Why a Whitelabeled Payee Experience Is Awesome and Important
Payment detail collection is a challenge to those in the digital economy (ad tech, marketplaces, ecommerce). You’ve built a sexy experience with your supply-side partners. You’re featuring healthy payouts and enough demand-side business to entice them to join your network. Then when it’s time to collect their payment details during onboarding, you kick them over to a third-party payment processor site.
How many abandons do you get at that point? What if they don’t even use the payment method you’re supporting? You end up potentially shunning that partner who will go to your competitor because they no longer trust your experience.
So then, you and your developers start thinking: “Maybe we should write our own way to collect banking details.”
Great! But then you started looking up how to connect to PayPal and ACH, or how to grab wire transfer details for banks in India and Croatia. Not so easy. The APIs are daunting and the regulatory requirements are very difficult.
Oh, and by the way… your tax advisor says you have to start collecting W-8 forms for partners outside the US because an IRS audit will easily levy a fine. What the heck is a W-8?
That’s when you need a complete, embeddable onboarding experience, and you need it whitelabeled to match and reinforce your brand. That’s where the Tipalti IFRAME comes in.
Develop Trust and Convenience
A whitelabeled portal never takes the partner out of the onboarding flow. It also establishes and reinforces the brand of your network with the payee. There’s never a question if they are dealing with you, unlike their perception if you take them to another site to login or create an account. The same user interface used for tracking their performance can be the same one they use to add and update payment details, selecting payment methods, digitally submitting tax identification information, and even viewing payment history.
There are other benefits as well:
- Streamlining Data Entry – The portal puts the responsibility for maintaining accurate payee data on suppliers and partners. That’s less time for your team to copy-and-paste in information from an email or custom form. Information can also be validated during entry to ensure good data goes in.
- Payment Method Selection – In exchange for this complete 5-minute self-service experience, they’re given the freedom to choose how they’re paid. Different countries and jurisdictions have varied banking and money transmission requirements and Tipalti supports them for over 190 countries in 120 local currencies over 6 payment methods, including PayPal. 26,000 payment rules determine available payment types depending on their country. There is also a clear articulation of any transaction fees that may be incurred. Your workload is kept to a minimum. No more error-prone manual payments entry.
- Tax ID and Form Collection – To ensure tax compliance, payees are required to complete the necessary tax forms (e.g. W-9, W-8, etc.), which are kept with the payer. For W-9 and VAT, we offer a validation service. And you can require additional documentation to be uploaded on a customizable basis. At the end of the year, a complete 1099 and 1042-S report provides a submission-ready file to help you manage reporting to federal and state authorities.
- Viewable Payment History – The need to interact directly with payees is dramatically reduced by providing them access to their payment history. They can easily identify when they were paid, how much, or if there are underlying issues preventing them from receiving funds.
In addition to the portal being branded, it’s important to brand all automated communications (payment status, payment issues, early payment offers, etc.). Again, it demonstrates how advanced your network is and how best-in-class your experience is. Automated, branded emails are all part of the Tipalti experience that you can offer your partners and suppliers.
