ZoomInfo's Journey into Financial Integration with Stripe and SAP BTP - XP128v
Hello everyone, and welcome to our session where we go to understand the details of Zoominfo financial transformation with both SAP and Stripe. My name is Ralph and I'm a partner solutions engineer here at Stripe, where I help companies like SAP to embed payments and money movements capabilities into their products and their services. And I'm joined today by my colleague Urvi. Hey, everyone. I'm Urvi Mehta. I'm a technology solution architect at Zoominfo Technologies.
I'm very excited to join Ralph here today to talk about Zoominfo success story of integrating S/4HANA 2021 with Stripe using the SAP Business Technology Platform. Brilliant. And let us kick kick us off with a very simple story, a short story about a business. And of course, to run a business is no simple matter. There are many challenges and obstacles that needs to be overcome, and fortunately, there is already a very good answer for those challenges and answer we all know very well. However, there is another subset of questions and challenges that also needs to be addressed from very simple things like how do one get paid? How can I collect payment for my invoices to also some complex scenarios like how can I expand to a new location while complying with the local legislations? How can I explore new business models like enabling subscriptions to my customers and also syndicating payments in a kind of marketplace scenario? Well, if we could summarize all of those questions, it will be a single one.
How do I move money? How do I move money from my customers to my business? How do I move money from my business to my suppliers? And how do I move money from my customers to my partners, to my suppliers, to my business? Everything in one go like they do on a marketplace? Well, the answer that we find out there is something that resembles a creative workaround. We see that companies implement this very costly integrations, build everything from scratch and have a very big operational burden. These workarounds, they don't bring any differentiator to the business. They just consume time and resources and they are not moving the company forward. Fortunately, there is a better answer.
And in today's session we are going to explore from a technical perspective a real use case and understand how Zoominfo by leveraging Stripe capabilities with the Business Technology Platform from SAP was able to achieve operational excellence in their financial processes. Hand it over to urvi. Let me start by providing you introduction about Zoominfo technologies. We empower our customers for all their go to market motions, offering a B2B real time insightful data on a unified engagement platforms. These platforms target the mainly the sales and the marketing teams to help you find faster and accurate leads and close those opportunities.
We started our greenfield implementation for S/4HANA 2021 last year in July. We went live recently on July 1st to end 2023. We went live by implementing S/4HANA on the S/4HANA Rise or the private cloud with our talented in-house team and taking a help from a partner.
The four main processes, the business processes that went live in this implementation are. Order to cash procure to pay. Record to report and tax. While the technical components that we implemented are S/4HANA 2021 Sps02. SAP Business Technology Platform.
SAP Analytics. Cloud SAP. Convergent Charging for the brim model that we have implemented for the subscription and the usage based billing and revenue multipoint connectivity solutions for the banking and the financial institutions Integration. When we started our journey of Zoominfo's integration with the payment service provider, we had a bunch of requirements in front of us. The one main thing that Zoominfo legacy system was NetSuite, which already was talking and integrating with Stripe as a PSP via the Suite Sync Integration Suite. Sync is basically the add on available in the industry for the NetSuite integration with Stripe.
We wanted to keep the impact to the business processes very minimal when moving away from net suite and implementing S/4HANA 2021. He also wanted to be mindful of the budget. We didn't want to add additional cost to the project budget by buying a per volume services or the other add ons available in the market. We also wanted to be mindful that we use the integration layer of MuleSoft that Zoominfo Technologies already had. We wanted to continue to send the custom links for the payments to our customers for the main two scenarios that we had in scope. Pay by customer or pay by invoice.
We didn't want to tokenize our credit cards in advance like some other businesses do. We also wanted to explore and enable the ACH banking payment methods for our customers. So it was clear for us that choose a PSP or a payment service provider that's going to be scalable in future that meets so many foes. E-commerce roadmap for the upcoming years. So Stripe was a no brainer choice.
We went ahead with integrating S/4HANA 2021 with Stripe. When we started discussions and the design workshops with Stripe, we mainly assessed three products they had to offer from their wide catalogue. The first one was the payment links. There was another option called Stripe Checkout, and the third one was a product called Payment Elements by Stripe, which would basically end up having the own or the Zoominfo owned checkout page implementing payment elements. We ended up choosing the second option that you see on the slide here.
Payment elements implemented with Zoominfo own checkout page. The more information can be found on the link on this slide. Payment elements offers various features of and the key, key pointers of the key features are, as mentioned on the screen. It requires a server side development for the secure authentication between your ERP system like S/4HANA and Stripe server. It also allows you to implement the API calls between a ERP system and Stripe point to point.
Basically, you can integrate two systems without any add ons. It supports the real time payment confirmations when the customer is making a payment. It offers you the T + 2 or T + 3 timeframe payouts that Stripe publishes to your. It supports the various methods of the payment and the payment modes like credit card ACH. And there are tons of tons of more payment methods out there.
They are supported in the most of the countries. Element. Element also helped us enable the automation for charges, refunds, dispute refunds. Et cetera. The components, services and the modules those were involved in.
The solution architecture are mainly the SAP Business Technology Platform. S/4HANA ERP System 2021, MuleSoft integration Layer and the stripe on the as a provider. We use the Business Technology Platform, A Mainly for the business application studio service.
This was used to create and generate the application that is a customer facing internet hosted application designed in file HTML5 technology. We also created a Node.js application using Business Application Studio, which works as a server side application in this particular solution. S/4HANA, 2021 mainly was leveraged to create the secure Odata services that would ultimately talk to the Stripe server via Business Technology Platform. The main four services those were delivered and went live were one service specifically designed for the Stripe authentication. The secure communication between the S/4HANA server via the Node.js server application to the Stripe server. Looking up the open customer balance.
This was the second Odata service design in the solution. The third service designed in this solution was payment intent, confirmations being received from Stripe to MuleSoft to Zoominfo S/4 system. And last but not the least, the fourth Odata service was about postings and auto reconciliation in SAP. When the stripe is able to publish the payout at a T + 2 or T + 3 time frame, or when the actual customer payment was made. He also was involved in the solution to listen to the events generated and published by Stripe on the dedicated webhooks the to webhooks that were implemented for Zoominfo. Mulesoft were payment intent succeeded and payout available.
And the Stripe Payment Element is the product offered by Stripe. It's a certified product. They offer to help you enable your customer payments at real time. The more information can be found on the link on the screen. Let's talk about Zoominfo.
Architecture of integrating S/4HANA 2020 102 with Stripe payment service provider. Using the SAP Business Technology Platform. What you see on the screen are the three main components or the systems involved in this solution. On the left hand side, you see the SAP S/4HANA that is owned by Zoominfo. On the extreme right hand side, you see the Stripe payment service provider.
And in between is sitting the SAP Business Technology Platform. As I mentioned earlier. S/4HANA in this case is the host of the various Odata services. This is Roman force system where all the various operations and business processes are running.
So this is the system, which is the origin point of this whole architecture. We sent out the customer payment links or the invoice payment links over an email to our customers, as you see in the bottom of the screen. When the customer is ready to make the payment, he or she is going to click on the link that is going to launch a Internet facing web application that is ultimately designed using the Business Application Studio on SAP Business Technology Platform.
The link is going to let customer click and show the specific invoice ID or a customer number against which they are going to start the payment. They are going to click on the proceed and that's going to call a odata service on the S/4HANA system. Looking up the open balance at that point in time, how much the customer is supposed to pay, what is the due amount? As soon as customers were able to see that open amount, as you see on the item number for. Um. They are ready to make a payment when the proceed to payment happens. The NodeJS application is called that is also designed on the B2B platform and the same time in the parallel as a number six, the NodeJS application is making a Odata service call in the back end to the store system, asking for the secure credentials. These credentials are ultimately required for NodeJS application to give it to Stripe server to ensure that the secure communication is established.
And now the control is handed over to Stripe to launch the iFrame, which is going to show the payment element product. This is the magic. So as soon as the payment element is launched there, the whole control is shifted to Stripe server. Now Stripe is already aware that what are the metadatas that Zoominfo system is sending to Stripe? Some of the metadata. I can give an example as a customer number, invoice number, probably our company code and etcetera. And then what is the amount that stripe is supposed to deduct from customers payment service provider like a credit card or a bank method? So all those details are already handed off to Stripe in the particular payment element or the payment intent request that was generated.
As soon as customer is gonna make a final click, go and pay Stripe is gonna go ahead and try to deduct certain amount from customer's credit card or bank account. That is the flow that number eight is showing over here. As soon as Stripe was able to develop the real time payment or the real time money from customers, credit card or a bank account, it creates and generates a response call or a confirmation call. Payment intent succeeded. This is something available online or offline.
The offline communication or the payload that is available for payment and then succeeded is actually listened over to MuleSoft webhooks for Zoominfo, and that is the payment advice flow that you see as a number ten. The payment intent as soon as hits the S/4HANA layer for Zoominfo. We basically clear that much amount that was paid by customer from the open air, meaning we moved that much amount or the money to clearing account of Zoominfo. And now after 2 to 3 days when the actual payment was made, Stripe is able to move the physical money from Stripes bank account to Zoominfo account. And the T+2/T+3 timeframe.
Stripe publishes the payout file to webhook called payout succeeded or payout available. When this file or the payload is forwarded from use of to s four system, we move the money from Stripe clearing account to the our Zoominfo bank clearing account. And the auto reconciliation, the downstream process of the rest of the auto reconciliation actually concludes when we are able to tie up the payout specific reference that indicates when with what reference stripe move the money from their account to Zoominfo account along with the bank statement that we are receiving from our bank. So this is basically the tie up mechanism of reconciling the money between our
bank accounts, electronic bank statements as an EBS versus the Stripe payout reference. This is overall, that's when overall this particular solutions auto reconciliation is completed or concluded. What you see on the screen here is a Business Technology Platform and stripes recommended slash guided architecture for these kind of solutions. You have an end user interacting on the left hand side with their desktop or the mobile applications and SAP Business Technology Platform is sitting right in between to your payment service provider, which is located on the right hand side here doing this magic using the API management and other cronjobs and whatnot to integrate the ERP system or the ERP facing customer with your payment service provider. Zoominfo achieved some of the fantastic results with this solution.
We were able to automate our financial account receivables, customer and invoice payment business processes. We are able to. Process the refunds automatically in terms of generating credit memo in those cases and reversing the payment lot against the original payment that was made when customer made the payment. We were also able to achieve the automation of the dispute refunds by reversal of the payment lot and refusal in. This is such a scalable solution that is already earning us a lot of reserves.
It is absolutely aligned with some enforce ecommerce cloud project already live for the code payments or the pay by code scenario, and there are future phases already planned and we are very excited that we will be able to use a solution, a scalable solution that we already implemented. It has saved us tons of costs. Of course, budget is important for any project and any company, so not buying add-ons was a fantastic choice or capability in this case.
We were also able to use SAP BTP capabilities for the web development using the Business Application Studio service. Well, that's all I wanted to present here today. I'm now going to finally flow back to Ralph to take you over the Stripe. Related details.
Well, thank you very much, Urvi. And what I really enjoy about Zoominfo's journey is that they are a perfect example of how you can focus on your core business so you can bring value to the customers while you outsource all the complex tasks of getting paid and money movement. Urvi's team didn't have to implement every different type of payment methods, every car network, every bank transfer.
No. With one single payment integration, they can already increase the collection of payments for their invoices. Same thing happening on the bank reconciliation part, because at Stripe, that's what we are really good at. We abstract all the complexity of banking rails, card networks, financial institutions and payment protocols. Put everything on a very simple, comprehensive API that can be leveraged by applications from your customers or yourselves. We put together with the Business Technology Platform adoption Team, a reference architecture that we just mentioned and that will allow you to build your integrations on top of BTP Leveraging a stack that you are very familiarized with. So for example, using the cloud application programming model and one of the SDKs from Stripe like the Java or the Node.js one,
and that's the invitation I make to all of you. You can go today to the dashboard.Stripe.com and create your free account and start exploring the full fledged capabilities that Stripe has. We make everything available on our sandbox. I'm pretty sure you already experienced at Stripe on your day to day as a customer.
We have millions of merchants that are built on our platform. To be honest, every week almost 5000 companies launch on Stripe. If you're going to the TechEd on-site in Bangalore, you paid your ticket that was powered by us as well. So now is your opportunity for you to test it on your own. Scan this QR code and you're going to be sent to a blog published by our SAP colleagues explaining how you can bridge the gap between an SAP solutions and payments and money movement capabilities using the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Thank you so much for your time today. This was super fun. I look forward to see what you guys build next and see you on the other side.
Urvi, Thank you very much for sharing your story today and it was a pleasure to share the stage with you. Thank you all for having me. Thank you SAP for this opportunity to present our success story.
I hope it reaches to the mass here and you have a fantastic day ahead. Thank you, everyone.
2023-12-24 18:31
