Below Integration is applicable to both APEXX Platform AX2 and ATOMIC:
During the initial discovery phase, the APEXX implementation consultant will typically ask you about the following aspects of your business:
- The nature of your business: what are you selling, and to whom?
- What aspects of your payment processing are you hoping to improve (fees, acceptance rate...)?
- Which markets are you active in/in which currencies do you trade?
- What is your settlement currency?
- Which legal entities do you expect to onboard?
- Your average transaction value
- The transaction volume we can expect
- Your current acceptance rates
- Who are your current payment services providers/acquirers?
- What are the reporting requirements of the different stakeholders in your organisation?
- What are your reconciliation data requirements?
- Does your application capture card data (requires level 1 PCI compliance)?
- What fraud checking do you wish to carry out?
- Who are the key contacts in your organisation APEXX will be working with?
1. Reporting requirements
The APEXX consultant will use this information to propose a configuration structure to you that reflects the different parts of your business, as well as the cash streams to track. Organisations are set up in APEXX in a hierarchical manner, with suborganisations at multiple levels reporting into parent organisations. Organisations can be structured based on e.g. subsidiary, vertical, or region.
Cash streams are aggregated in accounts, which belong to specific organisations or suborganisations. You can maintain separate accounts per payment method or acquirer, or consolidate the cash flows into a single account. Accounts are, however, currency-specific.
Your implementation consultant will agree the configuration structure that best reflects your needs with you.
2. How do you plan to capture card data?
There are two options for capturing card data:
- The merchant captures the card details directly and passes them to APEXX in the payment request (with or without tokenisation) - this option requires the merchant to be PCI Level 1 certified.
- The shopper enters their card details on APEXX's hosted payment page. This can be done either using a full page redirect, or (more commonly) an iframe that is embedded on the merchant's website. The merchant is not exposed to the card data at any time, but can optionally request a token in the payment request.
3. How do you wish to secure your transactions?
Consider encrypting payment and token requests to secure the payment data in transit.
To safeguard against fraud, consider using 3D-Secure, AVS verification, and enhanced fraud checks (where supported).
4. Which payment methods are you looking to integrate?
It is likely that APEXX already integrates with all the payment methods you offer. New integrations are added based on merchant demand. Your APEXX representative will discuss your specific requirements with you in more detail.
5. Availability of key personnel/resources
Consider when your IT, development and finance teams are available to carry out the work required of them. What other projects are they working on?
6. Will you require new MIDs?
If you sign up with a new acquiring bank as part of your implementation, it usually takes around ten working days for the onboarding process to complete and for live MIDs to be issued. You can proceed with your development and testing efforts in the meantime.
7. Availability of test cards/test accounts for live testing
Most acquirers provide card numbers for simulation testing. However, these cannot be used to test the live system end-to-end. Consider how you will obtain a card for testing purposes, especially if you are dealing with a local card brand that may not be straightforward to source.
8. Your PCI status documentation
APEXX will ask you to provide your Attestation of Compliance (AOC) if you are a PCI Level 1 certified merchant, or your Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ). Confirm that your organisation has completed the applicable certification process and that you have the documentation is available to share with us.
9. What are your benchmarks for a successful test run?
Think about the tests should form part of your UAT (user acceptance testing) process. Which payment types, currencies and functionality are you planning to deploy? What outcome is needed for the test to be considered successful?
You can download our test scripts for hosted and direct payments to assist with this decision.
10. Set up and share your go-live plan
Merchants will commonly start the go-live process by routing a limited amount of transactions through APEXX and monitor the result. Once the merchant and APEXX are confident that transactions are processing without errors and that acceptance rates are at the level expected, the transaction volume is then increased. A comparison with the merchant's existing data will allow us to assess how well the APEXX services are performing.
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