Hello there, it's been a couple of days since you last heard from me, I got some messages from people wondering where I ran off to (no I didn't run out of content 😂). I was somewhat under the weather. Now that I'm able to fire on all cylinders and synapses, we can proceed 😀. Today I want to talk about a popular feature on platforms, it's available on every platform where you have to pay for things, you absolutely can't miss it on an e-commerce platform, think Amazon, Alibaba or Jumia (depending on where you live).
PAYMENT INTEGRATION HELP'S US PAY FOR THINGS ON ANY INTERNET-BASED PLATFORM
Have you ever wondered what happens when you click the "buy" or "pay" button on a platform? Sometimes you're redirected to another platform, at other times, a small form pops up where you're asked to input your card details among other important details and voila! money leaves your account. The ability to pay for things on websites and applications occurs as a result of what we call "payment integration". Payment integration is just a fancy term for saying "allow people pay for things by processing their transaction amount and making use of a financial institution's API to help them complete the payment".
POPULAR EXAMPLES OF PAYMENT INTEGRATION PLATFORMS
I will write about APIs tomorrow, but for now, you need to understand that most organizations you buy things from aren't financial institutions, they have no ability to remove money from your account as such they need the help of a financial institution, (these days we call them fintech) to collect money from your account. Developers are able to make payment on any platform possible because they are leveraging APIs of financial institutions, You must have heard of platforms like Stripe, Flutterwave, or Alipay (depending on where you live).
IT'S NOT AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS FOR DEVELOPERS
Some payment integration portals are simple to use in the sense that they only involve online payments, others are end-to-end solutions that integrate payment across platforms like POS, USSD code etc. For Nigeria, we have an organization called "Remitta" that is known to provide this solution. Depending on the nature of the API, it can be reactively easy to use or can be quite difficult. One that is well-known is that sufficient technical documentation doesn't exist to enable new developers to use payment integration regardless of their programming language, a lot of junior developers struggle with something that should have been made a lot easier.
FINALLY...
One thing that I can assure you is that regardless of how esoteric a profession is, making things simple to understand will never get old. Most likely, the financial institution that can market their API as the "simplest to use" by developers will see their market share rapidly increase. Today we learnt about another fancy term known as "payment integration", we also learnt that payment integration platforms present a learning challenge to new developers who end up seeking mentorship (as a result of poor technical documentation) in order to make payment integration work in software solutions. That's it for today, see you tomorrow 😁.