As our ever changing world places new expectations on us to grow at an unprecedented speed, it has also given rise to challenges we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago.
In 2016, there were roughly 1,500 active satellites functioning globally, most of them institutional in some fashion. Now, the private sector dominates our exosphere, with a single company commanding 10,000+ satellites to deliver internet connectivity across the globe, while other players rush into space to explore mind boggling opportunities like selling sunlight access via reflective folding mirrors or floating data centers that beam content to and from Earth. Certain circles are already discussing concepts as novel as orbital waste management strategies.
Yet as companies build these advanced operations, they often run into a frustratingly grounded bottleneck: payment technology.
For years, the point of sale was a literal anchor, a square peg running proprietary, unmodifiable software, asked to fit a starship shaped hole. As society becomes more mobile, distributed, and experiential, the technology powering commerce is undergoing its own metamorphosis. The modern storefront is no longer a fixed room. It’s a moving target.
It’s easy to look to space for the tip of the technological spear, but we’re entering an era where the benefits of modernization are finally showing up where we’ve really been needing them: at the point of sale.
Imagine ACME Spaceport, a commercial facility managing private orbital launch viewings and high tech drone logistics. On a given launch day, thousands of spectators flock to an outdoor, multi acre viewing park while dozens of automated cargo drones land at various bays across the property. Maintenance teams need to purchase specialized components, fuel, and supplies from a network of vendors.
If ACME Spaceport forced customers and commercial clients to walk to a central office to swipe a credit card, operational efficiency would collapse. Spectators would miss the launch while standing in line, and cargo drones would sit idle on the tarmac waiting for invoices to clear.
They need payment technology that is as mobile as their workforce and as customizable as their proprietary software.
The rollout of the Elavon Payment Gateway (EPG) has fundamentally changed how hardware and software interact at the physical point of sale and is equipped to enable an out of this world experience for ACME Spaceport.
With a robust API and native integration tools, EPG allows developers to build custom payment experiences across mobile devices, websites, and payment hardware while keeping everything connected. Instead of buying an uncustomizable POS system that forces employees to jump between a proprietary inventory app, procedural database, ATC operations, flight data, and a separate payment terminal, ACME’s development team can use EPG’s SDKs to integrate card present functionality directly into its existing Android or iOS applications.
A field engineer standing on a drone landing pad can open a corporate tablet, run a diagnostic scan, view a troubleshooting procedure, determine that a replacement battery is needed, pull up the internal inventory catalog, and place an order with an external vendor. When the parts arrive, the engineer can accept payment right there next to the aircraft.
For environments demanding deep brand integration, EPG teams are even paving the runways for customers to create their own Android POS applications that run directly on dedicated payment hardware. This reduces the need for multiple devices in the field while giving integrators access to device hardware modules within their own applications.
But ACME Spaceport doesn’t stop at the hardware experience. They recognize that user experience and cohesion across every touchpoint directly influence conversion rates. Their online checkout needs to look, feel, and breathe like a natural extension of their advanced digital ecosystem.
To achieve this, ACME leverages EPG’s Hosted Payment Fields. Rather than embedding a jarring redirect or an unstyleable iFrame that disrupts the page layout, Hosted Payment Fields inject isolated, secure input elements, such as credit card number, expiration date, and CVV fields, directly into the brand’s native HTML structure.
Because these individual fields can be styled through the brand’s own CSS and design rules, they can inherit the exact fonts, input borders, hover states, animations, and responsive layouts designed by the UX team. To the end user, the checkout is cohesive and completely native to the site. Behind the scenes, sensitive card data goes directly to Elavon’s secure environment, helping reduce the merchant’s PCI DSS scope.
As important as the experience may be, the true power of this modern architecture extends far beyond checkout. It also redefines backend banking and operations.
Consider the complexity of ACME Spaceport’s supply chain. When a field engineer orders a specialized lithium cell or replacement titanium propeller blade while a drone is sitting on the tarmac, the software can’t simply process a generic charge. It must dynamically route and write transaction data to specific backend servers depending on which external vendor is fulfilling the order.
In the legacy era of payment processing, onboarding a new vendor into a complex web like this could be a bureaucratic nightmare involving manual configurations, human intervention, and endless testing. Establishing the proper gateway structure to handle a new supplier was traditionally measured in weeks.
Today, modern API architecture flips that paradigm.
When a new drone supplier comes online, ACME doesn’t have to wait. Its software can dynamically generate a secure redirection endpoint to handle the data flow while simultaneously provisioning dedicated sub accounts to group and organize the new vendor’s transactions for automated reconciliation.
What used to be a painful ordeal of manual banking red tape can now be executed through API calls in seconds.
By modernizing both the frontend experience and the underlying payments architecture, EPG goes beyond simply processing transactions. It reduces friction from scale wherever possible, allowing businesses to adapt as fast as the future demands.
If your business is ready to shed its physical and digital anchors and land among the stars, it’s time to start a conversation.
Reach out to the team at Cartis Payments to discuss how we can help modernize your payment strategy, streamline reconciliation, and build a seamless architecture that scales as fast as your vision.
We’ll meet you at the launchpad.