The following press release was authored internally by Tyler Hannan, Platform Evangelist (see contact info. below) and published on September 8, 2011.

DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)–IP Commerce announced today [Sept. 8, 2011] that it has raised $20.7 Million in growth capital. The funding round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from existing investors Meritage Funds, Venrock, TTV Capital, Fifth Third Processing Solutions, LLC, and Iron Gate Capital. The funding will be used to further enhance the capabilities within the IP Commerce Platform and drive application developer adoption.

“Commerce is the lifeblood of businesses of all sizes,” said Dave Flanagan, Managing Director, Intel Capital. “IP Commerce enables the application developer to innovate on behalf of their retail customers. We share the IP Commerce commitment to provide applications developers with the tools to build solutions that address the entirety of the commerce lifecycle – whether they leverage mobile, eCommerce, self-service (unattended), back-office, or multi-channel applications.”

“We are thrilled to have Intel Capital as a new investor and a valuable collaborator in our efforts to broaden the availability of our platform, and commerce-enablement tools, to application developers and their customers,” said Alfred “Chip” Kahn IV, CEO of IP Commerce. “Never has innovation in Commerce been so relevant to so many service and technology companies. Our Platform-as-a-Service has modularized Commerce requirements into a software stack that creates new opportunities for these application developers, service providers, and retailers.”

IP Commerce provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which functions as an OS for commerce. Managing payments technology, security, underwriting risk, network connectivity, and integration is a daunting task for any commerce enabled solution which IP Commerce addresses. IP Commerce enables customer-driven application developers to create intelligent multi-channel commerce applications and payment workflows that give retailers enhanced opportunities to interact with their customers. Averaging a 20% monthly growth rate for past two years, IP Commerce represents the largest proven open platform for integrated commerce software and will exceed a $3B TPV run rate in 2011. Go to http://developer.ipcommerce.com to start your development project today.

About IP Commerce

Based in Denver, Colorado, IP Commerce provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which functions as an OS for commerce. The IP Commerce Platform enables developers to create customized, multi-channel commerce applications and payment workflows that allow retailers to support their customers across all touch points. IP Commerce enables customer-driven software companies to develop customized, scalable solutions for their most innovative retail partners that need new ways to create and enhance consumer relationships.

IP Commerce maintains partnerships with some of the world’s most respected financial institutions and software companies. Leading investors, including Meritage Funds, Venrock, Intel Capital, Fifth Third Processing Solutions, LLC, TTV Capital, and Iron Gate back the company. For more information, visit www.ipcommerce.com.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$10 billion in over 1,140 companies in 50 countries. In that timeframe, 191 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 268 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2010, Intel Capital invested US$327 million in 119 investments with approximately 44 percent of funds invested outside the United States and Canada. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.

Contacts

IP Commerce
Tyler Hannan, 720-377-3700 x827
Platform Evangelist
thannan@ipcommerce.com

Recently, PYMNTS.com posted an interview with Retail Decisions entitled Fraudsters Take No Prisoners But Retail Decisions Can Strengthen Your Strategy for Prevention.

The entirety of the interview is just under 10 minutes, and I would encourage anyone who has interest in this topic to set aside the brief time required to listen.

In this interview, when asked about the delivery of fraud prevention as a service vs. an in-house solution, Carl Clump, CEO of ReD, gave a list of benefits to leveraging a service provider such as ReD (these are paraphrased):

• Retailers are not fraud experts, and should be spending their time focused on being the best possible retailer.
• Fraud prevention, when deployed only for yourself as an internal solution, only enables you to see trends from your own transactions vs. on a global basis and with pooled data from worldwide retailers across multiple verticals.

Increasingly, tier two and tier three retailers are facing the same challenges, in respect to fraud, as larger retailers. In fact, there is some argument that they represent a “better” target for fraudsters as a result of not (typically) having fraud solutions in place already. Quite bluntly, these retailers simply cannot afford the expense of building/deploying an in-house solution (based on their volumes) and require the capability of fraud prevention as a service.

As you may be aware, IP Commerce and Retail Decisions announced a relationship in March, 2011. In this release, entitled IP Commerce Strikes a Distribution Agreement with ReD, Peter Osberg, Sr. Vice President, Business Development & Marketing for IP Commerce, said the following:

“Many of the acquirers and processors, who leverage our platform to recruit and integrate software companies to their services, have been requesting risk services to be available for their merchants. Our software development community needed a risk solution to address a growing need for enhanced fraud prevention in the payments workflow. We chose ReD because of their leading expertise and unique product – which is second to none.”

Carl Clump was quoted as saying:

“This is an exciting development for us and significant news for tier two and tier three online retailers who are constantly under threat from fraud. With dozens of software companies joining IP Commerce each week, ReD will reach a vast new audience and bring its services to the wider retail market – rejecting more fraudsters and substantially benefitting the payments community.”

The last bit of this quote is particularly compelling given the interview with the PYMNTS.com team.

Enabling these retailers to participate in a best-in-class fraud solution, alongside the largest retailers, not only benefits the lower tiers of retailers…but ensures there is a larger base of information from which decisions can be made for the industry as whole.

Fraud prevention, as a value-added service, is wildly valuable to the software company building acceptance solutions for smaller eCommerce merchants…and, it is available through the same set of open payment APIs leveraged to build the initial payments integration.

 

About the Author:

Tyler Hannan is the Platform Evangelist for IP Commerce.  In addition to speaking about Platform & API trends with the software community, he maintains a blog entitled Emergent Commerce & Technology and coordinates frequent API Meetups.

If the Messages From The Edge series is about translating, and communicating, the requirements of the software development community…then, perhaps, you will allow me a bit of leeway in interpretation in this post.

What does it truly “mean” when someone states they have developed an “API strategy”? What do you actually desire from exploring Open APIs for Payments?

In some situations it is a “me too” response to industry trends. In others, there is a desire to enable innovation through partnership with the software development community.

But the “API” is solely the tool that is leveraged…the purpose, and desire, is to build a community of developers who desire to leverage the tool.

Every month (or two), IP Commerce hosts an API Meetup with our partners at Apigee. This event gathers developers, business folk, service providers, API providers, API tool companies, etc. to discuss API and Platform topics that the community finds interesting. Subsequently, we post video and content at www.APIMeetup.com to ensure the widest possible audience is able to benefit from these conversations.

In the most recent session, Abraham Williams (a hacker advocate) gave an extremely interesting talk entitled Please Feed the Unicorns.

The video and slides, below, provide a concrete, honest, and practical guide on engaging with and scaling a developer community.

I encourage you to monitor the API Meetup property. Understanding the perspectives of the most important consumer of the API, the software community, ensures that your API strategy moves beyond the “me too” stage and into a productive, growth component of your future business.

Answerly from API Meetup on Vimeo.

You can tell that a descriptive term, used in technical architectural implementation and design, has reached mainstream when it is featured in television commercials.

“The Cloud”

In researching the term, you will find references to several primary terms:

•    Cloud Computing
•    Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
•    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
•    Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

These terms, while interesting discussions in and of themselves, are (simply) references to implementation methodologies.

So, what then, is the importance of the “cloud” to a software company building a payment application?  What are they actually referencing when expressing the desire for a “cloud-based” solution?

While the specifics of implementation, and need, vary by the software company the core need can be summed up as a demand for “logic”.  At its simplest, “logic” is taking the highly complex and breaking it down into simple, re-usable components that can be consumed by the software company.  The desire for, and demand for, the “cloud” is the demand for simple solutions that solve problems.

Consider a specific example of Payment Status Monitoring…

In general, software companies are plagued by an inability to determine the status of a transaction after submission.  Payment Status Monitoring enables intelligence to be built into the software company solution based on the actual status of the transaction – saving software companies time and decreasing support costs related to integrated payments.

Could a software company build this monitoring into their own application?  If the data were available and they could ensure they were continuously synced with the system of record…it is possible, but incredibly complex.  Instead if they can simply make a call to a service, a service hosted in the cloud, their time and effort for integration is decreased and their customer experience is supplemented.

Software companies desiring to integrate commerce capability also expect to call upon logic provided to them through the tools they are provided to build complex workflows.  Further demonstration that an “API strategy” (exposing your current platforms with new tools) is not sufficient for the requirements of the Platform era.

 

About the Author:

Peter Osberg is the Sr. Vice President, Business Development & Marketing for IP Commerce. With extensive senior-level experience in highly competitive, multi-sided markets, Peter is a well-established entrepreneur with a proven ability to plan, execute and administer successful sales and business development initiatives.

Today, Fifth Third Processing Solutions announced the availability of e-Similate, an open payments platform and workflow engine facilitating the delivery of Fifth Third Processing Solutions’ payment services to the development community.

According to Bill Weingart, Chief Product Officer:

“It is important to remain flexible in our technology offering so that we can deliver secure processing options and solutions that will meet the needs of our valued partners. “Working with IP Commerce provides us with the ability to deliver just-in-time solutions with the speed and depth of service required to support a growing community of software developers.”

Chip Kahn, CEO of IP Commerce said:

“We are pleased with Fifth Third Processing Solutions’ decision to work with IP Commerce, and that our product, people and process supports their vision.  The alliance represents a significant advancement in enabling payments innovation and continues to validate the importance of the software developer in the payments value chain.”

The entirety of the press release can be found in the IP Commerce Press Releases portion of the website.

Series Introduction

Here at PaymentsAPI, we have been writing Messages From The Edge to communicate the unique perspectives maintained by the single most important constituent in modern payments innovation…the Software Company.

As Sr. Vice President, Business Development & Marketing for IP Commerce, Peter Osberg said in his most recent post, An API or a Platform?: Messages from the Edge,

An “API strategy” is not sufficient to partner with the software development community. What is your Platform strategy?

As the provider of the first Open Payments Platform, IP Commerce not only maintains a unique relationship with the software community…we have a demonstrated, tangible approach to solving for the needs expressed by this community.

To that end, we will be sharing additional insights into the solutions leveraged by software companies in this new series entitled, Perspectives from the Platform.

Value Added Capabilities

In a post entitled The Value of Value-Added Services: Messages from the Edge, the case was made that services that supplement the payment transaction are, frequently, of equal (or greater) importance than the payment transaction itself.

But how can a Platform solve for this issue?

The standard payment transaction is inherently synchronous.  A transaction is initiated, a response is sent, and goods are delivered.  This transactional interaction is supported by a system of legacy interfaces that have become decrepit since their initial creation.  Innovative service delivery and innovative points of acceptance are, actually, hampered by these legacy systems that are no longer sufficient for supporting modern software development methodologies.  Perhaps as important, they hamper the ability for differentiation of an offering vs. the myriad of other “me too” APIs battling for mindshare within the development community.

In contrast, the IP Commerce Platform enables this “synchronous” transaction to be securely interrupted and value-added capabilities injected into the transaction itself.  This capability of introducing “Value-Added Services” into the transaction flow (often without substantive development effort or recertification) immediately solves for the needs of the software community -  needs that are driven by their customer’s demands…not by some notional product decision made in a silo behind corporate doors.

But Value-Added capabilities comprise more than just services that occur, or are instantiated, during the transaction.  These capabilities also include Data Services which are leveraged to holistically provide full transaction lifecycle data and information required by the customer (or consumer).  Coupling payment services, value-added services, and data services through the same API ensures that the software companies remain “sticky” to their integration and eliminates any need for them to search out additional services from other providers in the market.

Your commodity sale of processing services is wholly insufficient in the era of the Platform.  Supplement the services offered to the development community with a rich combination of Value-Added services and Data Services.

If you review the items in this series, you will notice a key theme…all of the posts begin with an assumption. This assumption is one that is important to truly understand when engaging with the software development community.

The assumption of connectivity.

When a software company begins the process of identifying a solution to address the commerce needs of their customers, the assumption of connectivity is there. This assumption is simple:

“I require access to commerce services and will gain access to these services through tools.”

These tools are the APIs.

So if an API solves for the assumption of connectivity, what is the value of a Platform?

A Platform, to which the APIs connect, is not your front-end processing system. It is not the gateway that manages host capture connectivity inside of your firewall. Rather, a proper Platform manages, and supplements, the connectivity provided by the APIs. Said another way, a true platform acts as an intelligent workflow engine exposing value added capabilities from the cloud.

The Messages From The Edge that we share, these missives elucidating the needs and desires of Software Companies have NEVER focused on simple connectivity.

Your external API strategy may focus on providing access to your processing systems…but if this is the sole extent of the strategy you will only achieve the base level of requirement that is assumed to be available by the software development community. In contrast, a Platform strategy deploys an intelligent front-end to your systems enabling market segment targeting, the rapid addition of value-added services, availability of data services, profile management, and governance through Federated Identity.

An “API strategy” is not sufficient to partner with the software development community. What is your Platform strategy?

About the Author:

Peter Osberg is the Sr. Vice President, Business Development & Marketing for IP Commerce. With extensive senior-level experience in highly competitive, multi-sided markets, Peter is a well-established entrepreneur with a proven ability to plan, execute and administer successful sales and business development initiatives.

In an industry yearning for innovation to address the combined challenges of commoditization and regulation, there are substantial challenges to overcome…Offering an “API” does not enable innovation for your customers; rather it is addressed by deploying a holistic solution (including a Platform and APIs coupled with appropriate process) to meet the needs of all participants – leveraging people, product, and processes to enable partnerships between all industry participants (including the software company that owns the customer point of acceptance) to drive meaningful, incremental revenue for the entire value chain.

You can download the whitepaper here.

2010 has been an exciting and important year for the payments industry.  The emergence of new technology (coupled with the demand for customized services for this new technology) has kept Software Company & Developer communities vigilant in finding the resources they need to service their customers.  IP Commerce, the leading open platform for the payments industry, has drawn upon years of experience to provide guidance for Software Company & Developer communities with the Messages from the Edge series. Below you will find a list of all of the Messages from the Edge with a brief excerpt.  We hope this series will serve as a resource and be of value going into the New Year, which promises to be just as dynamic and significant as 2010.

Messages from the Edge: An Introduction

One of the most important things happening in payments today is a mounting discussion and associated activity surrounding the topic of “open APIs”. Everyone, from Service Providers to Issuers, is talking about the concept, with hopes of collecting coveted feedback from an increasingly influential target market.

Messages from the Edge: API Choice

The payments industry is a merchant-centric universe deeply rooted in hardware. Consequently, key players have not given due consideration to Software Companies, – tending to approach relationships with a, “you adjust to meet me” mentality in the form of older machine specifications, lopsided value propositions, disparate processing platforms, limited support and poor documentation, (As a tip, Software Companies are not VARS!)

Messages from the Edge: Taking Care of Customers – Payment and Provider Choice in APIs

Choice is about finding fresh routes to reach new customers and offering compelling reasons to keep existing ones. But choice in payment services and providers presents some unique challenges for Software Companies – who are experts in their application workflow, but do not want to become experts in payments.

The Necessity of Support: Messages from the Edge

If you want to treat Software Companies as true partners, and you want to be in the Payments API space, you have to ensure that your people and process treat the Software Company as a valued member of your ecosystem. The process of truly supporting those integrating to, and distributing, your services demonstrates your commitment to the market and to the technology.

Taking Care of Software Companies: Messages from the Edge

The key to successful integration support is striking a balance between availability and flexibility. The first, and perhaps most important, is simple availability. Ensure that your Software Company partners (You are viewing them as partners at this point, right?) are able to obtain the support they need…when they need it.

Integration is Only the Beginning: Messages from the Edge

There is a danger inherent in offering open APIs to the developer community. Time after time, in all industries, companies are caught in the trap of assuming that their responsibility is complete at the time a Software Company or Developer successfully leverages their APIs to complete an integration.
Integration, however, is only the beginning.

The Value of Value-Added Services: Messages from the Edge

**News flash for payment service providers**
Your payment service is not the single most important thing to the Software Company.

I am not defined by your SIC Code, Segments: Messages from the Edge

Payment services, particularly bankcard services, are commoditized. Software Companies require payment services, but they have a vast amount of choice when determining which commodity to leverage. This commoditization is, in part, the result of payment service providers inability (both from a business and technical perspective) to offer and promote the value-added services (VAS) that supplement the transactional lifecycle.

Workflow Templates – an Innovation Accelerant for Payments: Messages from the Edge

The combination of payment services, value-added services, policy governance, and the “business rules” that govern the lifecycle of the transaction are of increasing importance to the Software Company looking to build new workflows. Software Company time and effort, a scarce resource, is oft-driven not only by technology curiosity but also through a tangible need of their customer.

Enabling Real-Time Collaboration Through Federated Identity: Messages from the Edge

The legacy paradigm in payments of static consumer data is being changed to a modality of dynamic data and dynamic interactions. Federated Identity services are what is enabling and driving this change…without it, your payment API is lacking a key component to successful adoption.