I note that Payments‑as‑a‑Service (PaaS) offers a cost benefit – 60% reduction in payments infra costs.
I define a Payment Service Provider (PSP) as a 3rd‑party company that helps merchants accept credit/debit cards, e‑wallets, and bank transfers, acting as an intermediary between customers, merchants, card networks, and banks.
I define a Payment Aggregator (PA) as a 3rd‑party PSP that facilitates payments in online commercial transactions, onboarding merchants with a sub‑merchant account and receiving funds on their behalf.
I define a Payment Gateway as the virtual version of a POS terminal that collects, encrypts, and verifies online credit‑card data, communicating approvals or rejections to merchants and customers.
PCI‑DSS 4.0 defines four main goals set by the PCI SSC:
Goal 1: Continue to meet the security needs of the payment industry.
Goal 2: Promote security as a continuous process.
Goal 3: Add flexibility for different methodologies.
Goal 4: Enhance validation methods.
Validation frequency is annually or quarterly depending on transaction volume.
The net‑worth requirement must be demonstrated as on March 31, 2021.
A CA certificate of net‑worth evidencing is required to be submitted to RBI at the time of application for authorisation.
The net‑worth must be certified by a Chartered Accountant (CA).
I reflected on a payment‑authorization ML effort at PayPal and distilled three practical takeaways that guide how I prioritize tiny performance gains.
At PayPal, my team shipped models that improved payment authorization rates by about 20 basis points.
0.2% lift translated to $5M a year additional revenue at PayPal’s transaction volume.
I decided to focus on decimal‑point improvements rather than headline‑grabbing features because at scale decimals yield large dollar impact.
I also committed to invest heavily in measurement infrastructure – attribution, holdouts, and guardrails – since the model was never the hard part; measurement was.
Proving a 20bps lift is real - attribution, holdouts, guardrails - took more engineering than the model itself.