Today, integrating a payment gateway to your business is not an option but a requirement, looking at the ease of making transactions it provides. For this reason, more and more businesses today are opting for a reliable payment gateway. In fact, business owners are opting for multiple payment gateways for their businesses for enjoying the flexibility of collecting payments from numerous methods, countries and regions.

Customers are still worried about their data security. There is no doubt that payment gateways have made transaction processing quick and convenient, but there are still security concerns that merchants, as well as the customers, worry about. 

There are thousands of online payment gateways available in the market, claiming the best features and tight security. However, not every PSP stays true to its claims. So, how to collect the payments securely using a payment gateway? Let’s find out! 

Payment gateways are the safest way to collect payments anytime and from anywhere in the world. 

Why Is It Necessary To Use a Payment Gateway? 

Before discussing the ways to securely accept payments through payment gateways, let us first discuss why it is important to have a payment gateway in the first place and what would happen if you don’t use it!

The answer is, the cyber attackers and the fraudsters will gain easier access to the financial information you process, exposing your business as well customers to online scams and charge-backs. On top of everything, fraudsters will also find easy ways to make illegal transactions, which can degrade your reputation and harm your overall business. 

A payment gateway acts as a gatekeeper to your payment data. For online businesses, payment gateways act like an intermediary that relays payment information from all the parties (you, your bank, your customer, customer’s bank and the PSP) involved in the transaction using tight data encryption that keeps security threats away. 

Apart from fraud management, payment gateways also protect your business from the hassle of dealing with insufficient funds, expired cards, closed accounts, etc. 

How To Securely Collect The Payments Using A Payment Gateway 

There are a few things that you need to consider in order to collect payments via a payment gateway. These are as follows :

1. Choose The Right Payment Gateway 

If you want to collect the payments in a safe and secure way, the first thing you need to do is to select the right payment gateway. By right payment gateway, we mean that it should offer tight security levels and ensure a higher safety to your business as well as your customers. Your security checklist for a payment gateway must include PCI-DSS compliance, reputed security certification like SSL, data encryption among a few others. Half of your security concerns will go away as soon as you select the right payment processor, so choose it very carefully. 

2. Deploy Two-factor Authentication 

Two-factor authentication is another powerful way to secure your payment processing using a payment gateway. It adds another protective layer to the merchant’s and customer’s financial details and safeguards them against threats and fraudsters. Two-factor authentication is like a must-have feature for the payment processor. Once it is enabled, you and your customers will be able to make transactions in a more protected way. 

3. Use Multiple Payment Gateways

Are you operating a medium or large business on a global level? Just one payment gateway may not suffice your requirements in this case. Too much traffic on a single payment processor can raise security concerns, hence, it is better to integrate multiple payment gateways in different segments of your business. This will help you process your payments in a safer and more convenient manner.

4. Consider Real-Time Reconciliation 

You can perform real-time reconciliation. With this you can avoid abnormalities in the payment processing in a great way. Not just that, it helps you monitor your payment system. It helps you sense for the potential security issues even before they can arrive. Real-time reconciliation provides you with a 360-degree view of your payment processing. Using this feature, you can collect the payments in a much secure manner. The good thing is, most reputed payment gateways come with real-time reconciliation as their in-built feature. Click here to know more

5. Use Reliable Hosting Provider 

Good web hosting improves the performance of your site. It also helps you collect payments securely. Many business owners, especially the ones who have just started and have no technical knowledge. They ignore this fact and select their hosting provider randomly. One should pay special attention to web hosting. Because if it’s not up to the mark, it can result in security breaches. 

So, these are a few ways in which you can make your payment processing via an online gateway safe and secure. Follow these five simple tips and collect payments seamlessly.