Payment Processor Expands Portfolio with Automated Phone Payments

Summary

Major Payment Aggregator (MPA) is a payment processing company transforming the bill pay experience for consumers, billers and financial technology providers. One of MPA's major clients requested adding a voice payment processing option, so MPA collaborated with Plum Voice to quickly build and deploy a new application. Adding the voice channel extended MPA's portfolio of payment options, giving them a strategic advantage within their industry to win more clients and provide a comprehensive user experience.

Company Story

MPA is a payment processing company based in Seattle, Washington. They provide consumers with a simple, secure way to pay all their bills in one place. For billers, MPA's network-driven platform enables online and mobile payments with a simple integration, lower costs and modern features unavailable with legacy bill pay vendors. By making it easier for consumers to pay their bills, billers receive faster payments and need to provide less customer support.

Challenge

One of MPA's largest clients offered them an exclusive deal to handle all payments. The client requested a voice channel option for consumers to make payments. MPA didn't have this capability and didn't want to lose out on this significant opportunity, so they quickly began researching companies that provide automated payments over the phone.

As a payment processing company, their first criterion was finding a PCI compliant solution. "We quickly found this requirement narrowed our options in the marketplace," said MPA's Director of Product. In addition to PCI compliance, the MPA IT team wanted a hosted solution to avoid the headaches of maintaining an on-premises system.

MPA had a relatively short window to implement and deploy a voice solution. Therefore, their developers needed a platform with simple APIs that could deploy quickly. The MPA team also considered the future of their voice offerings and wanted a feature-rich platform that could handle outbound notifications and SMS messaging campaigns.

Solution

Plum DEV (DEV) met all these requirements and was competitively priced, making it the easy choice for building a voice channel for the payment processing system. DEV also allowed MPA to launch its voice channel quickly. 

MPA's team of engineers and developers built their voice application in-house. Within a month, they built the application and delivered it to the quality assurance stage. MPA's Director of Product noted that he received positive feedback from his engineers on the DEV tool. "They noted that the APIs were clear, straightforward and easy to use. There was no griping from our engineers about anything being onerous."

After another month of testing, MPA was ready to go. They went from signing a contract to deploying their voice app in about three months. "I found no other PCI compliant, hosted service that compares to Plum. Not only is it extremely cost-effective and flexible, but its ease of use meant that the time to market exceeded our expectations and helped us meet our client commitments," noted their Director of Product. 

The application they built enabled MPA to do two things: 

1. Process payments over the phone, and 
2. Maintain PCI compliance for the voice channel.

Regarding PCI compliance, MPA's Director of Product emphasized, "We don't take it lightly; we take our security very seriously. The fact that Plum Voice's platform is PCI compliant has significant value to us because we never have to worry about the voice parts (DEV) of our solution. When PCI auditors visit, we have no reservations about showing them the applications built on the Plum Voice platform."