The IXOPAY Origin Story
2024 is IXOPAY’s 10 year anniversary! A decade of IXOPAY seems like a good time to pause and reflect on just how far we have come in that time, and how IXOPAY came to be in the first place.
Welcome to the IXO World
Our origin story is very much one of eating our own dog food. The story starts way back in 2001, when siblings Rene Siegl and Nathalie Siegl founded IXOLIT. IXOLIT started out providing eCommerce services for clients. Back then, the internet was a very different place from what it is today, and online commerce was still in its infancy. Dial-up internet access was still very much the norm and social media did not yet exist. The smartphone revolution was years off, and PayPal had only just been founded. eCommerce almost exclusively relied on credit card payments, and the challenge of the day was recurring payments. An increasing number of clients needed to process recurring payments, and this is where the team cut its teeth in the field of payments.
Changing the Focus
With the number of clients growing and more and more international businesses joining the fold, IXOPLAN was born, a billing platform for handling recurring payments. We were still very much in the business of providing eCommerce solutions at this time, and with payments fundamental to any eCommerce venture, IXOPLAN was just another string in our bow. But the success of IXOPLAN, which attracted additional clients - including some of the world’s largest websites - gave a glimpse of what was yet to come.
A decade later, and the eCommerce landscape had changed dramatically. HTML5 had been introduced, apps and mobile devices had come to dominate the market and the first viable alternatives to credit cards had established themselves among consumers. The needs of businesses were beginning to shift. While we were still very much active in providing eCommerce solutions, nearly half of the developers were now working on payment integrations. And clients wanted much more control over their transaction flow, including the need for smart routing and cascading, allowing for a significant number of failed transactions to be recovered by retrying them with an alternative payment provider. We found ourselves constantly reinventing the wheel, integrating the same or similar payment options into different code bases for different clients.
Understanding that the overheads of implementing and maintaining multiple - often redundant - payment integrations separately would not scale, we decided that an additional technical layer was needed. Instead of maintaining multiple separate payment integrations, this technical layer would act as middleware between the eCommerce platforms and payment service providers. It would provide a uniform interface for all transactions, irrespective of the PSP or payment method. Rene’s initial impulse was to look for an off-the-shelf solution to handle these requirements.
Reality had different Plans
But back in 2014, it was impossible to find a platform that met all our requirements: support for all the payment integrations that we had already implemented, fast turnaround times for new integrations, and the ability to handle all downstream processes, including reconciliation and settlement in a uniform manner. A compromise solution was reached, as we opted to use three separate platforms in parallel. “Better three payment integrations than hundreds”, was the thinking.
Reality, it turns out, had different plans. Only a few months later, it became clear that these platforms were not up to standard. They were missing key functionality, such as the ability to depict all transaction types. Keeping track of the many different integrations was also difficult, with numerous mergers and acquisitions resulting in payment integrations that were disparate and inconsistent. Instead of unifying payments, we had simply succeeded in substituting one set of problems with another. Requests for additional integrations would incur substantial additional costs, and turnaround times were in the region of 9 months - if an estimate was provided at all.
In order to keep our customers happy, the decision was therefore made to continue integrating payment providers in-house, in addition to the three platforms, and this of course further complicated matters. Cutting this Gordian knot required severing all ties to the three platforms, letting the contracts run their course, even though by now, they had outlived their usefulness.
Finding a Solution
But all was not lost. Over the years, we had acquired a huge amount of payment knowledge, had experience with integrating a large number of payment service providers, and above all, fully understood the needs of eCommerce merchants. We knew that no payment solution is permanent - requirements change; business relationships change. What we needed was a solution that could leverage all the knowledge in the company, unify all payment integrations developed over the course of more than a decade, and above all reduce the ballooning overheads that came with maintaining all these disparate integrations. It was time to bite the bullet and implement our own solution.
That solution was IXOPAY, a unifying technical solution that provided a single interface for all our payment integrations, present and future. With just a single API to contend with, changes to a merchant’s payment providers no longer required wholesale changes to their platform. Instead it was simply plug and play. New payment providers could be integrated in record time, thanks both to our many years of experience, but above all due to a unifying technical framework. A merchant’s platform only needed to integrate with IXOPAY - a largely one time undertaking - and any future changes to their requirements required only minimal intervention.
A Success Story to be continued
It didn’t take long for word to spread about IXOPAY. While the intention had always been to use the platform as a purely internal project, businesses soon began knocking on our door, asking to be able to use it. Initially, we turned them down, stating that the platform was only meant for existing IXOLIT customers and an internal platform for IXOPLAN. However, that soon changed, and IXOPAY was quickly adopted by established global merchants as their payment platform of choice.
In the decade since, a lot has changed at IXOPAY. The company has grown significantly to nearly 100 employees and we have gained many more internationally recognized clients. What has remained unchanged is our desire to help merchants deliver the best possible eCommerce experience for their customers. IXOPAY has since outgrown IXOLIT - the two companies being merged into IXOPAY in 2023 - but the many years of developing eCommerce platforms still inform the development of IXOPAY to this day. Eating our own dog food for much of that time meant that IXOPAY was designed from the ground up to meet real world needs. We are uniquely positioned to understand the needs of our clients because we were one of them. This is borne out by the fact that other companies were quick to identify the value of IXOPAY, and serves as validation of our efforts. With more and more payment methods proliferating and eCommerce becoming truly global, we remain confident that IXOPAY will continue to deliver value and a return on investment for the decades to come.
If you would like to participate in IXOPAY’s ongoing success story, get in touch with us to find out how IXOPAY can take your payments to the next level.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is a best-of-breed payment orchestration platform offering flexible and independent global payment processing options. Fully PCI-DSS Level 1 certified and highly scalable, IXOPAY caters to the needs of enterprise merchants and white label clients, including payment service providers (PSPs), acquirers and independent sales organizations (ISOs). Built upon modern, easily extendable architecture, IXOPAY provides smart transaction routing with cascading, state-of-the-art risk and fraud management, fully automated reconciliation and settlements processing, comprehensive reporting and access to hundreds of acquirers, payment service providers and alternative payment methods.
IXOPAY is trusted by national and international enterprises and has offices in Austria and the USA. The owner-led and financed company has grown from 2 to nearly 100 employees by delivering innovative eCommerce solutions.
For more information, visit: https://www.ixopay.com