The actual setup of Slate Payments is entirely in your hands and self-service! No technical knowledge is necessary. Please see the detailed 'setup' article and follow the step-by-step instructions.

No. "Slate Payments" refers specifically to our built-in payment gateway, which uses Stripe as the payment processor. You can integrate external payment processors to work with Slate, but then you wouldn't be using 'Slate Payments'. For general information about collecting payments through Slate, including discussion of external processor integrations (such as Touchnet, CashNet, or Cybersource) see our overview article.

Sure! Slate provides the ability to configure any particular payment gateway so that it only applies to particular payment types, or particular rounds or periods, or both. For example, you could use Slate Payments to collect an application fee, but use another payment provider to collect an enrollment deposit.

In your test environment, only test-mode payments are allowed. The payment history is stored in the Slate test environment, and any data there is temporary. Real-money tests can only be done in your production environment.

Slate Payments currently supports payments made with a credit card (in the United States the card types are Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover, and Diners Club) or a prepaid Visa or MasterCard gift card. In addition Slate Payments supports instant payment methods like ApplePay, GooglePay and LINK. Users in the United States can also use checking account payments through ACH transfers.

When configuring the mapping from a payment account prompt to a Slate Payments Deposit Account, (Step 3 in the Slate Payments instructions) you can select whether to allow credit card payments, checking account payments, or both. We do not have the ability to restrict the permitted credit card types (or instant payment methods), but note that the transaction fees for all card types is the same.

Checking account ACH payments take approximately 5-7 business days (that is, weekends and holidays excluded) to complete or "clear." During this time, you will see a listing for the payment with a status of "pending," and the listing changes to "received" when the payment completes.

Please note that we do not recommend using the checking account payment feature to process paper checks internally. If you use the account information from a check to make a checking account payment, it will be a separate payment from that account in that amount, and the paper check itself will still be valid, risking a double payment.

Yes. SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) requirements are part of PSD2 regulations in Europe. As banks are beginning to enforce SCA for customers/payers in the European Economic Area (EEA), Slate Payments is enabled to use 3DS, so customers can complete additional authentication when requested by the bank. This functionality is available automatically via the payment widget whenever it is required.

You can archive deposit accounts that are no longer actively used (via the pop-up edit window). If you encounter any error messages there, check the base xml files as indicated in the message for references to old payment account names and remove those part IDs before trying to archive again.