Chris Kronenthal, President & CTO Keeping pace with the vagaries of complex payment environments is not an easy task. So, what can companies do to stay relevant in the face of an ever-expanding yet interconnected ecosystem of commerce? Pennsylvania-based FreedomPay has come up with an effective solution to this. “In the realm of ecommerce, there is a unique and pressing need for platforms that are consumer-centric. As such, from the FreedomPay perspective, we begin with the consumer, taking into account the challenges that they face in adopting technology when it comes to the broad genre of payments and cards ecosystem,” begins Chris Kronenthal, President and CTO of FreedomPay. This is the very ethos that underpins and drives the company’s product development, allowing it to introduce a multitude of unique solutions that place the consumer at the core while ensuring that they can seamlessly adopt the ever-evolving payment technology. Further, to keep up with the trend of globalization that is rapidly taking over the payments landscape, FreedomPay offers a significant opportunity to leverage its platform globally, providing coverage not just for card-not-present payments but a fully card-present/card-not-present alternative payment solution that is completely integrated and globally accessible.
Kronenthal continues, “One of the things that we remain highly committed to is the concept of fully integrated payments, and that's a driving principle behind all of our products and solutions.” To this end, considering the different touchpoints—web, mobile, kiosk, ecommerce, card present— FreedomPay provides a toolkit to integrators to bolt on to its platform in as little as two weeks. “Our solution assists clients in multiple industries, including hospitality, gaming, retail and education, with everything around offers, loyalty, discounting while allowing them to track customer identity, profiling, and customer behavior,” he adds.
Besides, the platform seamlessly integrates for EMV—both online and offline PIN and is PCI-, GDPR-, and EMV-compliant, taking the merchant out of scope. With the various integration touchpoints bolted to the FreedomPay platform, covering payments, identity, and a multitude of the compliance requirements that sit on enterprise data warehouse infrastructure, merchants can track their customer identity across any of those touchpoints. “We equip clients with a clean set of data to start diving into for segmentation, marketing, and retargeting for increasing their success ratio for the customer,” mentions Kronenthal. As a platform provider, FreedomPay acts as the glue that federates disparate solutions—stand beside devices, semi-integrated appliances, or host payment pages—on a single platform such that they seamlessly integrate to provide exceptional customer experience.
In an instance, MGM—one of the world’s leading hospitality and gaming companies—was struggling to provide a unified, integrated experience to its customers, in the wake of an array of point of sales solutions, check-in kiosks, an ecommerce site, a mobile application, along with the gaming operation. FreedomPay stepped in and mitigated the challenge at hand by tying all of MGM’s different point of sales, be it card-present, card-not-present, retail, lodging, food service along with ecommerce onto a single platform. Further, MGM implemented FreedomPay’s PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution to govern their overall PCI compliance while receiving the best interchange and Bank of America services portfolio. “The company currently also has one of the highest dynamic currency conversion adoption rates, and our unique integrated plug-and-play solution was deployed around different properties within five weeks,” underscores Kronenthal.
One of the prominent, distinct capabilities of FreedomPay lies in driving the same level of integration capabilities similar to those of emerging fintech players while also serving as a pure-play technology company that doesn’t necessitate merchants to disrupt their existing technological footprint. “We act as the bridge that links the entire existing infrastructure, enabling clients to innovate and accelerate product adoption. This gives us a tremendous competitive advantage in the US and the emerging markets of Europe and APAC where we are currently expanding,” concludes Kronenthal.
