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As a payment network, your role is to enable vendors to certify their products and start processing transactions in the field. You will have to be agile in doing this. This would make it successful both for the vendors and the networks.
Look at the success of UPI transactions in India. The success can be attributed to the ease of use and ease of implementation of the infrastructure. The networks that built UPI understood that adoption is not just a technology problem. It is a friction problem. The easier it is for vendors to integrate and certify, the faster the ecosystem grows.
How do you bring this kind of ease to every form factor?
This is a question that most payment networks are grappling with, except for the big players like Mastercard, Visa, Discover, Amex, UnionPay, and JCB. Smaller and regional networks often lack the tooling and infrastructure that the major networks have built over decades. The result is a certification process that is slower, more opaque, and more expensive for vendors than it needs to be.
The payments industry is regulated. Every product, before it is introduced to the market, needs to be certified to perform transactions. This means there is an extensive certification process that the payment network must follow, which is both time-consuming and complex for vendors.
Without visibility into payment network certification on both sides, the process becomes a black box for vendors. They submit test logs and wait. They do not know whether their submission is under review or sitting idle. That uncertainty forces vendors to follow up repeatedly, consuming time on both sides that could be better spent on the certification work itself.
Vendors will have to:
There are two main challenges that a vendor faces:
First, it takes a long time for the certification slot to be allotted. For smaller networks managing a growing member base, slot availability becomes a genuine bottleneck. Vendors that are technically ready to certify find themselves waiting weeks for a slot, during which their product sits idle and their launch timeline slips.
Second, if anything fails in the certification process, the vendor will have to go through another iteration, which means booking another certification slot. It is a delay that compounds the impact on the vendor's product roadmap and the network's own deployment targets.
This invariably results in lost time for the vendors. And lost vendor time translates directly into slower network growth.
Payment networks can provide test simulators that vendors can use to debug their products before booking the certification slot with the network. This will ensure they get the certification in the first iteration itself.
Pre-certification simulation changes the economics of the process entirely. A vendor that arrives at their certification slot having already worked through the common failure scenarios is far more likely to pass on the first attempt. Fewer failed attempts mean fewer rescheduled slots, a shorter backlog, and a faster time-to-market for every vendor in the queue.
Besides simulation, networks need a certification management payment network platform that gives both the network and the vendor a shared view of where things stand. Certification status tracking for a payment network should not rely on email threads and spreadsheets. Real-time certification monitoring means vendors can see their submission status, pass/fail outcomes, and outstanding requirements without contacting the network for an update.
A certification management system provides the network and its vendors with full visibility into onboarding, certification status, pass/fail scenarios, and timelines. A payment network certification dashboard that shows this information in real time removes the uncertainty. It slows everything down, replacing it with a shared, accurate picture of where every active certification stands.
We have a platform that can:
The cloud deployment option is particularly relevant for networks that want to offer vendors access to certification infrastructure without requiring them to set up anything locally. A cloud-hosted platform means a vendor in any geography can access the same simulation and certification tools from day one, removing the infrastructure barrier that often delays the start of a certification engagement.
Most vendors already have tools they use during development. A certification management platform that integrates with the tools reduces adoption friction.
Real-time certification monitoring on the platform also provides network operations teams with the data they need to improve the process continuously. Which test cases generate the most failures? Which specification versions create the most confusion? Which vendor segments take the longest to certify? Those questions can only be answered when the data exists in a structured, queryable form rather than scattered across email inboxes and manual logs.
The objective is to create a certification process that is fast, transparent, and predictable to everyone in the ecosystem. Payment network certification visibility is not just a convenience but a distinct factor that distinguishes the vendors they want to certify from those they need to avoid.
Would you be interested in knowing more? We are putting together a webinar on the topic: "The why, what, and how of simulators in validating acquirers, issuers, and networks."
This webinar was held on the 12th of April, 2023. Reach out to info[at]payhuddle.com to get the webinar recording link.
