LS Pay and the freedom to choose a payment service provider (PSP)
Driven by convenience and by government policies that discourage the use of cash, digital payments have quickly become the norm.
Today, retail and hospitality businesses are expected to offer a growing number of digital payment options. Credit cards, debit cards, mobile wallets, online “card-not-present” payments, contactless… The list just keeps on growing. For a business, offering all these options could be very complex. This is where payment service providers (PSPs) enter the picture.
What is a PSP, and why it matters to your retail or hospitality business
PSPs act as an intermediary between businesses (for example, a retail store, restaurant, or hotel) and banks, enabling you to offer safe and compliant electronic payments to your customers. PSPs ensure that all transactions are completed safely and securely from the moment the customer initiates the payment, up to the moment the funds reach your company’s account.
While they all facilitate payments, PSPs can differ widely in the cost structure, services and functionality they offer. For example, a PSP may also enable you to accept payments in multiple currencies, while another one may offer more extensive fraud detection capabilities.
LS Pay, the payment solution that removes the risk of PSP lock-in
In the past, LS Retail customers had to bear the burden of integrating to a PSP. In many cases, their implementation partner supported only one PSP – which the company would be forced to select. As a result, many companies ended up effectively locked to a specific PSP. If they wanted to switch PSP, they might have to change IT partner altogether.
With payment technology moving at the speed of light, we want our customers to have the freedom to choose the PSP that best fits their requirements and roadmap. That’s why we have developed payment processing solution LS Pay, which empowers our customers to use the PSP of their choice without having to embark on a costly and time-consuming integration project. We have already built the integrations to the leading PSPs in our main market regions, so you can pick your preferred one among several that are supported out of the box.
Why you need LS Pay
Here are six reasons why it makes sense for an LS Retail customer to choose LS Pay over a custom-made integration:
1. Choose your preferred PSP
Instead of having to select your tech partner’s preferred PSP, with LS Pay you can shop around. Look at the several PSPs we support and pick the merchant that best fits your requirements in terms of additional services – say contactless payments, or mobile wallet – or which offers you the most favorable conditions.2. Switch PSP as and when you want
Are you unhappy with your current PSP? Have they raised their fees unreasonably? Are they unable to offer some great functionality you desperately need? No worries: you can switch to another supported PSP without having to do an integration project.
3. Always use the latest functionality, for free
With LS Pay, it’s easier to take advantage of the latest functionality that your LS Retail software offers. As soon as we add a feature to one of our software platforms – for example if we add preauthorization, or tokens, to LS Central – then LS Pay supports it, at no extra fee for you. If you are using an integration designed by your partner, you might have to wait some time until the partner adds the new functionality to your integration.
4. Have a uniform payment structure for your international chain.
Say you run an international chain with store locations in very different geographies - Sweden, the UK, the US, and Malaysia. Without LS Pay, you’d need to find a PSP in each of this countries, and create four separate integrations. Today, you could potentially use LS Pay in all of the countries where you operate, and take advantage of a uniform payment structure. Leave it to LS Pay to abstract connectivity to the different PSPs in each country. This is the reason why international brands like adidas and Ikea have selected LS Pay for their extensive retail chains.To reduce the work even further, you could negotiate an agreement with a PSP with widespread geographical coverage. You could then use just one connection which would work out of the box everywhere across your chain.
5. Offer seamless omni-channel shopping and item returns
If your PSP offers online payments, then LS Pay does, too. And thanks to the unified commerce framework you get complete, clear visibility over all your online and offline transactions through a centralized transaction repository at the POS. This visibility, paired with support for payment tokenization, gives you full tracking of transactions and items across the channels. Ultimately, this means you can offer your customers seamless omni-channel shopping experiences, including highly in-demand services like “buy online, return in store”.
6. Stay safe
The LS Retail and LS Pay databases never see nor store any sensitive card data, and are therefore outside the scope of PCI regulation. In case of a breach, there would be no sensitive data for anyone to access. Since all sensitive data is managed by the PSP, we only associate with PSPs that are PCI certified.
Available for all LS Retail platforms
LS Pay is available for all LS Retail platforms, across all the industries we serve (retail, restaurants, hotels, c-stores, pharmacies…).
LS Central is supported by default from version 14.02 onwards. Are you using an older version? We have issued a FOB that lays out the blueprint on how to integrate: contact your partner to check timeline and costs involved.Would you like to know more about LS Pay? Book a meeting with the LS Pay experts and discover how LS Pay can help your business grow.
Don’t buy retail management software until you read this
