In today’s increasingly digital world, a strong payment infrastructure is critical, especially for businesses looking to offer seamless and secure payment experiences to their customers. From accepting online payments to managing transactions and payment processing, a robust payment infrastructure is key to ensuring smooth financial operations. With the rise in digital adoption, cyber security threats and risks of payment fraud are also, unfortunately, on the rise. What are the best ways to tackle this? In the following sections, I have listed down some of the best practices for building a secure and reliable payment infrastructure. Read on.
Accelerate efficiency with automation
Over the past few years, there has been a growing need for modern payment technology. The emergence of new payment technologies has removed or at least simplified barriers to entry. In the years to come, all payments will begin and end in software. As a result of this transformation, there is an increasing demand for automation and a programmatic approach to managing transactions on a large scale.
Manual processes are prone to human errors and some inevitable delays that affect go-to-market or go-live timelines; proving to be inefficient for businesses. This challenge can be solved by automating repetitive tasks.
For example, partner or merchant onboarding can benefit from automation. Automating can simplify the process, make it less unpredictable, and reduce friction. Reconciliation is another area where automation can play a robust role. Reconciliation is important for an organization to understand how completed and in-progress transactions add up. Most finance teams try to resolve the reconciliation problem with spreadsheets, email, and manual examination of bank statements – inefficient and error-prone processes. Automation can also be used in various areas such as monitoring, fraud detection, money laundering, and more.
Boosting security
With the increasing number of transactions taking place through online channels, the importance of security in payment infrastructure cannot be overstated.
The significance of security in payment infrastructure is threefold:
1. Protects sensitive information/data
2. Builds trust with clients/customers
3. Prevents frauds
To ensure a secure payment infrastructure, businesses should implement the following measures:
1. Use Encrypted Connections: Make sure all transactions happen via secure connections by using HTTPS/SSL encryption. This protects sensitive data from being intercepted by hackers during transmission.
2. Deploy Fraud Detection Tools: Implement fraud detection through tools such as machine learning algorithms to detect and prevent suspicious activity. This can help identify unusual patterns in transactions that may indicate fraud and flag them for review.
3. Regular Security Audits: Perform regular security audits to identify and fix any potential vulnerabilities in the payment infrastructure. This prevents security breaches by ascertaining that all security measures are up to date.
4. PCI Compliance: Ascertain that the payment infrastructure is PCI compliant.
5. Secure Data Storage: Make certain that sensitive data is stored securely and follows industry-standard protocols for data protection. This includes using encryption, firewalls, and access controls to prevent unauthorized access.
Operations
1. Operations Team: A business operations team plays a big role in the day-to-day monitoring of transactions and in addressing customer queries. A reliable and transparent back-end portal would enable them to do this job with ease and efficiency.
2. Ledgers: This should be the source of truth for transactions taking place in a financial system, displaying the current positions. A good ledger management must have immutability, concurrency controls, audit trails, and support of multiple currencies.
3. Sandbox Environment: A separate similar live environment is required so that the technical team can develop and test integrations in a risk-free environment.
Training and Knowledge Base
1. Besides technical training, compliance training programs are extremely useful. A strong compliance program will make sure that the employees are aware of all regulations, AML, and sanctions.
2. Building a knowledge base can serve as a valuable investment for any organization. A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that can be used to store, share, and access knowledge across the organization. An open-source or premium tool can be deployed in organizations where employees can share knowledge, training materials, etc.
At TerraPay, we have been committed to building innovative payment solutions for our partners with a focus on empowering them with efficiency, security, transparency, and the power of data. Consistent with our commitment, we have built a customized ML system designed to enable data-driven decision-making, execution, and tracking across TerraPay’s current and future offerings. It further breaks down the complexities around compliance, making processes more efficient, quick, and seamless for all our partners.