Q1 Product Update: New Features and Payment Solutions for Merchant Businesses and Online Marketplaces

In Q4 of 2022, we shared a glimpse into our product philosophy and how we build our payments platform to support new customer segments. In Q1 2023, we continued to deliver on this strategy.

Since we first opened our doors here at Finix, we’ve been serving the most complicated payment needs for large payment facilitators (PayFacs) seeking a strong technology partner to manage their intricate funds flows. Building for the most complex payment use cases first allowed us to repackage our solutions and steadily expand our robust system to new business segments. 

In 2022, we became a PayFac ourselves, and released a new version of our payment solution for software platforms looking to outsource payment facilitation. Now, we’re expanding our technology to support merchant businesses and marketplaces, bringing them the enterprise-level tools we developed for large PayFacs, including our industry-leading platform stability, robust payments dashboard, and predictable payments experiences via our APIs. Additionally, we’ve built intuitive reporting dashboards, fast integrations, and low-code or no-code features like white-labeled hosted checkout forms so these businesses can manage their transactions while maintaining full control of their buyers’ shopping experiences. Businesses who want to experience the platform before going live can now request a sandbox account.

With each audience we expand to work with, our goal remains the same: To provide embedded payments that seamlessly power our customers’ payments experiences—at an accessible price.

Finix customers don't have to give up configurability, speed, or ease of use to get competitive pricing. We’ve introduced more standard pricing options while continuing to support large businesses with custom models that meet their unique needs.

With Finix, you’ve got pricing options:

• Flat rate pricing for predictable fees per transaction

• Dynamic pricing charged the interchange rate plus fees per transaction

• Set custom fees, including international and ACH charges

We have your business’s security in mind. As part of this mission, we’ve created a new way for customers to manage their Team Members & Roles. These enhancements make it possible for administrators—the role with the highest level of access—to add, customize and manage users from their company directly in the Finix dashboard. These new enhancements make it easier to enhance security by tracking and managing who has access to your sensitive payments data and what actions are available to each individual role, with the flexibility to adjust as needed.

In the Finix dashboard, you can now easily:

• Add and deactivate team members

• Assign different permission-based roles using different pre-set profile types

• Create custom roles to address the unique needs of your team 

Why would you use custom roles? A common example of a custom role you might create is for an outside accountant, who may need access to specific payment data for a set amount of time during the year. Once the accounting project is over, you can simply deactivate that user.

Now here’s one for the developers. Webhook event logs have been added to your Finix dashboard! 

From the developer section of the dashboard, developers can use webook event logs for better visibility to debug, troubleshoot, and audit the activity their webhooks process. This includes:

• Reviewing how webhooks are configured

• Reviewing a history of all webhook event attempts

• Filtering webhooks by attempts

• Reattempting events that have failed

• Enabling email and in-dashboard notifications

We are always fine-tuning existing offerings and adding enhancements to support customers’ needs. This quarter, we’ve added:

Easier dispute management

All Finix customers can now mark a dispute as accepted via API, and no longer need to contact operations or support to do it for you. Time savings and more up-to-date information is a win-win for all!

Auto-Disable Payment Instrument for decline scenarios 

This feature provides the ability to turn on auto-disabling of cards that should not be able to process transactions. For example, his feature declines cards that are:

• Non-reloadable cards that have insufficient funds

• Lost or stolen cards

• Restricted Cards (buyers card issuer restricts due to exceeding of credit limit, or a card from a sanctioned location)

• Invalid card numbers

Implement an ACH fee cap

Customers now have the ability to set up ACH fee caps, which enable variable fees on ACH with a maximum. For example, customers can set a percentage charged per ACH transaction, with a maximum ACH fee of $5. The ACH Fee Cap feature allows eligible customers to keep costs from getting out of control, while also allowing them to typically make more money than they would with a flat fee, especially on larger transactions.

More in-person payment terminals with more functionality

We’ve rolled out multiple additional in-person payment terminals: Ingenico Desk 3500, Desk 5000, and Move 5000. These devices include receipt printing, straight from the device! This saves you from an extra step in setting up your in-person payment solution, and saves money by eliminating the need to buy a receipt printer in addition to the payment terminal itself.

Explore the Finix platform before you go live, with access to a fully loaded sandbox account. 

When you sign up with Finix, you get immediate access to a test environment—your sandbox–tailored to your business type. This sandbox is yours to test how you’d use Finix for live payment transactions, and comes complete with simulated reports to give you a sense of the data we provide to each of our customers.  

Some of what you can test in your sandbox environment includes:

• Payment instruments

• Transactions

• Disputes

• Generate reports in sandbox just like in production 

• Test ACH Returns scenarios, such as insufficient funds or an invalid account number

When you’re ready, decide which pricing schema and business type work best for you, apply for a live account, and start accepting payments.

Thanks for reading our Q1 product update. If you have questions about any of these new features, feel free to contact us.