-compliance. 

Highly secure, compliant, and reliable payments are the cornerstone of customers’ trust in your business – fundamental to every retailer’s success!  Working with a trusted partner or advisor with extensive industry experience is key to safe and swift transformation and establishing customer-centricity across every touchpoint through strategic tech innovation.

Safe and Secure + Fast and Flexible = Customer Centricity
Investment in tech innovation is revolutionizing Retail by speeding up, securing, and streamlining the customer-centric shopping experience for consumers and merchants alike. From using data to personalize loyalty incentivization to enabling alternative and digital payment acceptance within seconds, an independent, global payment gateway sits at the intersection of safe and secure, and fast and flexible performance.

FreedomPay is the world’s largest independent payment gateway, with 1000+ POS, PMS, web, and mobile integrations – all backed by industry-leading security. We empower businesses of all sizes to modernize their payment processes, expand beyond their current tech and seize new opportunities to drive revenue, customer satisfaction, andgrowth with our advanced and adaptive technology. 

EVERY business needs a payment gateway. Whether you’re an e-Commerce, brick and mortar, or hybrid business, a gateway is essential for accepting any digital or electronic payments made online and in-store at the Point of Sale (POS). 

What is a payment gateway?
A payment gateway is a software program that sits between the merchant and their customer. It’s often described as ‘an electronic cash register for the virtual world’. Payment gateways offer a secure pathway that requests and manages transactions to transfer money between a customer and a merchant’s bank account. FreedomPay is the world’s largest independent payment gateway, with many additional capabilities!  

What does a payment gateway do?
A gateway has three essential roles: encryption, authorization, and settlement.  

First, the gateway encrypts payment data through tokenization for secure transfer between the seller and the buyer. Next, it sends a payment request to the payment processor for authorization via the credit card or financial institution associated with the payment method. This allows the website or POS to move onto confirmation, receipt, or the next action in the sales journey. Finally, it settles the payment, completing the transaction and facilitating the transfer of funds between the buyer and seller. 

Some payment gateways with advanced functionality (such as FreedomPay) power order screening, tax calculation, and geolocation services to manage location-specific actions and feature dashboards for analyzing and reporting transaction status and payment performance.

How does a gateway help my business?
A gateway is great for customers. Why? It helps businesses deliver a seamless checkout experience by enabling secure acceptance within seconds. 

It benefits merchants, too. The right payment gateway ensures rapid, streamlined, and accurate transaction authorization. If a payment is valid, the value is exchanged. If not, the payment is declined, and your business avoids unnecessary chargeback fees!

What about PCI compliance?
The gateway provider assumes responsibility for the data traveling through the payment chain, reducing merchants’ compliance scope. Merchants never have to deal with sensitive credit card data directly with a PCI-P2PE, GDPR and PSD2-SCA compliant gateway like FreedomPay, relieving them of the associated PCI obligations and transactional security risks. 

Is a gateway the same thing as a processor?
There are many similarities but also some important differences. The gateway represents a system, whereas the processor is a ‘step’ in the payment chain. Processors and gateways both analyze and transmit transaction data to the relevant issuing parties, but a gateway also supports the settlement process by facilitating the transfer of funds between the buyer and seller.

Payment gateways and aggregators for online payments
To accept online payments, businesses need to have access to a payment gateway and to hold a merchant account, also known as an ‘aggregator’. Aggregators often offer access to a gateway in tandem with their merchant account (such as PayPal). A single gateway can support omnichannel payments, including online, mobile, and in-store POS transactions. A gateway must be compatible with the shopping cart to integrate with the aggregator, so you may need to set up your shopping cart and aggregator before your payment gateway. 

A powerful commerce investment
The right payment gateway is a powerful investment. FreedomPay’s cloud-based, patented secure switching easily connects to selling systems and unifies multiple channels. Its additional commerce capabilities enable at-a-glance reporting via transaction dashboards, and in-depth analysis of detailed consumer behavior insights. These can be used to streamline customer interactions and power a data-driven, personalized sales and loyalty incentivization strategy! 

The world’s largest independent payment gateway could take your sales operations and customer experience to the Next Level. Drive revenue, expand your legacy tech, and drive consumer satisfaction your way with an unrivalled world class, secure platform. Learn more about FreedomPay’s advanced and adaptive technology platform.

Chris Kronenthal, President at FreedomPay

At FreedomPay, our technology empowers businesses around the world to provide a robust, frictionless, and personalized purchasing experience across online and in-store channels. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Amazon One—the fast, convenient, and contactless identity service that uses your palm to enter, identify, and pay—is now integrated with FreedomPay’s commerce technology platform.

Together, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and FreedomPay’s technologies enable merchants to offer a seamless checkout process and a faster way to pay. Shoppers will be able to use their palm to pay with FreedomPay using Amazon One

Amazon One, a palm-based biometric identity and payment service, uses artificial-intelligence-like computer vision and deep learning techniques, including generative AI, to establish a person’s identity. Amazon One is highly secure and protected by multiple security controls using custom-built algorithms and hardware to create each person’s unique palm signature which is never stored on the device. Instead, these signatures are encrypted and sent to a highly secure, custom-built area in the cloud, which simplifies a range of tasks from payment to access. You can read more about how Amazon One was designed with customer privacy and data security top of mind.

With FreedomPay’s commerce tech, consumers and merchants gain access to world-class technology, including our seamless tokenization capacity. This feature enhances data security while delivering the seamless, personalized experiences consumers love. Tokenization protects customer data with a randomly generated “token.” Not only does this protect bank accounts and credit card numbers, it also allows merchants to recognize their customers. It also allows customers to build profiles of spending patterns and provide insights to deliver more targeted loyalty programs, promotions, and rewards. These features, powered by FreedomPay, enable consumers to use any credit or debit card to check out with any merchant or venue that accepts Amazon One.

Merchants face a rapidly changing consumer landscape. Payment flexibility will remain key to customer satisfaction and a merchant’s brand reputation. As consumer expectations continue to emphasize speed, customization and convenience of checkout, merchants must optimize every interaction with consumers by embracing innovation, prioritizing personalization, and delivering a seamless and secure experience.

A platform like FreedomPay’s differentiated and convenient payment experience is key to helping merchants unleash the power of pay with the world’s open payments platform.

We’re excited to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch this new solution and to continue building innovative new physical retail experiences.

We sit in a very unique space, in the middle of the entire payment ecosystem. This lends itself to understanding a lot about the consumers: what they’re buying, what they’re not buying, how they pay, and how they like to transact. 

Using our Business Intelligence (BI) platform, we can help merchants to understand what those trends are, for a variety of reasons; whether it’s enablement of new functionality, or understanding consumer trends to offer an enhanced consumer experience. Perhaps it’s the beginning of a loyalty at play where merchants want to use consumer segmentation to understand very niche types of consumers, so that they can better cater to them. 

Our Business Intelligence platform allows merchants to create and study any type of consumer segment. Maybe it’s their highest spenders, the consumer spending on certain products, or consumers they haven’t seen in a long time. The consumer segmentation engine within our BI platform allows merchants to generate these, so they can take action to drive their behavior and enhance their overall consumer experience.

Thank you, Cedric!

Take your understanding of your customers’ preferences and requirements to the Next Level with FreedomPay’s Business Intelligence platform.

Cedric Lourie, Vice President of Digital Development at FreedomPay, outlines the value of alternative, digital payment methods and the partners who enable them.

Consumer demand for innovation at checkout is booming. Merchants wishing to meet and exceed customer and guest expectations must offer them choice and ease of use through increased functionality. 

Very few merchants want to invest their time, talent, and resources into developing one-on-one relationships with the providers of each new functionality and integration they enable.  

FreedomPay seeks out and partners with third party providers of the alternative technologies that interest the merchants who choose our Next Level Commerce™ platform. We empower merchants to optimize their customer journeys with our agnostic, one-stop solution.

Perhaps your partner of choice is an industry giant such as PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Maybe you wish to establish additional functionalities such as payment with loyalty points, Pay by Link, QR code transactions, or gift card enablement. 

Whatever your plan is for your business, FreedomPay can help you integrate with ease to Unleash the Power of Pay