White label payment gateway solutions come in different flavors. From a brandable third-party payment gateway to a licensable open-source product. If you only need to boost your image, an ordinary white label gateway (that is yours only in name), should suffice. However, if you need to actually provide white label gateway services, control payment flow and customer experience, that is a different story. A custom white label payment gateway solution is not that easy to implement and maintain. The trick is that the more control over the process you get, the more responsibilities and tasks you have to handle. White label merchant services, white label payment services, and white label payment facilitator model work that way too.
White label payment gateway starts with partnerships
Many prospective white label payment gateway services providers tend to start from addressing the technical aspect of the process. This is their common critical (and costly) mistake. They focus on implementation of specific technical solutions, while first and foremost, they should think about partnerships. Without important banking and processing partnerships you are simply unable and/or unauthorized to perform any of your target activities. In order to get connected to the banking system, you need a sponsor bank. Then, you need an acquirer to underwrite you (i.e. to provide an account for payment settlement). Then, you need a processor to handle the payments. And, finally, you need a remitting bank, through which you will fund your customers.
How to approach your white label payment gateway project
Partnerships represent the busines aspect of the project. The technical aspect of the project starts with time framework for each task. Once you define the time frames, you can think about the details of specific technical and methodological solutions, required to implement the project. After that you can distribute the tasks (building, deployment, certifications, integrations, and others) between your team and the provider. These steps seem trivial, and implementation of a white label solution is an easier task than building a custom payment gateway from scratch. Still, if you miss something important at initial phase, it may lead to serious losses of resources during subsequent phases.
If you need targeted advice on how to implement a white label payment gateway solution in your specific business case, contact us.