Low-Code ‘Legos’ Help Indian Firms Scale Cross-Border Payments
In the push to be part of global commerce, businesses face a range of complexities. As companies seek to have a range of collection and payment options on hand beyond simply accepting cards, they must strive to offer localized choices.
It’s no easy task — merchants and all manner of enterprises must navigate compliance hurdles and connect to bank accounts while integrating payments infrastructure. And they must do all of this while pivoting to meet ever-changing consumer demands.
Ramkumar Venkatesan, senior vice president of engineering at application programming interface (API) platform and payments gateway Cashfree Payments, said that “low”-code payments platforms can streamline the technical heavy lift for firms based in India — especially when it comes to cross-border transactions.
“Traditionally,” he said, “building software applications requires a lot of programming, and teams of engineers in the mix.”
Those teams, he said, have had to take a holistic approach to the build-outs, taking everything from customer acquisition to monetizing new services into consideration. Engineering teams typically would have had to build all of this from scratch out of the proverbial box.
Related: Payments Space Supports Growth With Innovation
But with low (or even no) code options, there are more solutions available to them as they create new user experiences.
“These solutions can be used, even by non-programmers, with simple drag-and-drop user interfaces,” Venkatesan said. Companies seeking to integrate payments functionalities into their applications, he added, can tackle build-outs and go-to-market initiatives with speed and security in ways that had not been seen previously.
As Easy as Drag-and-Drop
By dragging and dropping, those blocks of payments infrastructure can get integrations done in mere minutes with few lines of code. Platforms like Cashfree Payments, he said, help client firms scale while also enabling them to collect payments and disburse funds.
The FinTech space, Venkatesan continued, is powering India’s great digital shift, eliminating long-standing frictions and reducing the costs of transactions done on the global stage.
Cashfree Payments, for its part, has built microservice architecture that in turn powers the platform with “Lego blocks” that help build reusable and new solutions, such as cross-border payments, quickly. Those transactions, he said, must be tied to reconciliations, to merchant reporting and settlement.
The company recently said it expanded Token Vault, which lets businesses who use multiple payment gateways process tokenized card transactions across any payment gateway and card network. That tokenization solution, he said, is built as a Lego block and can be used across payouts and Cashfree’s subscription production.
See also: Cashfree Payments Upgrades Its Token Vault
The availability of the blocks (and by extension, the token vaults) makes it easier for Cashfree Payments’ merchant customers to comply with regulatory guidelines that mandate that credit cards cannot be stored in merchants’ databases.
At the same time, there exists a real challenge for India’s merchants, as they move across borders, to be compliant in several countries. With the platform model, he said, the risks inherent in cross-border payments are absorbed by the company.
“We have an internal team that understands these risks, and we have a team of engineers building products that can also detect risks in these transactions,” he said.
Looking ahead, he said that with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) — an instant real-time payment system developed by National Payments Corporation of India — going global to countries such Nepal and Singapore, it will enable platforms that support UPI to add value to those countries.
“The value is that, for our customers, innovation takes place rapidly,” Venkatesan told PYMNTS.