How FinTechs Start With The End In Mind For Payments

FinTech firms are creating offerings to make it easier for retailers to handle their payments on the back end. Modo, for example, designed its new /Checkout product with “the end in mind,” Brian Billingsley, the company’s chief revenue officer, told PYMNTS in an interview. He explained that much of the industry is focused on creating beautiful experiences on the front end, but funds still have to flow back to the merchant and be reconciled at the end of the day.

A merchant could be integrated into multiple processors, with different portals and tools to manage its transactions. It might have a settlement file from one processor come in for its month-to-month reconciliation procedures and then have to go through the process with all of its providers to ensure the numbers match up.

Modo aims to provide a solution, turning the complex work of reconciliation into an automated process. Its system shows the entire state of a transaction – the before, during and after – and lets users reconcile across multiple processors in multiple bank accounts. If a transaction is out of balance due to fraud or another issue, users are automatically alerted so they don’t have to do crazy data dumps or have armies of analysts trying to match transactions.

For example, a merchant might have one primary processor and another backup/secondary, and maybe even a third tertiary processor as well. It might have also added a payment method for bigger-ticket transactions. Its finance group could then have multiple separate files coming in, as each processor would have its own reporting package and toolset. Teams might have to work across different portals to manage the business, download the data, bring it into its toolset and do the month-end close.

Modo, by contrast, seeks to provide merchants with a different option by abstracting that information so they don’t have to build a technical integration with the processor. “We take all of that data [and] put it into one set of data,” Billingsley said. The merchant or finance team can then get a single set of reports to look into all its different processors, as the FinTech firm started with the end in mind.