At Bitnet our mission has always been to enable simplified bitcoin acceptance for large enterprise merchants, whilst also working directly with points of aggregation such as payment service providers (PSPs) to reach the longer tail of smaller merchants. The reality of course is that even the majority of enterprise merchants rely on PSPs to process their payments, and that connecting directly to a bitcoin processor is not the preferred route for many who would rather have all of their payments processed via their chosen PSPs. This underlines the point that for any bitcoin processor to be successful in the merchant space, they will need to have a strong network of PSP partnerships in place. I’m not talking about simple referral relationships where a PSP may refer a merchant to a bitcoin processor so that the merchant can connect to them directly. I’m talking about carefully crafted and well thought-out integrations directly into PSPs so that existing merchants bases can seamlessly switch on bitcoin acceptance.

We’ve made great strides in this respect over the last year. Bitnet has partnered with the likes of Cardinal Commerce, Computop, Limonetik and Zooz to make bitcoin acceptance easier for merchants across industries and across continents. This week, however, we made a giant leap forward with the announcement of our strategic partnership with PAY.ON.

PAY.ON are not a PSP. You can think of them as a PSP for PSPs. They are a technology company that provides services to PSPs ranging from individual payment types to the provision of entire white-labeled payment gateways. Servicing over 100 PSPs globally, PAY.ON process over a million transactions per day from consumers in over 150 different countries.

The partnership is a natural fit for both parties. PAY.ON selected Bitnet as their partner after evaluating a range of bitcoin processors. The key reasons for their decision came down to two factors — technology and people.

“PAY.ON and Bitnet have built robust, industry-leading payment processing technology based on the same fundamental principles,” said Markus Rinderer, CEO and Founder at PAY.ON.

On the technology front, it was recognised that Bitnet has the only platform built specifically to service large merchants and PSPs, rather than having originally been built a few years ago to service a long tail of smaller merchants. Technical innovations such as our Instant Approval service that mimic a card authorisation and reduce implementation effort were also identified as clear technology differentiators.

“Flexibility, scalability, and security are delivered through RESTful APIs, making bitcoin acceptance simple for our network of payment service providers and their merchants. Enabling cross-border e-commerce has always been a core part of PAY.ON’s offering, so we are delighted to be partnering with Bitnet to further strengthen the global payment options available through our platform.”

On the people front, PAY.ON wanted to work with a professional and experienced team whom they would be comfortable introducing to their PSP customers. It’s a great testament to my friends and colleagues at Bitnet that they were recognised by PAY.ON as being a crucial factor in the selection process.

From Bitnet’s perspective, partnering with PAY.ON was a no-brainer. Why chase down over a hundred PSPs globally when you can deal with the technology provider behind all of those PSPs? It will enable us to scale our business quickly and efficiently. We’re already hard at work with PAY.ON, building a seamless integration and speaking to their PSP customers about the benefits of accepting bitcoin. Look out for more announcements in due course.

Akif Khan

Chief Commercial Officer, Bitnet