How third-party tokenization helped improve affordability, flexibility, and redundancy for a point-of-sale leasing technology
Acima Credit is a point-of-sale leasing technology that offers consumers a modern alternative to traditional financing. Accessible via an online portal, Acima already had reduced its PCI compliance scope by deploying iFrames to capture sensitive payment data at the point of entry, but its hands were tied with a single processor relationship that limited Acima’s redundancy and flexibility.
If its processor ever went down—and it did—Acima would be unable to accept payments until the processor came back online. To make matters worse, if Acima ever wanted to add or switch processors, it would be charged an exorbitant fee to export its tokens.
"We had a partner that wanted to charge us over one hundred thousand dollars to move our cards to a different processor," Acima Credit VP of Engineering Ryan Christensen said. "That’s when we realized we needed to remove the handcuffs and find a partner who would allow us to vault independently and provide the ability for us to onboard new card processors instantaneously."
By leveraging TokenEx as a proxy through which Acima could tokenize with any processor it so chose, Acima addressed its issues surrounding flexibility, affordability, and redundancy. After integrating with TokenEx’s third-party tokenization platform, Acima began directing all transactions to TokenEx, enabling the fintech organization to migrate without paying its previous processor for token retrieval.
Acima leveraged the TokenEx platform to save tens of thousands of dollars per year via its new ability to negotiate with multiple PSPs.
TokenEx was the first solution I found that solved our problem, and my research did not lead me much past them. We weren't able to find a lot of providers on the same level.
Now, whenever Acima needs to add a new processor to its payments stream, it can quickly and easily redirect its tokens from TokenEx without paying to retrieve them or needing to create new ones.
"Solving that problem solves our price problem and our redundancy problem," Christensen said. "It made our decision easy."
As a result, Acima became capable of instantly transitioning 100 percent of its transaction volume to new processors. Additionally, by implementing Account Updater to enable seamless recurring payments, it eliminated processing failures due to card expiration, theft, or loss.
"Being able to negotiate price at our volume is tremendously beneficial," Christensen said. "That is a huge win for us to make sure that we’re consistently getting the best price possible and the best service for that price."
