Based on my previous experience on payment systems, there's a surprising amount of value in not having to maintain direct business relationships with the underlying payment providers. It is much, much easier to work with a company like Stripe than to work directly with Visa and MasterCard and the ACH network, and heaven help you if you're a small company that needs to do automated cross-border payments to a wide range of countries without a middleman. You'll probably also get much better support from a tech-focused company when an API starts freaking out.
Yes, exactly, the important thing to us is that our users don't need to build an additional mental model between us and the networks we sit atop. If you know the network, we want you to be able to intuit how our API works. There's a very real difference (arguably the fundamental value-add of our company) in the transport layer, though. The actual mechanics of integrating with, say, FedACH, are a bit long to get into here (we get into it a bit here if it's of interest: https://increase.com/documentation/fedach) but suffice to say it doesn't have a REST API.
That's an excellent point too. Some payment systems have abysmal technology. The product I worked on was focused on international payments and in a couple cases, the "API" was literally, "Upload a CSV file via FTP, and at some later point, another CSV file might appear on the FTP server with some of the payment results, but if it doesn't, call us because we probably just forgot to upload it."
Batch jobs and (S)FTP. In a bit of a weird twist, back when I worked at Chase, they were innovating on the ancient technology but it was things like "better batch job management/orchestration" and SFTP proxy to route between different servers and centralize key management
But it must have _some sort_ of API. Since your rest API is modelled on their API it made me really curious about how you communicate with those networks.
I'm curious to learn more about what your customers look like, what sorts of businesses and activities they are in. Where stripe's customers are working on products unrelated to payments, yours are working on products related to payments? I'm having trouble conceiving of examples.
Idk how this one works, but credit card processors need license. If you can use credit card service without requiring that license then it'll be the best additional value.
Right, Stripe is a middleman and part of the value they're giving you is that you don't have to work directly with the underlying payment companies. If you had to support the same range of payment options without a middleman, you'd need to have business relationships with a bunch of payment companies, which would be a lot more difficult and time-consuming.
