The Client
The Payment Firm Ltd (The PayFirm) is an Electronic Money Institution, authorised in the UK. They offer services on an eMoney Distribution basis (rather than the now frowned upon Agency model). They specialise in providing cutting-edge digital financial services, providing an API to power their clients’ products.
Their mission is to empower their clients with robust, secure, and flexible financial solutions that drive efficiency and growth in the digital economy. The PayFirm is responsible for all compliance, transaction monitoring and MLRO functions, allowing their partners to focus on what they know, their customers and growing their businesses.
TPF are a principal member of both Mastercard and Visa for Card Issuing, with client onboarding underway for a variety of interesting programmes.
The Challenge
The initial brief was to work with the The PayFirm to power its new payment services for SMEs and individuals. The PayFirm wanted to deliver easy-to-use, customer-centric solutions to cover the full span of payment services, initially providing accounts with virtual IBANs, multi-currency accounts, cross border payments, card issuing, and accounts with virtual SWIFT. They wanted to deliver all of this with transparent competitive pricing and easy functionality.
As the project progressed the scope expanded to include a hierarchy to enable The PayFirm to work with fintechs that needed a fast path to market leveraging The PayFirm’s EMI licence.
Why SaaScada
SaaScada’s event sourcing architecture helped The PayFirm to build robust payments solutions that enable customers and suppliers to move balances between accounts on the network, without having to pay transaction fees. This helps to lower costs, as transaction fees only apply when money is drawn down. This allows The PayFirm to offer truly disruptive pricing to customers. Moreover, access to real time-customer data also helps The PayFirm to streamline and automate compliance reporting, ensuring efficiency and accuracy.
The PayFirm’s entire roadmap is customer-driven and SaaScada provides the data needed to develop and launch new offerings at speed to enable The PayFirm to be a full-service EMI, delivering what their customers need. SaaScada has enabled them to offer everything – high volume and low margins to give the best value to customers. SaaScada’s cloud architecture also primes The PayFirm to expand into new markets when the time comes.
They enabled us to build a new back end, middleware, and APIs in just three months – that’s normally a year’s worth of work. It’s unheard of to get it done that quickly
“In some ways, payments are simple – you put a pound in the top and it comes out the other end, divided up. But you need to know what you’re doing. SaaScada was the only vendor I felt confident in – the technology just works. And the fact they are already deployed and scaled with banks gave us peace of mind they know what they’re doing. The team has been hugely supportive, enabling us to build a new back end, middleware, and APIs in just three months – that’s normally a year’s worth of work. It’s unheard of to get it done that quickly,”
Gary Prince, CEO.
The Solution
By default a Client is an individual entity on the SaaScada platform, however, to accommodate The PayFirm working with other Fintechs, a parent-child hierarchy was created. We set out to make it as simple as possible for The PayFirm to provide their child institutions with a choice of access levels. This enables The PayFirm to offer either preconfigured products to their client or to give them access to all features to configure their own bespoke products.
We provide real-time data to The PayFirm to which they can apply their own logic to create reporting for their fintech clients or they can provide access to the fintech to produce their own reporting from the data we provide.
The Proof
Within weeks of soft launch, the team at The PayFirm had already onboarded 3 clients, with the first live transactions taking place a mere 7 days after onboarding. The company has no shortage of clients, with EMDs already live (integrating via TPF’s straightforward API suite), with several more in sandbox and testing phase. The onboarding process is becoming increasingly smooth and more seamless, with the necessary compliance checks, integration to sandbox to migration to live taking less than two weeks.
