One interface, all the freedom.

What sets Datatrans apart from other payment service providers: The Swiss payment expert stays out of the money flow, focusing purely on the technical aspects of the payment processing. As a result, Datatrans is independent of financial service providers and completely impartial in its advice. Datatrans customers come out as winners since they can select the most profitable payment methods for their business and switch card acquirers at any time to help optimise their processes and fees.

The interface makes the difference: Online merchants require only one integration to connect to all of their financial partners. The Datatrans API is robust and adapts at the same time smoothly to new developments, such as PSD2 and 3-D Secure.

Datatrans develops most of the updates itself, leaving very little maintenance effort for customers to take care of. In addition, the availability of the system is exceptionally high: «Despite weekly software release updates and technical migrations, our API availability in the past 12 months was 99.9996%. Very few other payment providers can match this,» explains Datatrans Senior Product Manager Simon Schweri.

New JSON API – simple, secure, versatile

For customers seeking to upgrade their payment processes or grow their webshop, it is now worth switching to the newly developed JSON API «The new interface is extremely simple to integrate and offers even more options, especially from a security perspective,» says Roman Seeli, Datatrans Payment Solution Architect.

With the JSON API, the name, address, merchant account and payment method details are transmitted to Datatrans via a secure server-to-server request before every transaction. The requests are protected with basic authentication by default. Once all of the customer data has been transmitted, Datatrans returns a transaction ID to the web merchant, which can be used for all subsequent steps in processing the payment. This increases security and reduces the volume of data to be transferred via the web browser between the merchant and payment provider.

Another advantage is that apart from the minimum details needed, such as credit card data, transaction amount and currency, additional information such as delivery address or e-mail  can be transmitted via server-to-server connection.  This supplementary data makes it easier for the issuer to perform the risk analysis for the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) pursuant to PSD2. In other words, online merchants improve their chances for a frictionless payment flow and secure a better conversion rate.
The bottom line: customers enjoy smooth usability when shopping online, and merchants benefit from increased security thanks to the liability shift, with the issuer assuming full liability for fraud.

The Swiss Federal Railways SBB has already been using the new API for several months. «As developers, with the JSON API we appreciate the simplicity of the integration and the well-documented interfaces. The new payment flow offers us additional flexibility and guarantees even more security during the transaction processing,» confirms Nico Hartmann, Software Engineer at SBB «Moreover, the Datatrans experts always addressed the needs of SBB during the integration and developed for us custom-fit checkout processes.»

By the way… as part of the new JSON API, Datatrans is also working on revised Mobile SDKs (for iOS and Android), including a new user interface for the entire payment process. Further information can be found here.

New token format with extra functions

In addition to the interface update, Datatrans has introduced a new token format that is compatible with both the existing XML API and the new JSON API. Datatrans customers face no additional integration effort. Merchants simply receive the new tokens in place of the existing ones. This means they will automatically benefit from all of the advantages: The new format improves security, simplifies GDPR compliance (the ›right to be forgotten‹), improves traceability of follow-up transactions, supports Visa and Mastercard’s network tokenization and enables future functionality such as sharing tokens across merchants.

 

Please find all information on the integration of the new API here and on the Postman Collection to test it here.