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Payhuddle, the upstart in the payments certification space, talks about its plans.
Payhuddle has entered a disruptive mode in this space. We are moving all our test platforms to the cloud to make it easier for acquirers, issuers, and vendors to debug and certify their hosts and products.
We are also helping payment networks cloud-enable their platforms, allowing them to run their certifications quickly and securely.
The shift to the cloud is not just a change in the delivery model. It is a fundamental rethinking of how payment certification infrastructure should work. Traditional test tools were built for an era when certification was an occasional event - something that happened when a new terminal was introduced or a new form factor came to market. Cloud payment certification platforms are built for an era when certification is continuous, specification updates arrive more frequently, new payment methods need to be certified faster, and the teams doing the certifying are distributed across geographies and time zones.
Most vendors and banks buy test tools and get stuck with them because they do not use them year-round. They are used only when a new acceptance device or form factor is introduced to the market.
What is the payback time for their investments?
It takes a reasonably long time, and most often they get only partial payback.
The economics of traditional test tool ownership do not work well for organizations that certify infrequently. A bank that buys a test tool to certify a new ATM fleet uses it intensively for a few months, then puts it on the shelf. The tool does not become more valuable over time. It ages. Specifications update. New network requirements come in. The tool that was current at the time of purchase is less current a year later, and the organization has to invest again in updates or in a new tool entirely.
For terminal vendors, the problem replicates across markets.
A vendor certifying in multiple geographies needs to manage multiple specification versions, network requirements, and certification timelines simultaneously. Maintaining separate tools for each context is more than an overhead to carry.
Given this situation, Payhuddle is making all its tools and platforms available on the cloud. This allows banks and vendors to subscribe for a specified period and perform their debugging, testing, and certification. In essence, you get the payback immediately.
Those customers who run their certifications throughout the year have the option to buy the tools and platforms outright, which gives them payback on a different timeline. But for most organizations that certify periodically, the cloud-based payment certification model eliminates the overhead of tool ownership.
The cloud-based payment certification model also removes the geographic constraint that has always been implicit in on-premise test tool deployments. A team in Southeast Asia can access the same cloud payment certification platform as a team in Europe or the Americas. The certification environment is consistent across all of them. Updates to specifications and test libraries are applied in the cloud once and become available to all subscribers immediately. There is no lag between a specification update and the platform reflecting it.
Payhuddle is looking to be flexible with testing tools and platforms, and we have a solution for everyone and every need.
The automated payment brand certification capability enabled by cloud delivery is one of the most practical benefits for payment networks and their merchant and acquirer bases. A payment network that runs its certification programs on a cloud platform can automate the test execution, result validation, and reporting steps that previously required manual coordination between the network, the lab, and the entity being certified. That automation compresses the certification timeline and removes the human variability introduced by manual processes.
Payhuddle strongly believes in making its tools and platforms intelligent. We are including Artificial Intelligence as part of our offerings, enabling our platform to learn continuously and provide intelligence to customers.
For instance, the customer should be able to figure out why a particular test case failed and the possible reasons for it. This would allow them to fix the issue during the debug stage itself.
AI-driven EMV certification changes what the debug cycle looks like in practice. In a traditional debug cycle, a test case failure produces a log. The engineer reads the log, interprets the failure, hypothesizes a fix, implements it, and reruns the test. Each iteration of that cycle takes time. In an AI-enabled platform, the analysis step is automated. The platform reads the log, identifies the failure pattern, and surfaces the most likely causes of the failure, along with pointers to where in the configuration or application the fix should be applied.
The result is a debug cycle that is shorter, more consistent, and less dependent on the individual expertise of the engineer running the test. A team that is new to certification benefits from the same AI-driven analysis as a team with years of experience. The platform brings domain knowledge into the debug process that would otherwise require a specialist.
AI payment brand certification takes that capability further. When the AI layer has been trained on sufficient volumes of certification results across multiple networks, terminal types, and specification versions, it can predict which test cases are most likely to fail for a given configuration before the test run begins. That predictive capability allows teams to address likely failure points proactively rather than reactively, reducing the number of debug iterations required to reach a clean certification result.
Payment brand certification AI cloud is where these capabilities converge. A cloud-based platform with an embedded AI layer can serve as both the certification infrastructure and the intelligence layer simultaneously. The platform runs the tests. The AI interprets the results. The engineer acts on the recommendations. And the cycle compresses to a fraction of what it would take without either the cloud delivery or the AI analysis.
What this means for customers is that their certification gets done in the first iteration. Our offerings will help customers save time, money, and effort in their testing and certification projects.
Watch the video where Prakash Sambandam is in conversation with Sabapathy Narayanan.
