The ultimate guide to white-label payment gateways

You could be forgiven for sometimes wishing that you ran a D2C business. Relatively quick acquisition, simple transactions, and a regular stream of customers. Instead, SaaS companies, platforms, and marketplaces have to deal with a great deal more complexity.

There are few more significant than how you facilitate payments for your users – be they merchants, marketplace buyers and sellers, or customers.

Thankfully, more solutions are coming online to help businesses embed financial services – like payment processing, digital wallets, and card issuing – into their products. The end result can be incredibly powerful, creating platforms that do everything users want and need.

White-label payment gateways are one of the most exciting innovations in embedded finance, as you’ll come to understand by the end of this article.

What is a white-label payment gateway?

A payment gateway is the technology that securely processes card payments to merchant accounts.

Among businesses that need to facilitate payments for their users (e.g. a marketplace or booking platform), very few have the time or money to build payments infrastructure, so they use third-party gateways. This often involves redirecting users to your gateway’s checkout, payment, and order tracking pages.

White-label gateways let you keep everything – from branding to checkout pages – under your control.

Key benefits of using a white-label payment gateway

Businesses choose white-label gateways for both practical and commercial reasons. The benefits are varied and span short- and long-term, so it’s worth considering this option across different timelines.

Full control of user experience

Sending users off-platform to make payments creates friction, inconsistency, and opportunities for churn. If you can control the user experience from account creation to payment processing, you’re giving your product a much stronger chance of success.

You can then create a unique and consistent experience for their customers.

How Flash Pack took full control of their checkout experience

Ability to own the merchant and seller relationship

Controlling the commercial terms and platform data in your user relationships is a huge win.

There are financial advantages to this, but it also benefits customer experience:

• You know that your team – with its own SLAs and KPIs – is in place to handle requests and support tickets.

• You can use platform data to drive customer success initiatives.

• You create a consistent and memorable experience across UI and UX.

Faster onboarding and built-in compliance

Working with a white-label gateway is quicker for everyone:

• You can build and launch in a fraction of the time it would take to do on your own.

• Once you’re live, customer onboarding is streamlined thanks to your provider’s existing AML and KYC checks.

Additional revenue

Your relationships with the gateway provider and your customers are entirely separate. You’ll pay your provider whatever they charge; how you parse that into your user pricing is entirely up to you.

Just a few ways you can unlock additional revenue with a white-label gateway include:

• Upselling valuable features, e.g. advanced reporting and analytics

• Creating tiered plans with different features (e.g. higher transaction value/volume)

• Adding a platform or transaction fee for facilitating payments, thus improving your margins

The beauty of white-label gateways is that you control the flow of information to your customers, rather than leaving it to be managed by the payment processor.

Strengthened platform loyalty and customer retention

Everything we’ve mentioned already will boost retention and loyalty. The crux of white-label gateways is that you can make them do what your users want and need. If you can do that, you give them no reason to leave.

Beyond offering an attractive product with customisation at its heart, there are other ways you can improve retention with a white-label gateway.

Some providers, like Airwallex, can offer other embedded finance products like payouts or digital wallets. For example, a second-hand clothing marketplace could integrate digital wallets for customers’ funds, making users more likely to spend their earnings in-platform.

Curious to find out more about how it all works? Find out more about the embedded payments edge.

Features to look for in a white-label payment gateway

White-label gateways are a major technical undertaking. There are some fundamental features that every gateway should offer, but the technical execution that you end up with will be bespoke to your business.

Beyond the purely technical implementation of a gateway, there are also account management features to consider.

Technical considerations

• Custom branding (dashboard, checkout, URLs) should be standard with white-label solutions, but different providers may leave breadcrumbs in some places. Get 100% clear on how white-labelled their product is.

• The kind of businesses that need white-label gateways often need multicurrency and FX features, too. If your gateway provider can’t provide truly global support, that may be an issue.

• To go along with multi-currency support, access to local payment rails is also important for global businesses. Offering the local payment method in any country reduces costs for all parties and improves acquisition rates.

• PCI DSS compliance and fraud prevention measures are essential. Your provider should be able to detail all of their security and anti-fraud processes clearly and upfront. If you can’t get this information, strongly consider your options.

• Your gateway will be developed using the gateway’s API (and wider developer tools). If the accompanying documentation and developer support is lacking, you might not be able to create the kind of product you want – at least not easily.

• Settlement, reconciliation, and reporting tools are going to be important for both you and your users. This will be a huge amount of data, so the capability needs to scale to enterprise levels.

Account management features

Some of these are essential, some are nice-to-have, but they all contribute to a good service along with a good product.

• A dedicated relationship or account manager, providing a direct line of support during onboarding and into the future.

• Pricing should be flexible and negotiable, as these products are generally enterprise-scale. If your billing varies each month, insight into future costs will be important.

• If you’re in a niche industry, you should look (or ask) for evidence that the provider has served customers like you in the past.

• Agree to SLAs and KPIs before signing a contract, so you’re certain of the service and support you can expect. This will also give you both a north star for measuring the success of your relationship.

The terms of your contract will make or break the relationship. Without fair break clauses and contingencies, you could end up stuck with a vendor that doesn’t give you what you need – holding back growth and stifling your potential.

How to choose the right white-label payment gateway in the UK

Much of the evaluation and comparisons you make will be unique to your situation. There isn’t a single ‘right’ choice to make, as every business approaches these projects from a different angle.

However, we can advise on some fundamental features and questions to ask.

• Licensing requirements: Who holds the financial license(s), do they cover your jurisdiction, and what fiduciary responsibilities do you have to your customers?

• Timeline to go-live: You’ll need a clear understanding of your provider’s typical timeline for launches. Not many businesses can afford to wait for one year or longer to launch a product like this.

• Pricing/commercial model: The way providers charge varies wildly, Some ask for a revenue share/commission, others charge flat fees, and others use tiered pricing that scales with the volume/value of customers or transactions.

• Tech stack + API and support quality: To really hit the ground running, you need a gateway that runs in a way your dev team knows well. Otherwise, they’ll be forced to learn a new language or you’ll have to hire new talent.

• Experience with target users: A SaaS platform signing up to a marketplace specialist’s white-label gateway could end badly. You need to know that your provider has the experience and capability to truly support your business.

How Airwallex supports embedded and white-label payment use cases

You’re on the Airwallex website – so we think it’s only fair that we fly our flag for a moment and explain why we’re a great choice for white-label gateways.

We’ve got a strong embedded finance capability that powers the financial infrastructure of some of the most innovative businesses across the world.

Beyond payments, you can also embed card issuing, FX, multicurrency accounts, and global payouts to create an incredibly empowering merchant experience.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can also enjoy Airwallex’s Global Account and spend management tools for your own business.

For more information, check out Payments for Platforms.

An engine for acquisition, revenue, and retention

The possibilities with embedded finance are endless. In weeks or months, marketplaces, platforms, SaaS, and ISOs and ISVs can all create products that would have once taken years of work, regulatory hurdles, and expense to build.

There’s never been a better time to build financial services into products, but the process still requires careful thought and the right partner.

If you’re ready to build with Airwallex, our team would love to talk about the future.