White label Payment Gateway: Pros and Cons

The concept of white-label product or service, surely, applies to electronic payments in general and to payment gateways in particular. Basically, a white label payment gateway is gateway product which you can offer your customers under your own brand.

So, what are the advantages of white label payment gateway solutions?

The key strong points are as follows.

• No need to develop your own payment gateway from scratch. You just take the readymade white label solution, put your logo and brand name on it, configure it, and become the gateway provider for your customers (cardholders or merchants).
• No need to handle the issues, related to payment security, integrations, certifications, and maintenance. Your white label gateway provider (the third party) will take care of them for you.

Companies that want to improve their image and reputation in the eyes of competitors and clients find it very beneficial to resort to white label services of third-party gateway providers. However, they become payment gateway providers only in name. Most of the process is controlled and handled by third parties, i.e. the actual gateway providers.

The trick with white label payment processing is that the more control over the process you need, the more responsibility you have to assume.

White label payment gateway model: options to choose from

• If you just want to boost your reputation and increase your customer base, a regular brandable third-party gateway might suffice.
• If you want to avoid slowdowns, that occur when multiple businesses are sharing a white label payment platform, you might want to go with a dedicated payment gateway instance.
• If you want to save resources on gateway maintenance, a virtual payment gateway might be the best option for you.
• If you want to customize your white label gateway solution as you please, you might want to license a ready-made gateway product with open source code and take it “in-house”. However, keep in mind, that each change you introduce will have to be separately certified by all your respective channel partners.
• Plus, there is always an option (at least, in theory) to develop a gateway product from scratch. But that is a different story, involving really impressive costs and efforts.

So, what is an optimal white label payment gateway model for you?

Well, startup merchants and SME, usually, opt for hosted (cloud) gateway solutions, almost completely maintained by third parties. As they increase their processing volumes and customer bases, their needs become more sophisticated. As a result, they are looking for more flexible white label credit card processing offerings and gateway solutions.

But is it possible to stick to the same gateway solution throughout the whole evolution of your business? Actually, it is. Flexibility and robustness are the fundamental principles of Paymentech industry. So, payment software companies are trying to follow them. For instance, UniPay Gateway solution offered by United Thinkers is a processor-agnostic payment gateway platform, which can be the only one you will ever need. If your transaction volumes are not very large and your processing needs are more or less basic, you can use a hosted cloud version of UniPay Gateway technology. If you need to customize the product according to new specific needs and challenges, you can license its open source code version and introduce any changes that you require.

For more information on white label payment gateway solutions and on UniPay Gateway platform, contact us at unipaygateway.com.