Storing payment details for future re-use delivers a positive customer experience by eliminating valuable time in the checkout process but also by housing your customers' payment information in Spreedly’s robust, flexible vault. By tokenizing card details with our vault, you can transact with virtually any payment service while securing payment methods.

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Rough transcript of Spreedly Solutions Stack: Secure Payment Methods: 

Today, we'll be discussing how to secure customer payment details. But first, let's talk a little bit about the context. The context, which is payment orchestration. So what is payment orchestration? Well, payment orchestration is based on the idea that every single customer experience is unique and all businesses provide a unique customer experience and so their payment experience has to be tailored as well.

So why is the customer experience different? Why is the payment experience different? Well it's because the products and services that you sell, the customers that you target, the markets that you serve, the business model that you're in, all of these elements are different. As a result, the payment experience is uniquely custom to just your unique company. So you need to have a payment platform, a system of services that support that unique business model. A one size fits all is not going to support your payment experience and ultimately it will leave you flat from a customer experience perspective. That can stymie your growth and your ability to expand into new markets.

Storing Payment Details

So it's no wonder that over 70% of today's businesses actually demand a multi-provider approach, they demand to have payment orchestration and the ability to connect and use different payment services depending on their need in the payment journey and ultimately in the customer journey. So what is the solution? Well, to deliver a great customer experience, of course you want to be able to store payment details like credit cards, debit cards, other payment methods like local payment methods for future reuse. Your customers rely on you to secure those payment methods. They expect you to be able to secure them, to protect them from fraudsters and other people. A breach or other kind of security issue can severely damage that trust, the confidence that your customers have placed in you to securely store those payment methods. You want to have cards on file for many reasons, perhaps you're a subscription business and you need to have that on a monthly or other recurring basis to keep charging those credit cards, or debit cards, or other payment methods to keep that service or product delivery going.

Or perhaps you want to store cards for future purchases. Makes it easier for customers that are returning to come back in and purchase another product from you. If you don't have that card on file, of course the payment experience will suffer and ultimately the customer experience will suffer. So Spreedly offers a PCI compliant fold that tokenizes and secures those payment methods for you on behalf of your customers. So what are tokens? Well they're a secure way of storing payment details that keep card numbers obfuscated, or secure and hidden so that other details, including the card numbers, expiry date, et cetera, are hidden away from bad actors. But at the same time, you also gain the flexibility to move your vault. After all that relationship between yourself and your customer through that stored payment method is yours that you've built as a company, and you need to be able to port that vault to whichever payment service you prefer. That portability is absolutely vital and a key tenant of the Spreedly approach.

Flexible Vault

So this overall strategy allows you to keep vital payment methods locked down, all that data locked down while letting you adjust your vaulting strategy as needed over time. So how does securing payment methods fit into the overall payment orchestration model? Well ultimately payment orchestration is about flexibility and the ability to control your path. So by allowing you to secure payment details, you're freeing up resources that can be devoted to other aspects of your customer experience. Plus, with our portable approach to a vaulting, you can actually take that vault and connect it to whichever payment service you like. So that flexibility shines through in not only freeing up those resources, but also being able to use that vault in the way that you see fit.

One Spreedly customer is SeatGeek. They're a very famous ticketing organization that's grown over time. At first, it started off as largely a marketplace where ticket brokers and others could sell excess inventory or other inventory to customers that wanted to purchase tickets for a particular event. SeatGeek used Spreedly in order to securely store and then transact with those payment methods. But over time actually SeatGeek grew and they added additional functionality, including expanding into the enterprise world where they now serve some of the largest sporting teams and other venues as part of their customer clientele. Over time, because they were growing, they needed to have a platform that adapted to their new business model and Spreedly's approach to securing payment methods in a portable vault gives them that flexibility to grow over time as they move business models and expand and grow globally.

Tokenization

So let's take a look at each aspect of the solution. The first one that I'll talk about is the idea of tokenization. Essentially what that involves is storing customer payment details to allow you to secure them, keep them hidden away from a breach, but still at the same time allowing customers to transact more freely with you. That's often the case where you need to store payment details for things like subscriptions, where there's a recurring charge, or perhaps where you want to have returning customers come back and make a future purchase much more simply because the stored payment method is there and available to transact in the future.

But those stored cards have to be protected in order to avoid the crisis that comes from a breach, fraudsters using store payment methods, or even just from a PCI audit and other kinds of compliance related issues. So Spreedly is actually built with security absolutely fundamentally at its core and our vault hides payment details from bad actors by tokenizing those card details and keeping them secure. In fact, Spreedly's approach to tokenization with universal tokens allows you to not only secure those transactions, to lock them down within a vault, but also to be able to transact with virtually any payment service while keeping your data protected. So that gives you not only the comfort of securing and protecting those payment details, but also the flexibility to use them in the way that matters most to you. So you can deliver that great payment experience and ultimately that great customer experience.

Portability

Now let's talk about portability. Your businesses work very hard to build trust with your customers and so you should have the flexibility to move that vault around between payment services when your strategy or vendor needs have changed. With Spreedly, your vault is portable, and that allows you to shift between gateways or other payment services as required. That allows you to avoid vendor lock in without the complexity and challenges of building and maintaining a vault yourself. That gives you the freedom to free up those development resources, to focus on other aspects of your customer experience that matter to your business.

You want to be able to provide a great experience for your customers and that requires that you can identify returning clients, even when they're using a card across different transactions. Spreedly helps by assigning a randomly generated identifier to each unique credit card number and exposes that value back to you in the API. So that means anytime a card is added, you can use the value, this fingerprint in order to determine if you've ever seen that car before. That lets you build out features like loyalty programs or even basic fraud detection. Also, through omnichannel recognition, all without increasing the PCI scope of your application or service and that allows you to provide again, a better customer experience by tuning that customer experience to the unique needs of each individual customer. That's by leveraging the rich payment data that you're collecting.

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