Add Payment Services to Your Document Production Workflow

Print and mail service providers are intimately familiar with all the steps necessary to collect data from their clients, create bills and invoices, and distribute them to bill payers. They know which payers prefer to receive their bills on paper and which want them delivered electronically. These mailing professionals are up to speed on postage rates and mailing requirements, and they’ve got near-flawless bill production down to a fine art. Outsource service companies routinely handle applications like bills for water, electricity, gas, tolls, fees, and more.

 But there’s an area where service providers could benefit from a little more knowledge and it’s a component of every billing application–payment processing. To many print/mail professionals, bill payments seem risky. They are hesitant to get involved in a process that involves the transfer of funds. It seems too different from document production, so they leave the payment function to someone else.

A Missed Opportunity

But neglecting to handle bill payments is a missed opportunity to give clients what they want–a single source for their billing process. Your clients see bill generation and bill payment as two parts of the same activity. If given the chance, they’d prefer to keep it all under one roof. An integrated payment capability makes your print and mail operation more valuable to your clients and distinguishes your company from the competition.

The reasons print/mail companies hesitate to add payment services are easy to understand. Start doing research about becoming a payment service provider and you’ll face lots of new terms, concepts, and acronyms. Online information about credit card payments may include discussions about regulatory compliance, certifications, partnerships with banks, merchant accounts, returns processing, data encryption, and other items with which you and your staff have no experience. The payment processing companies seem to speak an entirely different language and they know nothing of the print/mail business.

After attempting to learn about payment services, many print/mail companies find it too complicated and decide not to pursue the idea. It’s just too overwhelming.

Designed for Print/Mail Service Providers

Fortunately, Racami has an answer. We DO understand the print/mail business, and we’ve built a full-featured payment processing solution called Alchem-e™ Pay, especially for companies that already create bills and invoices. Alchem-e™ Pay allows print/mail service providers to add payment processing to their workflow without requiring them to become payment experts or spend months putting the pieces together.

 Alchem-e™ Pay handles all the backend work, using a safe, established payment process used by thousands of companies. You won’t have to worry about things like PCI compliance, credit card processing, or security–that’s already built in. Operationally, Alchem-e™ Pay looks like just another printer to existing production systems. Just “print” to Alchem-e™ Pay and the secure cloud platform does the rest.

Alchem-e™ Pay comes with all the functionality you would expect:

• Stores bills and links them to customer accounts
• Handles customer notification and preferences
• Accepts any print stream format
• Honors print suppression for individual customers who prefer paperless billing
• Provides client-branded landing pages for customers to pay their bills
• Supports any number of billers, keeping all data separate

Easy Integration

Alchem-e™ Pay implementation is simple. Most service providers finish the guided onboarding checklist within a week. Getting started with Alchem-e™ Pay is easy for your clients as well. Billers merely provide a button on their website linked to a biller-branded payment webpage that comes with the Alchem-e™ Pay service.

 As you introduce payment processing to your customers, Racami representatives will even attend meetings with your clients. We’ll join your meeting to answer questions or explain the benefits of the payment processing system.

Because Alchem-e™ Pay is a cloud-based solution, you won’t have to buy new servers or hire programmers to maintain the software. Alchem-e™ Pay payment processing is a standalone solution and requires no other Racami products. The monthly fee is less than you might expect. We even include revenue-sharing, allowing you to charge a small fee to process each of the client payments. Alchem-e™ Pay can be a new revenue stream for your company.

If your company is handling bill printing and distribution, but not talking to clients about payment processing because bill payment seems too difficult or risky, ask us to show you Alchem-e™ Pay. You’ll be surprised at how easy it can be to add value to the services you are already providing your clients.