Build Your Own Payment Gateway: Stop Renting, Start Owning.
Escape high fees and rigid platforms. We build custom, AI-enabled payment solutions that reduce your PCI scope and give you total control over your revenue.
Get a Custom Gateway BlueprintTrusted by innovative startups and Fortune 500 companies
Is a Custom Gateway Right for You?
You're paying thousands, maybe millions, in transaction fees to platforms that dictate your user experience and limit your business model. What if you could own the entire stack? We help you build a custom payment gateway that cuts costs, simplifies PCI compliance through advanced tokenization, and provides granular control over routing, reconciliation, and reporting. It's not just about processing payments; it's about owning your financial infrastructure.
Explore Our ServicesConsider a Custom Gateway If You:
- Face high transaction volumes where small fee percentages become significant costs.
- Need complex logic for transaction routing, split payments, or marketplace payouts.
- Want to control the entire user checkout experience to maximize conversion.
- Are expanding globally and need to manage multiple currencies and local payment methods efficiently.
- Want to drastically reduce your PCI DSS compliance scope and associated costs.
- Require a level of reporting and reconciliation that off-the-shelf solutions can't provide.
Our Custom Payment Gateway Development Services
We provide end-to-end services to design, build, and maintain a high-performance payment gateway tailored to your exact business needs. Our AI-enabled approach accelerates development and enhances security, giving you a competitive edge.
Core Gateway Architecture & Development
We build the secure, scalable, and resilient foundation for your payment operations. Our microservices-based architecture ensures high availability and makes future enhancements seamless, so your gateway evolves with your business without costly rebuilds.
- Build a high-throughput system capable of handling millions of transactions.
- Ensure 99.99% uptime with redundant, fault-tolerant infrastructure.
- Create a modular design that allows for easy addition of new features or payment methods.
PCI-Compliant Tokenization & Vaulting
Our primary goal is to minimize your PCI DSS compliance burden. We create a secure vault that replaces sensitive card data with irreversible tokens, meaning cardholder information never touches your systems, dramatically reducing your compliance scope, cost, and risk.
- Reduce PCI scope to the simplest level (SAQ-A).
- Implement secure, proprietary tokenization for repeat and one-click purchases.
- Protect sensitive data with industry-leading encryption both at rest and in transit.
Intelligent & Dynamic Transaction Routing
Stop leaving money on the table with generic routing. We build smart routing engines that dynamically send transactions to the optimal acquirer based on custom rules like cost, currency, card type, or success rate, maximizing approval rates and minimizing interchange fees.
- Lower processing costs by automatically selecting the cheapest acquiring bank.
- Increase authorization rates by re-routing failed transactions through alternate acquirers.
- Optimize for latency and reliability based on real-time network performance.
Automated Reconciliation & Reporting
Eliminate manual, error-prone financial reconciliation. Our systems automatically match transactions, fees, and payouts against bank statements, providing your finance team with a real-time, accurate view of your cash flow and financial health through a comprehensive dashboard.
- Automate the matching of transaction data with settlement reports.
- Generate detailed reports on fees, chargebacks, and net revenue.
- Provide a single source of truth for your finance and operations teams.
Multi-Currency & Cross-Border Payments
Expand your business globally without the operational headaches. We build systems that handle multi-currency pricing, foreign exchange, and settlement seamlessly, integrating with local payment methods to provide a familiar and trusted checkout experience for your international customers.
- Process payments in 135+ currencies and settle in your preferred currency.
- Integrate with popular local payment methods (e.g., SEPA, iDEAL, Alipay).
- Manage complex cross-border compliance and FX requirements automatically.
Subscription & Recurring Billing Engines
Build the perfect billing logic for your SaaS or subscription business. We create flexible, powerful recurring billing systems that handle complex plans, prorations, add-ons, and automated dunning management to reduce involuntary churn and maximize customer lifetime value.
- Support tiered, usage-based, and freemium subscription models.
- Automate invoicing, prorations, and plan upgrades/downgrades.
- Implement intelligent dunning strategies to recover failed payments and reduce churn.
Marketplace & Split-Pay Solutions
Power your platform economy with a robust payment infrastructure. We design and build complex payment flows for marketplaces, including vendor onboarding (KYC), split payments, commission calculation, and automated payouts, ensuring all parties are paid accurately and on time.
- Onboard and verify sellers/vendors programmatically.
- Automatically split funds between multiple parties in a single transaction.
- Manage and schedule mass payouts to vendors across the globe.
AI-Powered Fraud Detection & Prevention
Go beyond static rules with a dynamic, self-learning fraud prevention system. Our AI models analyze hundreds of data points in real-time to identify and block fraudulent transactions before they occur, reducing chargebacks and protecting your revenue without frustrating legitimate customers.
- Utilize machine learning to score transactions for risk in real-time.
- Create dynamic rules that adapt to emerging fraud patterns.
- Reduce false positives, ensuring good customers are not blocked.
Third-Party Acquirer & Processor Integration
Avoid vendor lock-in and create a resilient payment network. We integrate your custom gateway with multiple acquiring banks and payment processors, giving you the flexibility to route transactions, negotiate better rates, and ensure business continuity if one provider goes down.
- Connect to any major acquiring bank or payment processor via their API.
- Build a multi-acquirer setup for redundancy and cost optimization.
- Abstract away processor complexities with a single, unified integration point.
Developer-Friendly APIs & SDKs
A great gateway needs a great developer experience. We create clean, well-documented APIs and comprehensive SDKs that make it incredibly simple for your development team to integrate payments into any application, reducing implementation time and effort.
- Design RESTful APIs with clear, consistent, and predictable structures.
- Provide comprehensive documentation, code samples, and testing sandboxes.
- Develop SDKs for popular languages (e.g., JavaScript, Python, PHP, Java).
Custom Checkout & Payment Form UI/UX
Your checkout flow is the most critical part of your conversion funnel. We design and build beautiful, intuitive, and high-converting payment experiences, from hosted payment pages to embedded forms, all optimized to reduce friction and maximize successful transactions.
- Design a seamless, mobile-first checkout experience.
- Build components that can be easily embedded into your existing website or app.
- A/B test different layouts and flows to optimize conversion rates.
Digital Wallet Integration (Apple Pay & Google Pay)
Offer the fast, secure, and convenient payment options your customers expect. We seamlessly integrate Apple Pay and Google Pay into your checkout process, allowing for one-tap payments that dramatically increase conversion rates, especially on mobile devices.
- Enable one-click payments to reduce cart abandonment.
- Enhance security through biometric authentication.
- Provide a modern, frictionless payment experience on web and mobile.
Chargeback Automation & Management
Fight chargebacks effectively and efficiently. We build automated systems that help you manage the entire dispute lifecycle, from initial alert to evidence submission, helping you win more disputes and recover revenue that would otherwise be lost.
- Automate the process of gathering and submitting dispute evidence.
- Integrate with chargeback alert services to prevent disputes before they happen.
- Track dispute status and win/loss rates through a centralized dashboard.
Data Analytics & Insights Dashboard
Turn your payment data into a strategic asset. We create powerful, user-friendly dashboards that provide deep insights into your transaction trends, authorization rates, customer behavior, and more, empowering you to make data-driven decisions to grow your business.
- Visualize key payment metrics like approval rates, fees, and customer lifetime value.
- Analyze trends by geography, payment method, or customer segment.
- Identify opportunities for cost savings and revenue growth.
Ongoing Maintenance & Security Audits
A payment gateway is a mission-critical system that requires constant vigilance. We offer ongoing support, maintenance, and security monitoring services to ensure your gateway remains secure, compliant, and operates at peak performance 24/7/365.
- Provide 24/7 monitoring and on-call incident response.
- Perform regular security audits and penetration testing.
- Keep the system updated to comply with evolving payment network rules and regulations.
Why CIS is the Right Partner for Your Payment Gateway
Building a payment gateway requires more than just code. It demands deep expertise in finance, security, and user experience. We bring a multi-disciplinary, AI-augmented approach to de-risk your project and ensure a successful outcome.
Drastic PCI Scope Reduction
Our architecture is designed from day one to minimize your compliance burden. By isolating sensitive data in a secure vault, we can reduce your PCI scope to the simplest, most manageable level, saving you time and money.
AI-Accelerated Development
We leverage AI-powered tools and pre-built, battle-tested modules for core gateway functions. This allows us to reduce development time by up to 40%, getting you to market faster and with a more robust and secure product.
Dedicated FinTech Experts
You're not hiring generalist developers. Our team consists of certified payment professionals, security engineers, and FinTech architects who live and breathe this domain. We understand the nuances of interchange, compliance, and risk.
Focus on Cost Optimization
Our goal is to build a gateway that pays for itself. We architect solutions with intelligent routing and transparent reporting to help you actively reduce transaction fees, fight chargebacks, and optimize your overall cost of acceptance.
Full IP & Code Ownership
Unlike using a third-party platform, the gateway we build is your asset. You receive full ownership of the intellectual property and the entire codebase, giving you ultimate control and flexibility for the future.
Scalable Microservices Architecture
We build for the future. Our gateways are based on a modern microservices architecture, ensuring your system can scale to handle massive transaction volumes and easily accommodate new features without requiring a complete overhaul.
End-to-End Partnership
We're with you for the entire journey, from initial strategy and architecture to development, deployment, and ongoing 24/7 support. We act as an extension of your team to ensure long-term success.
Proven Process & Maturity
With CMMI Level 5, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 certifications, our development processes are independently verified to meet the highest standards of quality, security, and reliability, giving you peace of mind.
24/7/365 Proactive Support
Payment processing never sleeps, and neither does our support. Our dedicated team provides round-the-clock monitoring and incident response to ensure your mission-critical infrastructure is always online and performing optimally.
Estimate Your Custom Gateway Development Cost
This interactive calculator provides a preliminary estimate based on common features. For a detailed, fixed-price quote, schedule a free consultation with our FinTech architects.
Estimated Project Cost Range
$75,000 - $95,000
Disclaimer: This is a ballpark estimate for planning purposes only. The actual cost depends on the specific complexity, integrations, and compliance requirements.
Get a Precise QuoteOur Proven Development Process
We follow a structured, transparent process that ensures your project is delivered on time, on budget, and perfectly aligned with your business objectives.
1. Discovery & Architecture Blueprint
We dive deep into your business model, technical requirements, and compliance needs. The output is a comprehensive architectural blueprint that serves as the master plan for your project, defining the scope, technology stack, and user flows.
2. Agile Development & Prototyping
Working in two-week sprints, our team builds the core components of the gateway. You get regular demos and can provide feedback continuously, ensuring the final product is exactly what you envisioned. We prioritize building the tokenization vault first to de-risk compliance.
3. Rigorous Security & QA Testing
Our dedicated QA and security teams test every aspect of the gateway. This includes performance testing to handle peak loads, penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities, and end-to-end transaction testing to ensure accuracy and reliability.
4. Deployment & Acquirer Integration
We manage the entire deployment process to your cloud environment (AWS, Azure, GCP). This phase includes the critical step of integrating and certifying with your chosen acquiring banks, ensuring a smooth go-live.
5. Go-Live & Hypercare Support
After a successful launch, we enter a hypercare period. Our team is on high alert, monitoring the system 24/7 to immediately address any issues and ensure a stable transition to live operations.
Custom Gateway vs. Off-the-Shelf (e.g., Stripe)
Understand the key differences to make an informed decision. While platforms like Stripe are excellent for getting started, a custom gateway provides unparalleled control and cost savings at scale.
| Feature | Custom Gateway (Built by CIS) | Off-the-Shelf Platform (e.g., Stripe) |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction Fees | Direct interchange++ pricing. Significant savings at scale. | Fixed percentage + flat fee. Costly for high-volume businesses. |
| PCI Compliance Scope | Drastically reduced to SAQ-A via custom tokenization. | Simplified, but you operate within their compliance framework. |
| Transaction Routing | Full control. Dynamic, multi-acquirer routing to optimize cost/success. | Limited or no control. Routing is a black box. |
| Customization & Features | Unlimited. Built precisely for your business model (e.g., complex marketplaces). | Limited to the platform's available features and APIs. |
| User Experience | Complete control over the entire checkout flow and branding. | Customizable within limits, but often constrained by the platform. |
| Data Ownership & Access | You own all your data with direct, unfettered access. | Data is accessible via API, but stored on their platform. |
| Initial Cost & Time | Higher upfront investment and longer time to market. | Low upfront cost and very fast to implement. |
| Best For | Scaling businesses, complex models, and companies seeking to optimize costs. | Startups, standard e-commerce, and businesses prioritizing speed to market. |
Success Stories in Payment Innovation
We don't just build gateways; we build strategic assets that drive growth. See how we've helped businesses like yours take control of their payment infrastructure.
Case Study: Reducing Churn for a B2B SaaS Platform
Industry: Software as a Service (SaaS)
Client Overview: A rapidly growing B2B SaaS company with over 10,000 subscribers. They were using a popular subscription management platform but struggled with high involuntary churn due to generic dunning logic and were losing a significant portion of their revenue to processing fees.
"CIS didn't just build us a payment system; they built us a retention engine. The control we have over our billing logic has been a game-changer for our LTV."
- Michael Harper, CFO, InnovateCo
Key Challenges:
- Over 5% monthly involuntary churn from failed recurring payments.
- Processing fees were consuming nearly 2.5% of their total revenue.
- Inability to offer flexible, region-specific pricing plans.
- Lack of detailed analytics into payment failure reasons.
Our Solution:
We developed a custom subscription billing engine integrated with a multi-acquirer payment gateway. The solution included:
- An AI-powered dunning management system that customized retry schedules based on the reason for failure.
- Intelligent transaction routing to send payments to the acquirer with the highest success rate for that specific card type and region.
- A flexible plan management module allowing for custom discounts and regional pricing.
- A detailed analytics dashboard to track churn, recovery rates, and processing costs in real-time.
Positive Outcomes:
- 15% Reduction in involuntary churn within 6 months.
- $200,000+ Annual Savings in processing fees.
- 90% Decrease in time spent on manual billing administration.
Case Study: Enabling Complex Payouts for an E-commerce Marketplace
Industry: E-commerce & Marketplaces
Client Overview: A niche marketplace connecting thousands of independent sellers with buyers. Their existing payment solution required extensive manual work to calculate commissions and process weekly payouts to sellers, creating delays and errors.
"The automated split-pay and payout system from CIS scaled our operations overnight. We went from a team of four spending days on reconciliation to one person managing the entire process in hours."
- Olivia Bishop, COO, CreatorHub
Key Challenges:
- Inability to automatically split payments between the platform and sellers.
- Manual, error-prone payout process taking over 40 man-hours per week.
- Difficulty onboarding international sellers due to complex KYC and payout requirements.
- Lack of a centralized dashboard for sellers to track their earnings and payouts.
Our Solution:
We architected a complete marketplace payment solution on top of a custom gateway. Key features included:
- Automated split-payment logic that instantly calculated and allocated commissions.
- An integrated mass-payout system to pay thousands of sellers simultaneously.
- A programmatic seller onboarding module with automated KYC checks.
- A dedicated seller dashboard for transparent earnings and payout tracking.
Positive Outcomes:
- 90% Reduction in manual reconciliation and payout efforts.
- Seller satisfaction increased by 40% due to faster, more reliable payments.
- Expanded to 15 new countries by automating international seller onboarding.
Case Study: Achieving PCI Compliance for a FinTech App
Industry: Financial Technology (FinTech)
Client Overview: A mobile-first FinTech startup offering innovative payment solutions. To secure their next funding round and partner with major banks, they needed to achieve PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, a daunting and expensive task for a small team.
"The thought of a PCI audit was keeping us up at night. CIS's expertise was invaluable. They designed a system that took most of our infrastructure out of scope. We passed our audit on the first attempt."
- Nathan Carter, CTO, PayForward
Key Challenges:
- Storing and handling sensitive card data across their infrastructure.
- Facing a complex, expensive, and time-consuming PCI DSS Level 1 audit.
- Lack of in-house expertise in secure payment architecture.
- Needing a solution that was both highly secure and developer-friendly for their team.
Our Solution:
We focused on a strategy of "compliance by design" by building a dedicated, standalone tokenization vault. This solution ensured:
- No sensitive cardholder data ever entered or was stored in the client's primary application environment.
- All interactions with card data were replaced with secure, non-sensitive tokens.
- The client's PCI audit scope was reduced from their entire infrastructure to just the small, isolated vault.
- We provided a clean, simple API for their developers to interact with the vault, abstracting away all the security complexity.
Positive Outcomes:
Our Technology Stack & Tools
We use a modern, robust, and scalable technology stack to build secure and high-performance payment gateways, ensuring your solution is both powerful today and ready for tomorrow.
What Our Clients Say
Our success is measured by the success of our clients. Here's what they have to say about partnering with CIS on their mission-critical projects.
"CIS delivered a payment routing system that saves us over $30k a month in interchange fees. Their expertise in the payment space is second to none. They understood our complex requirements from day one and executed flawlessly."
"The PCI compliance process was our biggest hurdle to scaling. The tokenization vault CIS built for us was a masterpiece of engineering. It simplified our audit process immensely and let our team focus on building features, not worrying about compliance."
"We needed a complex marketplace payout system that could handle split payments and multi-currency payouts. The solution from CIS was robust, scalable, and delivered ahead of schedule. Our seller satisfaction has skyrocketed."
"The AI-powered fraud detection module has been incredibly effective, reducing our chargeback rate by over 60% without impacting the user experience for our legitimate customers. It's a level of sophistication we couldn't get from an off-the-shelf tool."
"The developer experience was a top priority for us. CIS created some of the cleanest, most well-documented APIs we've ever worked with. It made integration a breeze for our internal engineering teams."
"Working with CIS felt like a true partnership. They were transparent, communicative, and genuinely invested in our success. Their project management was excellent, keeping a complex project on track and on budget."
Meet Our FinTech & Payment Experts
Our team is our greatest asset. We are a collective of seasoned architects, certified security professionals, and innovative engineers dedicated to solving the most complex challenges in payment technology.
Amit A.
Founder & COO - Expert in Enterprise Technology & Secure Payment Architectures.
Dr. Bjorn H.
V.P. - Ph.D., FinTech, DeFi, and AI-Powered Risk Management.
Vikas J.
Divisional Manager - Certified Expert Ethical Hacker, Enterprise Cloud & SecOps Solutions.
Joseph A.
Expert in Cybersecurity, PCI/DSS Compliance, and Secure Software Engineering.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have questions? We have answers. Here are some common queries about building a custom payment gateway.
The timeline can vary significantly based on complexity. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with core transaction processing and tokenization can often be built in 4-6 months. A full-featured gateway with intelligent routing, subscription management, and advanced fraud detection may take 9-12 months or more. Our AI-accelerated approach often helps reduce this timeline.
The key is tokenization and creating a secure card data environment (CDE), or vault. We design the system so that raw cardholder data from your customers goes directly to this secure, isolated vault and never touches your main application servers. Your systems only ever handle a 'token' that represents the card. This means your primary infrastructure is "out of scope" for most of the stringent PCI DSS requirements, drastically simplifying your audit and reducing risk.
Absolutely. This is one of the primary benefits. We build an acquirer-agnostic platform and can integrate with any bank or processor that provides an API. This allows you to build redundancy, negotiate better rates by creating competition, and intelligently route transactions to the best-performing acquirer in real-time.
A payment gateway is a mission-critical system. Ongoing maintenance typically includes 24/7 infrastructure monitoring, security patching, regular vulnerability scans and penetration tests, and updates to comply with evolving rules from card networks (like Visa and Mastercard). We offer comprehensive managed support and maintenance plans to handle all of this for you.
We help you build a detailed business case. The ROI is typically calculated based on three main factors: 1) Cost Savings: The difference between your current platform fees and the lower interchange++ fees you'll pay with a direct acquirer relationship. 2) Revenue Uplift: Increased revenue from higher authorization rates (due to smart routing) and improved conversion (from a custom UX). 3) Operational Efficiency: Cost savings from automating manual tasks like reconciliation and chargeback management. For businesses with significant volume, the payback period is often between 12 and 24 months.
Ready to Own Your Payment Infrastructure?
Let's talk about your specific needs. Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with our FinTech architects. We'll help you map out a strategy, estimate the ROI, and provide a detailed blueprint for your custom payment gateway.
Schedule Your Free Consultation