Recently a number of ecommerce merchants and traditional companies have asked us, “Can I just outsource ALL of my payment processing? I’ve had it!”

At first we suspected that these requests were driven by PCI compliance concerns. As it turns out that’s only a small part of the motivation.

Companies are reacting to ever increasing payment complexity – multiple gateways, interfaces to numerous internal systems, complications due to new payment types/methods in order to transact internationally, a proliferation of data standards, and new regulations (e.g. IAT). The on-going IT maintenance costs are motivation enough, let alone the business process confusion.

My colleague Allen Weinberg has coined the phrase PaaS – “Payments as a Service” to describe this.

Here at Glenbrook we’re debating what exactly it means – hosted order pages have been around since Day 1 of ecommerce, and are still being used by smaller merchants – but is PaaS more than that? After all, the payment itself is just one small component of the order-to- cash or purchase-to-pay process. What about fraud analysis, subscription support, chargebacks and ACH administrative return exception processing?

If you were to buy Payments as a Service – which processes, services, and/or functions would be included in your dream solution? Let us know in the comments.