Easy Pay Direct is a versatile, reliable payment processing partner focused on serving businesses that deal with card-not-present transactions. Easy Pay Direct delivers these businesses robust support and flexible payment solutions with unique, high touch service in an otherwise transactional marketplace.

Easy Pay Direct exists to make payments easy. They offer services integral to businesses involving card-not-present transactions, including specialized merchant accounts, payment processing designed to reduce decline rates and chargebacks, thorough underwriting and multiple banking partners, fraud protection and compliance, as well as customer support, payment optimization consulting, and seamless integration with popular ecommerce platforms.

The company’s goal is to provide a near-seamless integration experience for card-not-present merchants, regardless of their existing tech stack, and to make switching to Easy Pay Direct as fast and inexpensive as possible. But to grow, Easy Pay Direct needed to:

• Improve UX, reporting, and analytics: While Easy Pay Direct could deliver high-touch services in response to customer needs via their reps, they struggled to do so via their digital product. Because core processing was white-labeled through a payment processing partner, responding to customer needs meant relying on the partner to make product changes. Easy Pay Direct wanted Altus Nova to help them improve their portal to provide better data visibility with more useful information for merchants while also updating the look and feel of the UX and UI.
• Expand ecosystem integrations: Prospects often require multiple integrations across the payment services ecosystem to work around limitations placed on online merchants and to mitigate the risk of possible merchant account shutdowns. The ability to support multiple payment gateways within a single platform would expand Easy Pay Direct’s ability to serve the addressable market. Bottom line, the team wanted to make it easier for merchants with payment integrations to migrate to Easy Pay Direct.
• Hosted, Standalone Checkout: To fuel revenue growth, Easy Pay Direct wanted to both widen the addressable market and improve customer retention. The company’s leadership saw taking more control of functionality as key to all three goals. Knowing merchants may have hundreds of checkout buttons to manage, Easy Pay Direct wanted to deliver an agnostic hosted checkout that converts better for merchants, supports recurring billing, allows the creation of more sophisticated checkout pages, and makes it easier for them to manage the whole ecosystem.

These three goals together represented an enormous undertaking with many dependencies. The Easy Pay Direct team asked Altus Nova to find the best path to move forward with confidence while avoiding costly missteps. Ultimately, lessening their reliance on a payment processing partner would allow Easy Pay Direct to find a better partner in the short term, or even become a gateway themselves, in time.

Easy Pay Direct truly understands online merchants. Altus Nova conducted multiple interviews with the company’s experts to ensure that any proposed functionality connected back to solving real customer problems.

To ensure proposed solutions would expand Easy Pay Direct’s differentiation, Altus Nova examined the brand’s core values, ideal customer profile, and positioning. Altus Nova also analyzed top competitors, product-market fit, and current business state including revenue streams, growth rates, and growth targets.

Finally, Altus Nova examined the existing user journey and tech stack to determine what could be leveraged, and what might need to be developed to reach Easy Pay Direct’s market expansion and customer retention goals.

• Add Easy Pay Direct hosted checkout to any digital platform
• “Re-point” integration patterns to Easy Pay Direct
• Use gateway emulation to accept transactions and subscriptions
• Use recurring billing connectors to manage subscriptions through any billing platform
• Use processor connectors to add 3rd party services such as fraud detection
• Use asynchronous integration to see post-transaction events
• Use service provider admin connectors to allow merchants to fully manage payments across multiple service providers
• Build new services that listen to and respond to high priority transactions
• Ingest transactions brokered outside of Easy Pay Direct to consolidate visibility of all merchant transactions in the portal
• Support robust reporting within Easy Pay Direct

To become partner agnostic, Altus Nova helped Easy Pay Direct put a framework in place today that enables more integrations over time. From 3rd party gateways, processors, and recurring billing engines to eventually adding ancillary functions like fraud and chargeback management, tax, shipping, and more, Easy Pay Direct could become more independent by owning more functionality.

A new portal would enable a totally fresh user experience and a new way of slicing and dicing merchant data so Easy Pay Direct’s customers could get insights they needed to run their businesses. By starting with portal improvements with improved infrastructure and data, Easy Pay Direct could then execute parallel workstreams to make reporting more robust and add portal functionality as well as to improve hosted checkout with additional functionality for services online merchants need.

Enabling multi-source transactions, building hosted checkout with subscription management and recurring billing, and adding emulator technology would give Easy Pay Direct the independence to offer more timely responses to serve customer needs. Having a roadmap to achieve the steps in a rational order allows Easy Pay Direct to move forward with confidence based on business priorities and budget realities — and to do it with any partner.

To establish project scope, timeline, and estimated costs, Altus Nova defined 3,000+ rows of functional requirement using MoSCoW framework. Then, an estimate proposal allowed Easy Pay Direct to prioritize either total cost, speed, or a combination of both.

Altus Nova guided Easy Pay Direct to break down digital product development into a phased minimum viable product (MVP) to be delivered in 6 to 8 months, with interdependencies and key milestones defined for each phase:

1. Technical Infrastructure
2. Portal UI/UX
3. Hosted Checkout
4. Recurring Subscription
5. Gateway Emulation

Altus Nova’s solution included guidance on balancing the need for new functionality with the goal of customer retention. In serving a user base that varies widely in ecommerce experience, ensuring a simple, easy-to-use experience was paramount.

In order to reduce the costs and time of development, Altus Nova reviewed several third-party solutions including those suggested by Easy Pay Direct leadership. Altus Nova provided a clear-eyed assessment of how closely these solutions fit the full set of business requirements including UI capabilities, reporting frameworks, and recurring billing engines.

With Altus Nova’s guidance, analysis, and detailed roadmap in-hand, Easy Pay Direct was able to articulate their vision to potential development teams and select resources to help them execute their vision.