Intellivative Payment Solutions without Borders

Intellivative, Inc. is pleased to announce that the Intellivative Merchant Portal now allows merchants to submit paper checks to the banking system electronically via Check 21.

What is Check 21?

Check 21 is a federal law that is designed to enable banks to handle more checks electronically. Using Check 21, merchants send scanned images of paper checks electronically to the bank.

Banks can then handle these checks electronically, which makes check processing easier, faster and more efficient.

Why use Check 21?

Before Check 21, merchants had to physically take paper checks to the bank for deposit. Banks then were required to manually process the paper checks with the banks and credit unions that the checks were drawn upon. This process is clearly inefficient and costly. By using Check 21, banks can process the payment faster and more efficiently, enabling the merchant to get paid faster. Merchants also save trips to the bank to deposit paper checks.

How does it work?

The merchant uses a check scanner, which scans and captures the entire image of the check. Intellivative submits these images electronically with the transaction information to the bank. The merchant’s bank can transmit this information electronically to the customer’s bank. If a receiving bank or its customer requires a paper check, the bank can use the electronic picture and payment information to create a paper “substitute check.” Using ‘Check 21’ electronic check conversion, the transaction is processed within 24 business hours.

Which check scanner(s) are supported?

The RDM 7000i is the check scanner that is compatible and is currently being used with the Intellivative Merchant Portal to capture the check images. Other check scanners may be integrated in the future. The RDM 7000i is available for resale from Intellivative.

If you sign up for a merchant account with Intellivative that includes ACH check services, we will provide a check scanner at no cost.

Is it difficult for merchants to set up the check scanner?

It is not difficult to set up the check scanner to work with the Intellivative Merchant Portal, but for those occasions where a problem is experienced, we prepared the Installation and Setup Guide, complete with step-by-step instructions, pictures and screenshots, to help the merchant install the software drivers and get the check scanner device working properly with the Intellivative Merchant Portal.

Contact us for further information or to get set up for the check 21 service.

I see a lot of fantastically innovative applications out there, where creative developers take APIs and make all kinds of new functionality with them.  A stop by ProgrammableWeb shows so many great ideas–every day there are new web applications (or “mashups”) built by simply combining two or more APIs in a new, sometimes unexpected way.

Well, we’re wondering what people might do with the Intellivative Payments API. The goal of our payments API is to simplify adding payment functions (e.g., credit card, debit card, echeck transactions; recurring payments; card on file) to business applications–making it easier to integrate payments into whatever it is you might want to build.

So what WOULD you get if you crossed a payments API with a:

• billing API, an e-mail service, and an SMS messaging service?
• travel service and a map?
• claims processing system?
• movie?
• retail store, SMS messaging service and shipping API(s)?
• Twitter?

Perhaps none of these are groundbreaking ideas–some of them I’m sure have already been done. But maybe you have a business idea that hasn’t been done, or maybe a way to do something that has been done, only better. Or perhaps you have a new twist on an old business idea? Whatever it is, we’d like to hear it.

Are you a developer? Would you like us to feature your work on our blog? Tell us–What would you build with the Intellivative Payments API?  We’d love to tell your story.

(Add a comment below by clicking on the little thought bubble thingy.)

Lately reports of the amount of credit card information that has been compromised are staggering. It’s getting a little scary to be a consumer in these times, let alone a business owner who might be held accountable if fraudulent transactions happen on your customers’ cards.

What’s an entrepeneur to do?

Well, one option to help keep people from stealing customer information would be not to keep any cardholder information around.

One way to keep the burden off your business is to use customer lookup and card on file functions (something like the features offered in the Intellivative Payments API and Intellivative Merchant Portal).  These functions were originally designed for convenience, but when used in lieu of storing the sensitive customer information at your business, they can also act as fraud prevention tools.

By using these two features in tandem, you can save customer billing, shipping, and cardholder account information for later retrieval on a secured server. This allows you quick access to the information, but you don’t have to worry about how to protect it from fraudsters. You leave the burden of protecting your customer information to an expert in security–unless security is your business, you may be better off leaving it to the experts.

That doesn’t help if your payment solutions provider is compromised for some reason, but hopefully they are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen. I know we are continually updating security at Intellivative. We make it our mission to keep your customer information safe and secure.

You will also need access to previous payment receipts in case there’s a chargeback, so make sure your payment provider offers secure access to those as well or you’ll end up keeping copies of receipts around, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you’re worried about how to store your customers’ information safely, perhaps the best solution is just not to store it at all!

Lately reports of the amount of credit card information that has been compromised are staggering. It’s getting a little scary to be a consumer in these times, let alone a business owner who might be held accountable if fraudulent transactions happen on your customers’ cards.

What’s an entrepeneur to do?

Well, one option to help keep people from stealing customer information would be not to keep any cardholder information around.

One way to keep the burden off your business is to use customer lookup and card on file functions (something like the features offered in the Intellivative Payments API and Intellivative Merchant Portal).  These functions were originally designed for convenience, but when used in lieu of storing the sensitive customer information at your business, they can also act as fraud prevention tools.

By using these two features in tandem, you can save customer billing, shipping, and cardholder account information for later retrieval on a secured server. This allows you quick access to the information, but you don’t have to worry about how to protect it from fraudsters. You leave the burden of protecting your customer information to an expert in security–unless security is your business, you may be better off leaving it to the experts.

That doesn’t help if your payment solutions provider is compromised for some reason, but hopefully they are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen. I know we are continually updating security at Intellivative. We make it our mission to keep your customer information safe and secure.

You will also need access to previous payment receipts in case there’s a chargeback, so make sure your payment provider offers secure access to those as well or you’ll end up keeping copies of receipts around, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you’re worried about how to store your customers’ information safely, perhaps the best solution is just not to store it at all!