Adaptive payments future: let's unite for a long lasting saolution

[filipporonco]

More than an answer this is going to be a long story and a call for all those professionals, developers and merchants that are actively using adaptive payments (preapprovals and chained). If you'll have the patient to read my poor english maybe you want to join the call.

I (and my team with me) strongly think that adaptive payments are a great solution.

Since we adopted them in late 2012 we immediately understood the potential and the flexibility of this great set of APIs. The adoption of this APIs in Italy was something like a nightmare in those times. No docs in italian, no support in italian, everything was done in english with one great support person of paypal in Dublin following us in the integration. We were pioneers in our country but at the end we finally had our flows done.

Preapprovals + chained payments and the world can be in your hand. We could do almost anything and this was what we did. A great platform for buying groups that in those last year is expoloding in our country. Today we have dozens of active and happy users (thousands we brought to paypal) and almost one houndred very selected merchants that we've followed step by step with the paypal team in the limit removal nightmare stuff. One, by one.

And here come the call.

What will be the future of those great and flexible tool that paypal has conceived years ago?

As almost all of the users of adaptives knows those APIs are deprecated since few years. This means that nobody can start new integrations with them but, worst of all, that all those that are actively using them - like us - don't really know what the future will be. I'm fairly certain that we can't be alone. I'm almost sure that there are other businesses, merchants, developers who have built great ideas relying on those APIs and now that we've given soul and blood for years putting all of our efforts in developing, optimizing, updating and growing our platforms and our communities, we're at a crossroad: to wait and hope or to look for alternatives.

On a app owner view, there's no understandable reason why paypal should shut off those APIs and, infact, till today, we've heard nothing about a sunsetting of those APIs, however we all know that they have been deprecated and aby of us can safely say that there will be a sunsetting or a forced migration in the future.

Whay don't we start joining our voices to have clear, understandable and certified roadmap and / or plans around this topic?

Talking with the commercial team in Dublin, they say that everything is ok with adaptives and they will continue working for a long time (and this would be great) but, on the other side, talking with the MTS team the view is a little bit different and no so enthusiastic go on mood in the air.

As many in the European market should have heard, in the last few months another big concern (investing everything in the payments industry) is the PSD2 compliance and maybe just for this directive that the future of adaptives could be involved too.

Adaptives are not PSD2 ready.

The strong customer authentication, mandatory in the new rules schema would force the tech team to update all their products but, always on the merchant / app owner / user view, it seems more plausible that paypal will put the more efforts in the new products instead of renewing the old ones.

However, adaptives are both:

- a great solution used by a lot of merchants in the world continuatively draining new users and merchants (for free) to paypal (just for how the adaptives and preapprovals works, in many cases you're forced to open a paypal account and all we app owners have done this for years);

- an easily adjustable tool to be PSD2 ready

For the paypal tech team: consider that we're now in a "grace period" for PSD2 and that to make Adaptive payments complying with PSD2 directive is not so hard: preapprovals are the CORE and if you add a strong customer authentication to the preapproval flow the great part of the job is done. Chained payments made direclty at the presence of the user too, just adding a strong customer authentication should fit the needs and server to server chained payments sould fall in the MIT (merchant initiated payments) that seems to be out of the object of the directive.

The questions for paypal are:

- what is better? To loose a lot of app owners, merchants, users and, finally, transaction fees because at a certain time someone will decide to shut down this great service or provide solutions to update the service and / or make a soft migration reasonably manageable?

- Will we ever receive a precise communication from paypal to all the app owners on the precise future of those set of APIs?

- What a business, working hard to growth, developing updates and new platforms, should do if his business model completely rely on those set of APIs?

- How paypal think to support us in the future? And what kind of guidance can give us?

The call to all the community of adaptive payments users is to join this conversation and bring your thoughts, just to see if we're alone or if we're a lot with the same issue at the door.

An enthusiastic and happy adaptive heavy user and owner in Italy.

Cheers, Fil