Services and APIs Turning Interchange Pressure Into Merchant Growth

Payment processing may be the plumbing of modern commerce, but for banks and FinTechs chasing transaction volume, it is also the battlefield where customer loyalty is won — or lost. In an era when merchants expect instant onboarding, bulletproof security and actionable data, the bar for processors keeps rising.

Lori Jones, vice president of product management and project management at rebranded payment processor North, argues that a crowded field can be an advantage.

“We actually see a highly competitive marketplace as bringing its own opportunities to package very specific capabilities and meet specific needs,” she said, adding that North “has a very strong appetite to serve new and emerging markets,” whether that means unusual business models or fast-growing acquisition channels.

That appetite explains the company’s makeover. Formerly known as North American Bancard, the 32-year-old firm put together a portfolio of platforms and relationships through organic growth and acquisitions, including its 2014 purchase of processor EPX. But the mosaic of sub-brands and legacy logos masked what Jones calls “the innovation that was actually happening on the inside.”

The simplified North banner unveiled this spring is meant to signal a single technology stack — encompassing core processing, banking relationships, risk tools and customer service — capable of underwriting everything from startups to large omnichannel enterprises.

“In order for us to be considered a competitor in that marketplace, we really had to modernize,” she said. “Whatever aspect of payments fits your business model, we’re here to work with you and we hope this brand represents that.”

More Than Cosmetics

The rebrand is more than cosmetic. North has been bundling operational software — merchant enrollment, partner onboarding, risk monitoring and compliance — around its gateway and acquiring rails. The goal is to blur the line between processor and solutions provider and, in the process, protect margin as interchange compression and pricing scrutiny intensify.

“It comes down to transparency and giving control to the merchants,” Jones said, pointing to a mix of flat-rate, interchange-plus and dynamic models that can be toggled in North’s Payments Hub. Access to multiple sponsor banks, she noted, lets the company serve high-risk or specialty verticals “at very competitive rates.”

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North also leans on what Jones calls a “front-door-to-back-office” mindset. Beyond card acceptance, merchants can turn services on or off, whether it’s inventory, customer management or recurring billing, inside a cloud dashboard. Detailed statements are standard, and new network incentives aimed at lowering interchange are pushed out as soon as they are certified.

For Jones, the philosophy is simple: If merchants can see exactly what each feature costs and how it boosts revenue or reduces fraud chargebacks, they are more likely to stick around.

The Developer Angle

Developers get a similar concierge treatment. A would-be integrator can spin up a free demo account on North.com using nothing more than an email address, experiment with APIs and — once underwriting is cleared — have the test credentials automatically convert to live keys.

The developer portal mirrors every self-service merchant flow, Jones said, and the product team is “actively looking at adding low-code options” that marry large-language-model chat interfaces with North’s documentation. Ask the bot how to board a niche industry merchant or reduce Visa interchange, and it will spit back code snippets with the correct parameters.

All the capabilities would mean little if transactions were siphoned off by fraud. Jones describes a multilayer defense that begins at application review and extends through real-time transaction scoring. Hundreds of millions of historical transactions feed proprietary models; artificial intelligence (AI) layers now filter out false positives, freeing analysts to focus on the genuinely suspicious.

“With the AI models on top of what we had previously done, we’re eliminating some of that wasted work,” she said. Merchants rarely notice the scrutiny, she added, “but they’re getting all those benefits of North’s internal teams covering for them.”

North’s ambition to be more than a processor comes at a time when software-led acquirers such as Stripe, Adyen and FIS are pressing deeper into value-added services, and when banks, under pressure to diversify fee income, are reevaluating their own merchant strategies. Jones believes the Detroit-area company can carve out share precisely because of its unusual evolution — from ISO, to processor, to platform that can be white-labeled by independent software vendors or wholesale ISOs looking for “more skin in the game.”

“We got really good at onboarding merchants, and we gained a deep understanding of what the processors in the market at the time — their strengths and weaknesses,” she said, recalling North’s years as an ISO. The acquisition of EPX, she added, let the firm fix shortcomings it once had to navigate.

Today, “Those learnings allow us to optimize our processes for the underwriting, risk, compliance [and] service areas,” and to open the stack to partners that want control without rebuilding everything themselves.

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As the payments landscape fractures into specialized verticals — embedded finance for software vendors, buy now, pay later at checkout, instant payouts for gig workers — North is betting that a processor with the flexibility of a platform will resonate.

“For that payments company that wants to access a processor but wants more control of the experience, we’re ready to work with them,” Jones said.

After three decades in the payments processing sector, North wants to elevate and expand its services and reach, with the rebrand as a starting point. Jones sees the rebrand as a statement of intent: “Now we’ve processed hundreds of millions of transactions for merchants across all industries,” she said. “We’re looking at how we can open this up to even more distribution channels that might be looking for the right processor to work with.”