PaySimple handles both ACH and credit cards—with a focus on customer service.

by Jeff Goldman [January 24, 2007]

PaySimple was spun off in late 2005 from parent company Conclave Group, which provides media services to apartment buildings. According to Jeff Gardner, PaySimple's president, Conclave's building owner clients said their biggest headaches consistently came from collecting rent—and so Conclave created PaySimple.

PaySimple's aim is to make payment processing as, well, simple as possible. Its original target was apartment buildings, but Gardner says the company's focus quickly expanded. "There's a whole host of verticals—everything from parking companies to daycare companies to utility companies, private schools, you name it," he says.

PaySimple 1518 Blake St. Denver, CO 80202 Web contact form

The company's key differentiator, Gardner says, is the fact that it covers both common payment types. "We allow you access to credit card processing and ACH processing, which is the check world, through a single web interface," he says. "Those two financial worlds have been completely separate until now—we've pulled them through a single payment gateway."

The service also includes an online customer interface. "It's fully embedded in the system, and it can be customized to your own look and feel in a very short time period," Gardner says. "If you have familiarity with HTML, you can have a full-blown payment collection form on your website within a half an hour."

Recurring billing, Gardner says, is another key strength. Prior to joining PaySimple, Gardner was a vice president at Avaya, where he ran the company's maintenance operations, billing 500,000 maintenance customers on a monthly or quarterly basis—which, he says, would be a perfect fit for PaySimple. "If you have customers that pay the same amount every month, you can just set it and forget it," he says.

Integration and reporting
To integrate with the client's software, like a billing or CRM solution, PaySimple uses a SOAP/XML interface. Gardner says there's been enough demand for software integration that he's hired a full time employee whose sole responsibility is to help clients integrate PaySimple with their legacy applications. "We've done four integrations in the last week for companies like that," he says.

At the same time, Gardner says, a simple batch upload can also do the job. "You take an export out of whatever billing system you have and you upload it to the payment system," he says. "Once you have it set up—which takes probably about five minutes of mapping fields—after that, it's literally a push of a button: it transacts the payments and gives you a returned file with all the authorizations."

The system offers 12 standard reports, but custom reporting is also available. "You just click on the 'custom reporting' button, and we can grab any field that you want and design any report from a custom standpoint that you would like," Gardner says. "It's literally a matter of a few minutes to put any report together."

With its fee structure, Gardner says, PaySimple does strive to be a low-cost provider—but he says that's not a key priority. "I can't think of a time when a customer called in and said, 'What are your rates?'" he says. "That's not the first question they ask—the first question is, 'I'm trying to transact, I want to do ACH and credit cards, and I don't know the first thing about it: can you help me solve my problem?'"

Service and support
The point, Gardner says, is that while price is important, service is what really makes a difference. "We're trying to help our customers—we provide them with advice on when to use ACH transactions versus credit cards—we're very high touch," he says. "Our focus is to give our customers as much hand-holding around the front end of the process as we possibly can."

The fact that PaySimple covers both ACH and credit cards, Gardner says, helps greatly in that regard. "People who are trying to do it on their own, they have to go to a credit card provider, fill out all the information, get approved, then they go to the ACH provider and they get approved, go through that process, and then they find a web shopping cart, or they hire a consultant to develop some kind of web interface for them," he says. "What we done is we've put it all together and made it really simple."

When a potential customer calls PaySimple to find out more about the offering, Gardner says, they're first walked through a demo online. If they choose to sign up, they're taken carefully through the setup process. "Then we follow up on day seven," he says. "We walk them through the transactions they've run, see if they have any questions, and make sure they realize all the benefits they have from a reporting standpoint—then we give them another follow-up 30 days in, to make sure they're comfortable with the system."

In most cases, Gardner says, customers are pretty self-sufficient after that. "For the first 30 days, we're very intimate with them, and then after that, we're there to support them," he says. "And we don't charge for any support—our call center's open, and we're there to support our customers."

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