How architecture firms can accept secure online payments

Key quotes:

• "With so many constant changes and updates to technology, architects and architectural firms are facing some of the biggest challenges among many industries today."
• "Whether it’s design work, project management, accounting, communications, proposal tracking, or updating applications, Monroy IT wants to help you set up your business and team for success."
• "So why do some architectural practices hesitate or fight new tech when it is beneficial to their business? Learning new skills and functions, while beneficial to your architectural practice, also takes up much valued time."
• "Yet taking that extra time to teach your employees new architectural technology will not only help your firm work more efficiently down the line, but also streamline processes and make happier clients."
• "If your architectural practice is already up to date with technology, you’ll know how beneficial and easy it now is to collaborate and have real time design edits for projects."
• "No longer a thing of science fiction, people are taking the leap into a virtual world and finding new ways to use it every day."

Key quotes:

• "In order to support cash-based payment, we ended up introducing a new payment method in the form of Boletos."
• "Introducing Boletos to our platform not only presented us with an opportunity to support new users in Brazil, but also allowed us to develop a general-purpose pattern for asynchronous payments and booking which is now leveraged to enable new payment methods in many other countries."
• "Downstream, we had to reverse-engineer these audit entries to infer what happened in the production system and use elaborate SQL queries to process this data and generate the various financial reports that we needed."
• "Our new billing interface solves for all of these issues by taking each Airbnb product and treating each item (reservation nights, fees, taxes, etc) as discrete items."
• "This new billing interface allows us to easily create, edit, and remove products on the Airbnb platform."
• "By using this unified API, it allows us to reuse payment models as we add new local payment and payout methods around the world."

Key quotes:

• "Adyen is a payment gateway, service provider, acquirer, and processor for online and brick-and-mortar commerce."
• "Adyen requires only one system, one process integration, and one contract for a multinational enterprise to serve customers in 150+ countries and to accept 200+ methods of payment."
• "Adyen has plenty of room to grow, as growth of 1% in Adyen’s market share will lead to an additional US$1.6 billion dollars of revenue."
• "Merchants have access to centralized consumer data and are able to manage all payments across channels and countries with one integration, one backend, and one contract."
• "Also, Adyen has a fully built in-house risk management system, meaning merchants can outsource all their security and regulatory compliance issues."
• "By integrating gateway, risk management and processing & acquiring processes all into one platform, Adyen presents these key benefits: global reach, unified commerce and centralized data."

Key quotes:

• "For architects who aspire to address humanitarian issues, this often means partnering up with external funding organizations or, increasingly, working for multinational businesses keen to emphasize corporate social responsibility by setting up philanthropic foundations and associations."
• "“Meetings can be held over Skype to share ideas and contribute to projects, with Internet increasingly accessible even in very poor areas today — due to projects like Google’s Project Loon, internet.org and Buffalo Grid, this provides the potential for distributing self-build architectural plans tailored towards different environments.” Critics of large corporations engaging in humanitarian work — whether directly or through establishing foundations — are concerned philanthropy is being used to deter focus away from the less marketable aspects of corporate enterprise."
• "Other than volunteering abroad for a nonprofit organization, working pro-bono part-time is the second main business structure architects are adopting to enable them to practice within this field without taking long breaks from the office."