ORCA challenges developers to compare PayPal X, Amazon Flexible Payments, and Google Checkout in a side-by-side comparison
The summer of 2009 was an epic period in the life of ORCA. After nearly nine months of development, we finally unveiled the world’s first global, open payment platform. The public announcement, and our partnership with the API management company, Mashery, followed on August 4th. Today, ORCA is ready and available to any developer in any country to use its APIs and experience an entirely new form of payment platform.
Our APIs allow developers to offer consumers the ability to create accounts and pay directly within applications using the same brand.
Unlike existing payment providers, we don’t seek to build our own brand with consumers. Our philosophy is simple: digital media companies that sell goods and services should have their own branded form of payment. Period. We have architected an open development platform that aims to answer the problem of disjointed purchasing and real-to-virtual currency conversion issues. We have built a service that is entirely for you the developer to design, own, and manage. We give 100% control to companies over the “look & feel” of ORCA when it is experienced within their site.
ORCA was inspired by some of the most successful and popular features of payment platforms like Amazon, Apple iTunes, PayPal, Facebook, and Google Checkout. We took these ideas and disposed of the flaws, reinterpreting and molding them into a sleeker, fresher architecture written in JPOS, the most widely deployed open-source language for financial transactions which is currently used by First Data, Chase, Blackhawk, and dozens of other financial services companies for payment applications. The result is elegance, flexibility and reliability.
We know that we are solving a real problem that many digital media companies may not have been aware of, but that has been hurting them financially. We also know that we are pursuing an opportunity of grand proportions, with the transformative power of micro-blogs, search advertising, online video, e-mail, and other web innovations before it.
Using offers and surveys as a primary approach for monetization has lost its universal appeal. Asking an offer company to manage your online payments is like asking a telemarketing company to manage your phone bill, or asking a direct mail company to manage your advertising budget. ORCA ends this practice.
ORCA also helps digital media companies exploit the largest opportunity for revenue growth they have — using their own brand for payments. Websites must encourage visitors to create payment accounts with them directly, thus increasing conversion to transaction through a streamlined checkout flow, devoid of interference with a spotlight-eager payments provider. Apple and Amazon figured this out a while ago, and now Facebook realizes it, too. We are the platform for everyone else — eliminating the need for expensive or customized build-outs. We help digital media brands create a direct dialog with subscribers in every critical part of the value chain, and especially in payments.
InComm, the pre-paid card pioneer, already paved the way with branded cards for iTunes, Xbox, T-Mobile, NeoPets, Nexon, and other digital goods and services. We know digital media companies with high brand recognition want an online payments offering that mirrors InComm in its devotion to its brands. Since we are using the same open source language, we have also built APIs with some of the robust capabilities First Data offers in the plastic card world, like loyalty programs and outbound communications of account status and activity.
We invite any development team, big or small, to put ORCA up against the largest payments platforms and draw their own conclusions. ORCA will emerge worthy of serious attention in providing a focused solution for the needs of digital media companies.
When your Pals run out of answers, ORCA is there.
Contact us today at info@orcaone.com.
