I have spent the past 5 months working with Paymetric’s solution for SAP credit cards and I must say I have been impressed.
I first came across Paymetric in 2002 when supporting Credit Cards from the CRM side and they have come a long way since then. I was impressed with their expertise at that stage but their solution was not as comprehensive as it is today.
They have had a long and comprehensive look at SAP’s standard solution for credit cards and developed their offering to fill the gaps and improve the functionality.
Here are a few examples:
- In standard SAP, the customer needs to decide up front in the sales order to pay by credit card. It is not possible to pay for your open A/R balance later. Paymetric’s Open A/R module allows you to select Open balances after the fact to settle with a credit card.
- In standard SAP, if you have a billing plan of say 3 bills of $5,000 each, SAP will attempt to authorize the whole $15,000 instead of only the amount with in the configured horizon. There is a way of using the Auto A/R module to cover this.
The solution comprises of a group of SAP programs (imported as a series of transports) and a separate server called XiPay (actually server is a misnomer, it is actually a piece of middleware that communicates with the payment processor). There is also an encryption/decryption server which resides on the same box.
The XiPay server is where you get a lot of value, as Paymetric has certified their interfaces with the processors (and they support quite a few). This save a bunch of development and testing time.
Even though the solution is vastly improved, it does not necessarily mean that you do not have to add code to user exits.
For example: It does not support Invoice Cancellations out of the box. You need to add some coding to cover the 2 scenarios: before settlement and after settlement. Actually, most of the coding is related to the XiPay side in this case. Another example is Billing Plans. A bit of code needs to be added to handle these.
Whatever you do, do not underestimate the effort still involved in implementing credit cards as we have discovered. Paymetric definitely does shorten the implementation time dramatically, but do not get the illusion that it is a plug and go.
I have also been very impressed with the caliber of the Paymetric consultants when we have had questions or issues.
In summary, I think it is an excellent solution and well worth the investment. It will shorten your credit card implementation time and really improve your final solution.
