APIs Can Help Businesses Scale Financial Capabilities Globally, Minimize Fraud

Despite significant progress in recent years, making and receiving payments remains a complex challenge for small and large businesses alike, leaving more room for solutions that optimize integrations, reduce cost per order and improve payment authorization rates.

These are some of the challenges that former Delivery Hero executive Orkhan Abdullayev is looking to solve through Payrails, a startup that enables large enterprises and fast-growing technology companies to leverage a unique application programming interface (API) to scale their payments and financial capabilities globally.

The API also helps firms integrate a range of payment service providers to extend acceptance coverage across different countries, currencies and payment methods. According to Abdullayev, it was critical to create a platform that could help consolidate the huge volume of features without having to invest in payment solutions on different platforms.

“It’s [all] in one space with very advanced functionalities when it comes to integrations, fraud prevention and reconciliation of gains and payouts,” he told PYMNTS in a recent interview.

Given that each potential client is likely to have a unique set of issues that they want to solve, Abdullayev said they have the possibility to tailor the Payrails solution to their needs.

“Our approach is to sit down together and understand [the business’] pain points, design the right implementation approach and make sure that there is a dedicated team on our side, but also on the customer side, that is working together to bring this solution [to life],” he said.

Read more: Payrails Raises $6.4M Seed to Launch FinOps Software

Headquartered in Berlin and co-founded late last year by Abdullayev and two other Delivery Hero alums, Emre Talay and Nicolas Thouzeau, the German startup is gaining traction and catching the attention of investors.

Earlier this month, the firm announced it had raised $6.4 million to expand its financial operations software for enterprise clients and launch its next-generation financial operations (FinOps) platform.

Robust and Scalable Infrastructure

The Berlin-based firm has partnered with different providers in the payments space to help merchants reduce digital fraud — and unlike other players, the value add that Payrails brings to the table is increased visibility for online payments.

“The fact that our product comes in a way that sees a wider business, in terms of compositions of the transactions, in terms of who is ultimately processing online payments, how the money is being split and how it’s being paid out, it allows you to take your fraud prevention to a higher level,” Abdullayev explained.

He said moving forward, they see the platform solving payments for global business by either extending their payment acceptance, introducing fraud prevention or reconciling their money movements.

In the long term, the goal is to offer embedded financial services, considering the increase in consumption of financial services happening within specific ecosystems such as marketplaces and among Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

“As a platform, it’s important to control the experience side of things and to participate in the economic value creation,” Abdullayev said. “What you don’t necessarily want to do is build all the underlying infrastructure in bits and pieces, so we see ourselves [providing] a very robust and very scalable infrastructure piece that would help you to build on top.”

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