Gr4vy And Spreedly Launch New Vaults As Merchants Contend With Payments Complexity

Two major practitioners of the art of payments orchestration have announced cloud-based payments vaults within hours of each other. Both new services, from Spreedly Inc. and Gr4vy Inc., promise sophisticated management of a wide range of payments data in a bid for more efficient transaction routing and settlement on behalf of the merchants that use orchestration services.

Gr4vy’s vault, announced late Monday and aimed at merchants, offers to tokenize, store, and update card data, but the company says it can also store and update tokens for alternative payment methods as well as tokens generated by payment processors. This feature, according to John Lunn, the company’s founder and chief executive, can ease data portability at a time when payments data have become increasingly complex.

“Not all payment providers support easy card and payment data portability,” Lunn says in a statement. “Merchants need a ready-made vault to support network tokens for payment processing and to keep card data secure.” Tokens are used to mask actual card information that could lead to fraud if stolen in the clear by cyberthieves.

The vault operates on Google Inc.’s Cloud Platform and offers merchants the flexibility to change or add payment-service providers, according to San Mateo, Calif.-based Gr4vy. Lunn says the company is offering the vault as a standalone product or as a service integrated with its payments-orchestration platform.

Gr4vy’s announcement was followed early Tuesday by Durham, N.C.-based Spreedly’s introduction of a “new, advanced” vault building on its existing service. As with Gr4vy, Spreedly’s Advanced vault offers support for network tokens.

The new service, says Justin Benson, Spreedly’s chief executive, is aimed at controlling costs for merchants faced with managing a wide array of payment methods. “It was clear that many of our current customers were incurring increased costs with their payment-method retention strategies. The set of tools available, while valuable, required payment teams to create and manage the entire optimization process themselves,” Benson says in a statement.

The Advanced vault service offers to keep card details current and to add details to card data as they become available, including payment-account reference data, according to the information released by Spreedly, which says it handles $45 billion annually in payment volume.

Payments orchestration has grown rapidly in importance over the past few years as merchants of all sizes have expanded their reach to markets around the world. That has increased payments complexity for sellers as they must deal with an increasing array of currencies and a widening variety of payment methods and tokens. That, in turn, has created a growing market for technology platforms that offer to manage this complexity on merchants’ behalf.