Overview

Introduction

The Benker payment platform allows you to process payments with support for a wide range of Open Banking payment methods and payment scenarios. From the technical standpoint, makes the platform an advanced information system—state of art, high-integrity, and efficient. Thanks to this, all required actions in the platform are executed in milliseconds while merchants and their customers can expand ranges of services they offer and enjoy high quality performance of the platform.

The Benker payment platform allows you to process different types of payments with support for a wide range of Open Banking payment methods and payment scenarios. It relies on exceptionally thought out and organised processes and high-performance computing resources, which, from the technical standpoint, makes the platform an advanced information system.

To make sure that your questions about working with the platform are answered, you can use this documentation portal. You can also contact your account manager and the technical support.

Key concepts: projects and payments

While the integration workflows and scenarios can vary, working with the platform starts with registering in it a specific merchant and a project of interaction between the merchant's web service and the platform. Along with that, the project is assigned a permanent identifier, and a wide range of customisable properties is set up for it. These properties include support for various parameters that determine payment processing workflows and procedures. Once this has been done (and only then), it is possible to process payments in the project of the merchant.

The number of projects set up for one merchant can vary. Most often, one project is enough, but in certain cases, the number of projects can increase. As a rule, the optimal number of projects is determined by the Benker specialists on the basis of the merchant's business specifics and goals. More importantly, this number can be changed in the course of collaboration with Benker.

Working with the platform starts with registering in it a specific merchant and a project of interaction between the merchant's web service and the platform. Along with that, the project is assigned a permanent identifier, and a wide range of customisable properties is set up for it. These properties include support for payments methods and currencies and various parameters that determine payment processing workflows and procedures. Once this has been done (and only then), it is possible to process payments in the project of the merchant. The number of projects set up for one merchant can vary. As a rule, the optimal number of projects is determined by the Benker specialists on the basis of the merchant's business specifics and goals.

Tools: interfaces and components

To work with the Benker payment platform, you and your web service can use specialised interfaces each of which allows you to achieve specific business goals. These interfaces include:

Payment Page—the payment form developed by Benker that is invoked via an API and allows you to process purchases with the use of various Open Banking payment methods.
Gate—the payment API that provides you with the largest range of capabilities for working with payments and implies that your web service utilises in-house UI solutions.
Dashboard—the web interface for your employees that allows them to configure projects, including the interface of Payment Page, and to monitor the state of all payments (processed and in-progress).
Data API—an API that allows you to retrieve information about operations and balances for the projects in use. It also helps you establish the workflow of monitoring and analysing payment processing outside of Dashboard (for example, in the external BI system).

Capabilities and procedures

Capabilities of the Benker platform are diverse and, more importantly, are supported to a varying degree with different tools. It is important to keep in mind that:

Each tool of the platform is intended for achieving its own specific set of goals.
Achieving any applicable goal can be accomplished with the use one or several tools.
To ensure efficient use of platform, it is often beneficial to combine its capabilities and tools according to the specifics of goals you are working to accomplish.

Capabilities of the Benker platform are diverse and, more importantly, are supported to a varying degree with different tools. Each tool of the platform is intended for achieving its own specific set of goals. To ensure efficient use of platform, it is often beneficial to combine its capabilities and tools according to the specifics of goals you are working to accomplish.

The capabilities of the platform can be divided into several groups functionality-wise:

Processing payments (or performing essential payment procedures)—a group of capabilities that ensure basic functions of the platform.
These capabilities allow processing purchases with the use of various Open Banking payment methods.
Expanding the scope of payment scenarios (or using additional capabilities)—a group of capabilities that ensure flexible configuring of the integration for specific situations and business needs to improve payment services.
These capabilities allow performing procedures that can be considered complementary enhancements: they are not required to process payments, but they facilitate the variability of payment scenarios, boost payment interfaces conversion and payment acceptance rates,and increase customer loyalty.
Managing payment solutions—a group of capabilities that allow merchants to manage payment solutions but do not affect payment processing per se.
These capabilities are intended for simplifying the use of procedures for monitoring and analysing payment information, managing balances and other processes important for maintaining merchants' business operations.

Together, these groups of capabilities ensure full functionality and scalability of the platform for merchants.

Integration steps

Depending on the tools that will be used for working with the platform, the actual steps and the order in which they should be taken are going to vary significantly. In general case, you need:

Address the following organisational issues of interaction with Benker:
1. If your company is not yet a client of Benker and has not obtained the project identifier and a secret key for interacting with the platform, submit an application. Once the application receives its initial approval, you will have the contact information of the Benker specialists in charge of your onboarding.
2. Coordinate the procedures of integrating with the payment platform, testing, and launching the functionality with the Benker technical support specialists.
Complete preliminary technical tasks. Make sure to implement signature generation and callback response processing on the server side of the web service.
Test the required actions and launch the integration solution in coordination with the Benker technical support.

Upon testing and monitoring, when the required actions are performed correctly, the Benker technical support specialists will switch to interacting with the web service in the full-time support mode.