Building Better APIs by Using Them Ourselves: Inside Our New Merchant Onboarding Console | Global Payments
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When we set out to rebuild our merchant onboarding platform, we made a critical decision: we'd build it entirely on our own GP API onboarding APIs. Not because it was easy – but because if we expect developers and partners to trust our APIs, we needed to prove they could handle complex, real-world demands.
The result is more than just a better onboarding experience for merchants. It's a testament to the power, reliability, and flexibility of the GP API platform itself.
Before we built our internal merchant onboarding console, our merchant onboarding process was far from streamlined. Our merchant configuration system – a combination of spreadsheets and various internal APIs – was becoming increasingly fragile as more merchants discovered Global Payments. This growing demand highlighted several problems that were making the system increasingly frustrating for the onboarding team to use.
When something went wrong, we had no way to see what happened behind the scenes. Troubleshooting became a time-consuming guessing game that delayed merchant onboarding and frustrated both our team and our customers.
Every boarding required multiple manual steps across disconnected tools, creating countless opportunities for mistakes. A single typo could derail an entire onboarding.
The UI wasn't designed for the people using it daily. Our teams struggled with workflows that didn't match how they actually worked, and new team members faced steep learning curves.
Errors only surfaced after configurations were deployed, forcing teams to backtrack and fix issues that should have been caught upfront.
This wasn't just inefficient – it was unsustainable. We needed a solution that was faster, more reliable, and easier to use. So, we turned to our own APIs. We knew we could use them to deliver on the promises we were making to our partners and developers and it was time to leverage. We just had to build the infrastructure to do it.
Rather than try to fix all of the problems one by one, we decided to rebuild it from the ground up, using the same Global Payments APIs that we make available to our merchants. This wasn't about dog-fooding for its own sake – it was a strategic decision in a couple of ways.
First and foremost, we needed a merchant onboarding platform that could tackle all the complexities of merchant configuration with both power and simplicity. The goal was to build a system that would allow our internal teams to keep pace with the growing number of merchants using our APIs and give them an intuitive, easy-to-use UI to work with.
When onboarding a new merchant, the onboarding team is now greeted with an easy-to-use UI with a clean, minimalist design.
Our new console makes merchant onboarding process far more intuitive.
We knew that our APIs could deliver on both counts to provide a highly reliable platform for one of our most mission-critical operations.
And we also knew that building it with our own APIs would not only streamline our onboarding of new merchants, it would prove that our APIs are production-ready, reliable, and capable of handling complex enterprise requirements at scale.
The numbers tell the rest of the story: today, more than 90% of the merchants using Global Payments solutions are now onboarded using the same APIs they use every day to process transactions and generate revenue.
Rebuilding our console with our own APIs solved a lot of problems.
When building our new onboarding console, we discovered something that surprised us. It made our APIs better.
In retrospect, we realized that when you're building with your own tools, you encounter friction points that external developers face but might not report. You experience the APIs the same way your customers do.
This approach created an invaluable feedback loop. Every bottleneck we encountered, every missing feature, every workflow challenge became an opportunity to strengthen the APIs themselves.
As we built the console, we constantly asked ourselves: Are the APIs we're calling in the background working smoothly? Do they provide the right abstractions? Are they truly developer-friendly? When the answer was “no” or "not quite," we worked on improving the API itself. The improvements we made didn't just benefit the console; they enhanced the APIs available to every developer through our portal.
These improvements are ongoing. Right now, we're working on exchanging production credentials more smoothly and creating better sandbox environments – enhancements driven directly by our experience building real applications with our own APIs.
Ultimately, our strategy paid off in ways we did and didn’t expect. The result is a more automated, self-service boarding experience not just for us, but for every ISV, technology partner, and developer using our platform. And when we improve the APIs that power our console, we improve the APIs available to everyone.
Great tools aren't built once and forgotten – they evolve with the people who use them. Our UX team spent months interviewing users, observing workflows, and identifying friction points before we even started building. That research shaped everything from the console's look and feel to how tasks flow from step to step.
But the learning didn't stop at launch. We're continually enhancing the console based on feedback from the operations teams who use it daily. When the people who rely on a tool every day are enthusiastic about it, you know it truly works – and when they identify areas for improvement, we listen.
Upcoming releases will introduce expanded developer entity management and new automation features designed to make onboarding even faster and more efficient. We're committed to supporting the next generation of payment innovation by building tools that scale with your business.
Our new onboarding console proves what's possible when you build with your own APIs. We built it to be faster, simpler, and more reliable than the system we were using before, demonstrating the power and flexibility of Global Payments APIs.
Using GP-API boarding APIs also made building our console easy and helped us quickly realize multiple benefits.
Whether you're a developer building payment solutions, or an ISV looking for robust integration capabilities, you can trust that our APIs can handle complex, real-world demands because we trust them for our own mission-critical operations.
Want to see for yourself? Visit our developer portal to get started. You can also contact our team to learn more about our self-service tools and all the capabilities Global Payments can unlock for your business.