Interview: How Brite is Redefining Merchant Integrations and Transforming Payments in 2025
In the rapidly changing world of payments, 2025 is poised to present new challenges and opportunities, especially in merchant integrations. As businesses strive for smoother and faster payments, the industry is shifting towards payment solutions that reduce complexity, lower operational costs, and enhance support.
We spoke with Manfred Schulz, Head of Merchant Solutions at Brite, who shares his insights on how Brite is shaping the future of merchant support. Plus, how instant Account-to-Account (A2A) payments provide a better, more affordable payment experience for both merchants and consumers.
In this interview, Manfred discusses common challenges faced by merchants, the significance of a collaborative integration process, and how Brite’s hands-on approach is tailored to meet the evolving needs of European merchants. He also highlights the distinct advantages of branded “Pay by Bank” solutions, which not only foster consumer trust but also enable merchants to achieve faster and more cost-effective payment operations.
Read on to discover what lies ahead for payment integrations and why they are essential for a successful merchant strategy in 2025.
What are common problems in merchant integrations across the payments industry?
Manfred Schulz, Head of Merchant Solutions: Right now, everything has to be fast; nobody has time and development resources are limited. Merchants want to go live quickly with the least effort possible. Yet, I think the biggest issue is that, in many cases, their payment partners leave them alone, and they have to figure out complex integration processes on their own – that’s an issue.
This leads to many merchants hesitating to add new payment methods because they fear the effort required to add a new payment solution. And it’s not just IT resources or effort from a technical perspective; they must also educate their customer service and operations team and align with their finance team for reconciliation purposes.
It’s a really big deal.
If you’re left to figure all this out alone, it becomes a huge, complicated task, especially since you’re not the expert. As a merchant, you need someone to guide you through the process to make it easier.
What does Brite do differently? How does it work with merchants?
Manfred Schulz: First, we have a great company culture here at Brite. This is key. If you have a great culture and people, you also establish great processes and products. That’s at the core of what we do.
What we also do differently is that the whole merchant journey is taken care of end-to-end. We established excellent processes to ensure seamless handovers between different departments within Brite. Initially, our dedicated commercial team guides the merchant through our offering and the sales process. Then they go to the Merchant Solutions team, which helps them with onboarding, integration, testing, and finally, the go-live before our Merchant Support team takes care of our merchants. All these teams work very closely together. We know what each other is doing and complement each other’s work.
Specifically within my team, I have experienced people passionate about merchants – who genuinely love what they do. They want to help merchants; it’s not just a task. It’s not simply taking a merchant, doing something, and then handing them over. We are genuinely invested in helping merchants achieve the best possible conversion.
If you have this mindset—which I think is also closely tied to our company culture—you treat this like your own project. You want to make it better; you don’t just do a standard job. You go the extra mile by understanding, helping, and monitoring the merchant and guiding them through the whole process.
Naturally, merchants have many questions when they add a new payment method to their system. That’s why they get a dedicated person from my team who is responsible for them, familiarises themselves with their system, understands their customers, and knows their product/offering.
How can payment providers ensure they deliver adequate support to merchants?
Manfred Schulz: The best companies I’ve seen have excellent processes and maintain high standards by tracking satisfaction with those processes.
Whenever we complete an onboarding and a merchant goes live, my team sends a survey to the merchant. We also try to get feedback on what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what we could improve. We try to learn from that.
What points might we be losing time at? Is it something we can fix internally? Do we lack the right documentation? Should we improve it? That’s definitely something we focus on. I think we could do even more in this area.
How do you think support in the payments industry needs to evolve to meet merchant needs in 2025 ?
Manfred Schulz: AI is the buzzword when you look at other companies (and they will remain nameless). So yes, it has to involve AI in some capacity. And for specific elements, I’d argue it makes sense. It’s good to use AI. But I’m still a big fan of having a personal relationship with the merchant because I feel – and this is also based on my experience – that the most successful collaborations happen when you have a good relationship.
Direct reassurance and trust are essential – especially when things don’t work as they should. In that way, I’m not the biggest fan of making everything AI-driven. Even though, in the end, we’re just moving money from A to B, the human element and company culture are incredibly important and shouldn’t be forgotten.
Relationships with merchants are important, and trust goes hand in hand. Never promise something you cannot deliver on, and always be honest. That’s something Brite will continue doing in 2025 (and beyond).
Given the rise of Pay by Bank, how is Brite assisting merchants in educating consumers and merchants about the benefits of using Instant A2A payments?
Manfred Schulz: Education and promotion are key. We work closely with our merchants to promote the payment method actively. Many customers are familiar with it, but it’s still relatively new in some markets, and as with all new or unknown payment methods – people are hesitant to use it initially, so they may need an incentive from the merchant to use it. Indeed, merchants can play a key role in educating their customers too. Yet, often, merchants don’t know how to present or promote it or even fully understand the benefits of this payment method for themselves or their customers.
That’s why we’re here to help.
We do our best to help merchants showcase the unique selling points (USPs) for their customers, and likewise, we point out the USPs for merchants. For customers, it’s a safe, secure, and fast payment method – and that’s what customers want.
Now, you could argue that other payment options are also safe, secure, and fast. However, an account-to-account payment method is even more affordable from the merchant’s point of view as it offers quick settlement on the merchant’s bank account, which helps with cash flow.
What’s more, wallets or buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) payment solutions are expensive for merchants. Credit cards are also costly and complex from a payment fee perspective. An A2A payment method, however, is super affordable for merchants and allows customers to make high-ticket payments.
Another important aspect is consideration for the time spent educating internal teams on how a payment method works and its impact on operational departments, logistics, and other areas.
From years of experience, I know how complex integrating a BNPL payment method is. The payment itself at checkout is the easy part – when it comes to logistics, refunds, support and so on, that’s where the complexity arises. If you spend a lot of time and money acquiring new customers only to lose them due to a poor refund process, it harms the customer journey and results in a significant loss. An A2A method is much easier to implement and to maintain.
Of course, the beauty of an A2A payment method is that refunds are also instant, unlike other payment methods, which can take up to 14 days. An instant refund in-store, for instance, increases customer satisfaction and can generate revenue for the merchant because the customer can spend the refunded amount immediately in the store. For fashion retailers, the lowest customer NPS score is typically connected to cumbersome refund processes, which can be significantly improved using an A2A payment method such as Brite.
What are the advantages of using a branded Pay by Bank or instant A2A payment method like Brite over something unbranded and white-labelled?
Manfred Schulz: In my view a branded solution brings more benefits for both merchants and customers.
The benefits of a branded payment method are twofold.
First, whenever a customer uses Brite in one shop, we can remember them. So, if they shop at another store offering Brite, they’ll enter our returning flow automatically, providing a faster experience than a white-label solution can provide. A white-label solution can’t offer this cross-merchant experience at all because customers will feel uneasy, wondering why their bank account information is saved in a store they’ve never shopped at, which would be a big security concern. With a branded payment method, customers recognise they’ve used it before, and if they enjoyed the smooth experience, they are more likely to continue using it. This creates a positive ripple effect also for the merchant because with that he saves money.
Another advantage of a branded payment method is that we can add additional value-added services for consumers in the future. These can only be provided with a branded payment method, not with a white-label option.
Why is building trust crucial for a branded method like Brite?
Manfred Schulz: Trust is one of the key elements that end customers look for in a payment method. They need to trust it. And as I mentioned before, the user experience has to be superb. If something breaks along the payment journey, trust can be lost. That’s why we focus on putting our brand logo there, as it ensures we provide the best customer experience. And if customers consistently have a great experience, they’ll trust the brand and continue using it, as they know it’s reliable across all their shopping destinations.
This, in turn, benefits merchants as well. They won’t lose customers due to a broken or unreliable payment process, which they don’t control; they can rely on us as their payment provider to take care of their customers in the best possible way.
Our teams work hard to provide the best end-customer experience and the best experience for merchants. My team, for example, constantly seeks the best ways to integrate our payment method into the merchant’s checkout.
Some providers don’t prioritise this; they’re satisfied as long as their payment method is there and transactions are processed. For us, that’s not enough. We strive for a super-smooth customer experience because we know every additional step, every checkbox, every confusing sentence in the process can be a conversion killer.
We aim to ensure that merchant integration is straightforward and guide merchants through it. At the same time, Brite focuses on making the customer flow as smooth as possible.
As more consumers opt for Pay by Bank, how will this impact e-commerce and online retail in 2025?
Manfred Schulz: The sky is the limit!
Open banking, Pay by Bank, it’s a global trend, from Sweden and Germany to markets like India and Brazil. Everywhere, the focus is on instant payments. There’s a lot of momentum right now.
What’s more, we see that merchants are becoming more cost-conscious on the one hand, but of course, on the other, they want to offer the best-converting payment methods to their customers to generate revenues. Customers want a safe, secure experience – they want to transfer money instantly, and they want control. I remember logging into the internet with a 56k modem; that took time. But today’s generation doesn’t have that patience – they want everything instantly, and that’s why I believe Pay by Bank will gain a share of the checkout.
It may not replace credit cards entirely, but it will definitely reduce the share of credit cards and perhaps even wallets and buy-now-pay-later solutions. From a customer perspective, especially Gen Z, there’s a shift toward more sustainable options. They don’t want to take on credit, and we’re seeing this in the US, where credit card usage is declining while debit card usage is rising.
Customers are becoming more aware that they don’t want credit because of high interest rates. This is why account-to-account payment methods, which involve no credit and provide instant payments, will likely grow significantly over the coming years.
Also, the Instant Payment Regulation (IPR) will come into force in 2025, requiring banks to offer instant payments. Any merchant investing in this now will benefit in the future.
Should merchants consider operational costs when choosing an A2A provider over cards or digital wallets in 2025?
Manfred Schulz: I would say yes.
And that’s sometimes a challenge because payment managers usually only see the payment costs; they don’t look at the big picture in terms of which other costs increase based on a specific payment method. That’s at least my finding when working with many payment companies and merchants over the past years.
Payment isn’t just about fees or what happens at checkout—it’s a complete journey that starts when the customer lands on the website and can end with a refund. It’s a long process, and that should be considered. If a payment method significantly increases your refund rates or touchpoints in your customer service or if your cash flow changes due to it, then you should take those parts into account as well. That’s why I think looking at payments from a holistic perspective is essential.
Of course, payment fees are significant, but there’s also potential for cost savings if you have a streamlined process and guidance along the journey, so you don’t have to figure out everything yourself. Crucial aspects also are reconciliation, settlement and payout. If you compare Brite to other providers, many of them only handle payment initiation, meaning each transaction is sent to your bank account individually, and you have to reconcile every transaction. With Brite, we collect everything, and you get one fast payout and one file for reconciliation without needing to handle thousands of transactions individually. Based on my experience, this is a significant issue for many large retailers. Bundling these payments and guiding merchants on reconciling them quickly is a huge USP for us.
Want to find out how easy it is to add Brite Payments to your payment mix?
As we look beyond 2025, the landscape of payment integrations will evolve significantly, presenting challenges and exciting opportunities for merchants and providers such as Brite.
Not only that, but the speed of change underscores the importance of a collaborative and adaptive approach to merchant integrations and highlights the value of instant Account-to-Account (A2A) payments and branded Pay by Bank solutions.
Understanding these trends will be crucial for businesses aiming to thrive in the fast-paced world of new and growing payments. If you want to learn more about Brite’s different payment products, please get in touch.
