Basic Concepts¶

Let's look at the basic concepts with which the payment hub operates.

What is a Payment Gateway?¶

The main job of a payment gateway is to validate your customer’s credit card details securely, make sure the funds are available for the payment and get you paid.

A payment gateway is a service that authorizes credit card payments for online and offline businesses. It is the equivalent of a physical point of sale terminal in a shop or restaurant. It lets your customer submit their credit card details and then securely passes this sensitive financial information from the customer to the merchant and then between the merchant and the bank. The payment gateway then tells you whether the charge has been approved by the cardholder’s bank and submits your charges for settlement. A settlement is where the payment amount is deducted from your customer’s credit card account and deposited into your merchant account.

What is a Merchant Account?¶

Payment gateways are often confused with merchant accounts. To take payments online you need both a payment gateway and a merchant account. A merchant account is where funds are held before being deposited into your bank account. The role of the payment gateway is simply to decline or approve a transaction.

Merchant accounts are the types of financial accounts that authorize merchants to accept payments online. These accounts are required if you want to use a payment gateway to process transactions from your website.

Payment Service Providers¶

What is a Payment Service Provider?¶

Payment Service Providers (or PSPs) act as both a merchant account and the payment gateway, helping businesses to collect and manage their payments. Payments go to the PSP and are then transferred on to you.

In details, a payment service provider (PSP) offers shops online services for accepting electronic payments by a variety of payment methods including credit card, bank-based payments such as direct debit, bank transfer, and real-time bank transfer based on online banking.

Typically, a PSP can connect to multiple acquiring banks, card, and payment networks. In many cases, the PSP will fully manage these technical connections, relationships with the external network, and bank accounts.

Furthermore, a full-service PSP can offer risk management services for card and bank-based payments, transaction payment matching, reporting, fund remittance and fraud protection in addition to multi-currency functionality and services.

Some PSPs provide services to process other next-generation methods (payment systems) including cash payments, wallets, prepaid cards or vouchers, and even paper or e-check processing.

Full-service payment service providers like Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Adyen are typically easier and quicker to get started with as you don't need to set up your own merchant account (and if you do the provider will offer that too).

What Payment providers does Corefy support?¶

The platform supports all possible currencies, methods, flow and payment providers.

A complete list of already implemented integrations with payment providers can be found here.

There are more than 900 payment providers in the world. Even if you do not find the provider you are interested in, you can always request its implementation from us at any time.

Currencies¶

What is the currency?¶

A currency, in the most specific sense is money in any form when in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, especially circulating banknotes and coins. A more general definition is that a currency is a system of money (monetary units) in common use, especially for people in a nation. Under this definition, US dollars (US), pounds sterling (£), Australian dollars (A), European euros (€), Russian rubles (₽) and Indian Rupees (₹) are examples of currency. These various currencies are recognized as stores of value and are traded between nations in foreign exchange markets, which determine the relative values of the different currencies. Currencies in this sense are defined by governments, and each type has limited boundaries of acceptance.

Currencies can be classified into two monetary systems: fiat money and commodity money, depending on what guarantees the currency's value. Digital currency has arisen with the popularity of computers and the Internet.

Digital currencies¶

Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is a type of currency available in digital form (in contrast to physical, such as banknotes and coins). It exhibits properties similar to physical currencies, but can allow for instantaneous transactions and borderless transfer-of-ownership. Examples include virtual currencies and cryptocurrencies and central bank issued money accounted for in a computer database (including digital base money). Like traditional money, these currencies may be used to buy physical goods and services, but may also be restricted to certain communities such as for use inside an online game or social network.

What currencies does Corefy support?¶

In general, Corefy supports all the currencies in the world.

This need is dictated by the fact that Corefy integrates various payment providers that can process any currency, including digital and crypto.

A list of all supported currencies can be found in our currency directory.

Payment and payout methods¶

What is the payment method?¶

The most common alternative payment methods are debit cards, charge cards, prepaid cards, direct debit, bank transfers, phone and mobile payments, checks, money orders and cash payments.

What difference between payment and payout methods?¶

In general, there is no difference between payment methods and payments. This separation is necessary only for ease of identification.

Payment methods used for payments in the payment gateway. Payouts, respectively.

What methods does Corefy support?¶

Supported by widespread access to high-speed internet and the insatiable appetite of customers for convenience, online commerce is progressing rapidly around the world and estimated to reach $4T (source: eMarketer) in 2020. But when it comes to payments online, businesses expanding internationally and taking advantage of the increased reach that online commerce provides them with are met with widely varying customer preferences. Not only can delivery terms be quite different (pay after delivery, for example, common in Europe and Asia, requires businesses to only expect payment once they’ve shipped goods) but the payment methods used for online transactions themselves vary too. Credit and debit cards, not always the most trusted option, only account for half of the online transactions globally. Bank payments, digital wallets, and cash are in strong customer demand, and can even offer additional benefits to businesses such as lower risks and transaction costs.

That's why, Corefy supports all the payment and payout methods implemented by payment providers that connected to our platform.

A list of all supported currencies can be found in our payment and payout methods directory.

Payment and payout services¶

What are payment and payout services?¶

This term is specifically introduced to identify methods in conjunction with currency. Often, payment providers use exactly the combination of method and currency. This allows you to accurately operate with one term for routing on the provider side, interacting with a single code, instead of two.
Services include the properties and parameters required to initiate a payment or payout.
This is like a contract for the gateway protocol.
The gateway can always expect the parameters listed in the service properties.

Example:

If you need to make a payout, then obviously, for this you need to send some details based on service fields. For payout service to PayPal account by email, they look like this:

{
    "code": "paypal_email_usd",
    "method": "paypal",
    "currency": "USD",
    "amount_min": 0.01,
    "amount_max": 10000,
    "fields": [
      {
        "key": "email",
        "type": "string",
        "label": {
          "en": "Email",
          "uk": "Електронна пошта"
        },
        "hint": {
          "en": "Enter email",
          "uk": "Введіть адресу електронної пошти"
        },
        "regexp": "/^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&’*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*$",
        "required": true,
        "position": 1
      }
  ]
}

What differences between payment and payout services?¶

The only difference between the payment and payout services is that the payment service has flow property.

Flow code determines the scenario of the payment processing.

There are 4 basic payment processing flows:

hpp — Hosted payment page. It is when a customer needs to be redirected to external HPP provided by Payment Service Provider.
invoice — when a customer needs to pay by payment details. At the same time, the payment process outside the processing and asynchronous. This can be a manual transfer to a digital wallet, or bank Wire-transfer, or payment in a self-service kiosk by cash., etc.
card — used for host-to-host card payment processing. Requires PCI DSS.
test — used only for testing.

What payment and payout services does Corefy support?¶

First of all, the payment hub unifies the protocols and interaction with external payment providers.

Therefore, it is necessary to have a single payment and payout service codes directory.

The full directory is available here.

Next¶

Let's take a look at how you could connect different payment providers in the next article.