Payhuddle Consulting

Our consulting has mainly focused on the acquirer side, especially at Level 3.

Besides, we offer consulting to payment networks on specification development, review, setting up certification boards, certification management, and creation of project dashboards.

We are also starting to offer consulting to banks on the issuing side.

We are pretty excited about our consulting offerings. We will focus this post on the consulting we have provided on the acquisition side.

Consulting to acquirers

A few things that we want to talk about include:

#1 Remote consulting

We are the first ones to offer remote consulting in the acquiring space.

When the pandemic set in, most acquirers put their terminal certification projects on hold because consultants could not travel to assist with testing and certification.

Many of our customers were also stuck. That's when we rolled out our remote consulting services.

With remote consulting, we could deliver testing and certification services effectively at a fraction of the cost it would have otherwise.

While it helps the banks tremendously, it has also enabled us to broaden our scope considerably into other geographies. Today, we are offering these services in 58 countries.

Remote consulting is not just a pandemic-era workaround. It has become the preferred delivery model for many of our customers because of the speed and cost advantages it delivers.

A certification project that previously required a consultant to fly in, spend a week on-site, and fly out can now be executed entirely remotely in the same or a shorter timeframe. The savings in travel cost and elapsed time are real, and the quality of the outcome is no different. For banks in markets where specialist EMV consulting expertise is not locally available, remote delivery has opened access to a level of support previously unavailable.

#2 Different customers have different needs

We encounter three kinds of customers.

• The banks that are highly knowledgeable in the domain. They want the test tools and consulting services, and they want them quickly. We ensure that everything is done within the defined SLAs. We have even executed certification projects for them within a week.
• The banks that have their own tools and have done some testing. They want our consulting services. We help them with steps to avoid pitfalls and remove challenges in testing. Once the analysis is complete, we also help them fix the issues by providing advice. Sometimes we handhold them in their interactions with other stakeholders, such as switch vendors, terminal vendors, and payment networks.
• The banks that are going for certification for the first time. They are likely in contact with the payment network, but they have no clue about how to certify their terminals. We begin by sharing the consulting project guide. We help with prerequisites, filling out ICS forms, choosing the right features, and selecting appropriate test cases. We train them on how to perform testing and capture logs. Once we analyze the logs, we go back to them with fixes and handhold them in their interactions with other stakeholders. From beginning to end, we handhold them in testing and certification.

The three customer profiles reflect the market's maturity range. A bank that has done five certification projects and a bank doing its first one are solving very different problems, even though the end goal is the same.

Our consulting model is designed to meet each of them where they are rather than applying the same approach regardless of starting point. For first-time customers in particular, the value is not just in the technical guidance. It is in having a partner who has navigated the same process across dozens of markets and can anticipate where projects typically stall before they become problems.

#3 Timezone needs

As we address customers worldwide, the need for our consultants to be available during their work time arises.

Our consultants are available in their time zones, helping them test, implement fixes, coordinate with other stakeholders, and train.

It has helped them complete certifications in record time.

Timezone coverage is an underappreciated part of what makes remote consulting work at a global scale. A consultant who is only available during India Standard Time is not genuinely available to a bank in the Americas or Western Europe at the moments when they need support most.

Our consulting team structure is built to ensure that customers in any geography have access to a consultant during their core working hours, not just during ours. When a testing issue comes up at 2 pm in São Paulo or 10 am in London, the response does not wait until the next morning in India.

#4 Device agnostic

We have helped banks undergo certification across various terminal types: ATM, POS, mPOS, and SoftPOS. We have addressed both the contact and contactless interfaces.

The breadth of terminal types we support reflects how much the acceptance landscape has changed over the past decade. A bank certifying a traditional countertop POS terminal and a bank deploying a SoftPOS solution on Android devices face very different certification challenges.

ATM certification involves a different set of test cases and host interactions than a contactless mPOS deployment. Having consulting experience across all these terminal types means we can support a bank's full acceptance infrastructure, not just the terminal category we happen to know best.

#5 Credentials

We have an EMVCo-qualified Level 3 tool, Tecto, used by banks worldwide, and many of our customers also use it for their Level 3 testing needs. Besides, we are a Discover-accredited E2E certification service provider and a Visa-accredited CVES provider.

Having accredited status with Discover and Visa means our customers work with a consulting partner whose processes and outputs are recognized by the payment networks themselves. That matters when a bank is submitting test results for network review. The credibility of the submission is not just a function of the test results. It is also a function of who helped produce them.

Conclusion

We are constantly looking to improve our consulting offerings and ensure we deliver that delta improvement in every consulting engagement we undertake.

The testimonials from our customers and their continuous engagement are a testament to our offerings.

Reach out to us for your consulting needs.