Simplify Commerce, a developer platform aimed at the ISO market (and the small-to-mid merchant space it serves) that was incubated in MasterCard Labs, announced its launch on June 27.
While MasterCard leverages its payment processing expertise by operating as the technology vendor and developer point-of-contact, the payment acquiring and merchant services are handled by Georgia based ISO Priority Payment Systems. In a briefing with Mercator Advisory Group, MasterCard representatives assured the market that it was not out to disintermediate its acquiring partners and agents, and that the platform deal with PPS was by no means exclusive.
Differentiation in the merchant acquiring space is hard to accomplish these days, but Simplify Commerce believes that merchants are still looking for “acceptance-in-a-box” type card services that allow merchants to be “up and running fast,” presumably as fast as with comparable “open” payment platforms such as Braintree and Stripe.
Gary Lyons, MasterCard’s chief innovation officer and head of MasterCard Labs posted about Simplify Commerce on his company blog:
Simplify Commerce, introduced today by MasterCard, is specifically designed to make it unbelievably easy to begin accepting payments, regardless of brand, in a matter of minutes. We’ve streamlined the process for businesses to get a merchant account and include a payment gateway in a single, secure package.
Since a lot of businesses use developers to help with their online presence, we wanted to make the technology really easy to use. With our APIs, clear SDKs in a variety of languages, including Ruby, PHP, Pylon and Java, and mobile SDKs for iOS and Android, as well as rich documentation and code examples – we’re making it easier for developers to quickly integrate payments for their merchant customers.