Merchant Payment Services Providers: unlock efficiency and growth with Modulr

Modulr By Modulr on 12 December 2023   •   5 mins read

Are you an acquirer or merchant payments infrastructure provider looking to grow your business and make it more efficient? Modulr’s wide range of solutions can help your business improve current processes and unlock fresh opportunities through embedded payments. 

 Acquirers, PSPs and Payment Infrastructure can unlock… 

  • A full end-to-end merchant payment experience 
  • Easy-to-add services to help you sell more, to more 
  • Fast merchant settlement via instant payouts 
  • Recurring revenue 

  … with help from these products: 

  • Individual accounts for merchants​  
  • Account 2 Account payments  
  • Open banking​  
  • Faster Payment Scheme & SEPA Instant 
  • Cards 

So, how can Modulr deliver all the above and more? This article outlines the challenges we see in the market and shows how Modulr's embedded payment solutions help merchant payment service providers overcome them, while making efficiency gains and affording a competitive edge. 

The challenges

Increasing merchant expectation

Merchants have higher expectations than ever. As consumers rapidly move beyond card payments, merchants need providers who can help them keep up with their changing behaviour and preferred payment methods. To compete in this space, you need to launch new payment products and services quickly and efficiently. This is not just a requirement but a growth and revenue imperative.

Regulatory and licensing

Many service providers lack the licensing and resources needed to offer customers the full range of payment solutions​. Often PSPs and Acquirers don’t have the right permissions to issue accounts or get direct access to payment schemes.  

Failure to overcome these challenges, and broaden your offering and operations, will limit your ability to grow and scale. 

Legacy infrastructure 

Relying on a bank for payments introduces roadblocks for merchant services providers. Because traditional banks aren’t designed to work with modern tech-first businesses. It’s an outdated infrastructure of restrictive hours, little or no software automation, batch rather than real time processes separate from core business systems, and manual processes fraught with errors.  Card payments are also slow to process and incur significant fees for merchants. 

As a result, you, and your customers, contend with high levels of payments friction. Where there’s friction, transactions become slow and error-prone, resulting in dissatisfaction. If you want to improve your revenue potential, you need to find a more modern, API-driven way. 

Modulr's key benefits

Now let's look at how Modulr’s regulated, software-driven embedded payment services overcome these challenges and unlock growth and opportunity. 

A range of payment options to exceed expectation

Modulr’s embedded payments solution allows you to offer the full range of payment methods your merchants and their customers want. Access multiple pay out and collection methods including Direct Debits, Faster Payments in the UK and SEPA Instant in Europe. And provide Open Banking’s Payment Initiation as a more intuitive alternative at checkout, Confirmation of Payee for account name checking, and issue virtual and physical cards, all via a single API integration.  

Modulr enables you to launch new products quickly and unlock instalment or recurring revenue opportunities, such as interchange income share models from cards, and all in a robust, secure, and compliant way.

Regulated payments and accounts

Our regulatory permissions as an EMI mean you can embed payments and accounts into your offering, without worrying about navigating payment scheme access or becoming regulated yourself.  

Accounts can be issued with just an API call. And you can set up as many as you want, when you want and in real-time, for yourselves or your end users. This not only simplifies reconciliation but enables you to bind merchants into a growing ecosystem of services. With visibility over transactions, you can gain insight into behaviour and financial activity, and can offer rewards and incentives to drive payment volumes.  

You can also expand across the EEA with Modulr’s regulatory support and local payment capabilities, including EUR accounts and local IBANs in Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, and France.  

Goodbye legacy tech, hello supercharged settlement 

A reliance on legacy technology results in payments friction and settlement delays. These delays frustrate merchants, hold up cash flow and restrict business growth. 

But our platform is built from the ground-up to use payment rails in a way that makes them applicable to the modern world. This enables merchant services providers to overcome longstanding challenges and unlock fast merchant settlement and instant pay outs, 24/7 365, via the Faster Payments Scheme and SEPA Instant. Software webhooks can also trigger actions based on real-time payments data, so payments can be split and fees deducted automatically. Merchants can receive notifications when payments are made. This eliminates the need to track transactions or wait for business hours to check their bank account.

Unlock new opportunities with Modulr 

By partnering with Modulr, merchant services providers can find profits in the place they’ve never looked – payments. 

Core to Modulr’s success is our robust platform, ability to operate at scale, and unrivalled connections to payments schemes - including the UK’s Faster Payments Scheme and Europe’s SEPA Instant via the Bank of Lithuania. We’re also one of the few non-banks to have direct access to the Bank of England. This is all underpinned by our regulatory status as an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority and in Europe by De Nederlandsche Bank.  

Today, Modulr handles over $100bn of annualised payment volume and the platform handles on average 30 API calls per second and has an uptime of 99.99%.  

We call this Payments Unleashed.  

So, if you’d like to unlock growth and efficiency for your merchant services business through embedded payments, contact one of our sales team today!

Get in touch with Modulr