I'm going to kick this off!
I'm super excited to be joining this community. Since I'm new to Vantiv, I'll be learning about Vantiv products alongside many of you.
My goal and challenge for this community is to connect Vantiv O.N.E. developers with the resources they need, and to foster community collaboration, while having some fun along the way.
I have some ideas and hopes in the pipeline to make this community a helpful and handy place for payments developers, but I always love to hear user ideas on improvements.
When I'm not managing developer communities, I read cyberpunk sci-fi and design cyberpunk clothing.
I also enjoy hanging out with the two goofiest dogs of all time.
Thank you Dani, and welcome to the team! Lady Gaga's wardrobe team could learn a thing or two from you.
I'd also like to stress it's not just a goal to make our partner's integration successful but also to create an exception experience when you choose to partner with Vantiv or simply looking for a new partner, no matter the line of business you partner with (Enterprise, eCommerce, PayFac or Integrate Payments).
There is so much happening in the payments space in regards to innovation and some of it might be trade secrets, which of course we would never suggest you leak. But the evolution of our business thrives from our partners ability to work together and improve the payment experience for merchants and consumers. Vantiv O.N.E. is exactly the place for like minded developers to ping ideas or assist those not as familiar with the complexities of payments.
When I'm not working I enjoying snowmobiling, but it usually turns into digging holes to China...
Hey radialstudios, any cool stuff brewing in the eCommerce space?
Hello Chris & welcome Dani!
Yes indeed Chris - we've got a new release on our end that adds some new fraud tools as well as tokenized refunds for our WooCommerce customers, and we are working with a few folks at Vantiv to hopefully create a new narrative for that software and some new tools that are going to be released soon.
But per Dani's rules - some things about myself:
1 - My role in the company
I run Radial Studios, alongside my wife Bethany. My role shifts often as is the case with a small business owner, but most often I'm working with our clients to understand their needs and then working with our developers and designers to create systems that achieve our merchants goals with equal parts efficiency and artistry.
2 - My top question or challenge
Right now, my top challenge that I'm working on has to do with changing ecosystems for open source eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Magento - specifically how best to harmonize the various integrations available to Vantiv Merchants.
I hope to make use of Vantiv O.N.E. to expand upon the work that gjsissons started last year with an overview of some of the tools available to Merchants looking to deploy on WooCommerce.
On a less strategic level, I'm looking forward to having faster access to API's and things like testing guides as we start to ramp up work on a custom Lightspeed integration for one of our Canadian Merchants.
When we ran into some issues a few weeks ago on a new project we were developing, I was able to hop on and pull the latest copies of the integration guides and realized that there had been and update between April, when we started our integration and July, when some new requirements were introduced. In the past, getting those docs was often a two step process and being able to just pull them down directly on demand is really useful.
3 - What I hope to get out of Vantiv O.N.E.
Vantiv O.N.E. strikes me as a great way to educate Merchants and their third party developers that are working on projects about the Vantiv experience and how much it can contribute to the successful launch of a new venture.
Having started with Mercury Payments and now continuing with our experiences with Vantiv Integrated Payments as well as Vantiv eCommerce, I've found that it's difficult to fully convey how great an impact to onboarding a Merchant the processor can have. Not all companies are cut from the same cloth. We've been doing ECOM projects since late in 2001 and we've boarded Merchants pretty much everywhere. There is no comparison - from the front end support team on through to the developer support network that Vantiv has, we're never left with the feeling that we're stuck alone in an echo chamber chatting with a support rep who couldn't care less. We can get real answers, and that's what keeps us coming back.
We just completed a boarding process with another processor that shall not be named which took MONTHS from start to launch readiness.
Delays in paperwork, requests for the same documents over and over again, and then crazy conflicts between the gateway and processor after the account was boarded that nobody wanted to own up to.
Endless calls, each of which left me feeling like Mugatu in Zoolander:
On the same day that we finished that, we had a different merchant submit their paperwork for a new Vantiv account.
We had them ready to process transactions the very next day.
If I can help someone who is poking around Vantiv O.N.E. understand how valuable the support infrastructure is that you provide, I can finish my day knowing I saved that developer or Merchant countless hours of headache down the road.
4 - Something about myself!
While I love solving problems and developing solutions for Merchants, I also enjoy getting out and photographing architecture and the natural world around me. No programmers or designers, no clients (well, not always) ... just my family and the open road.
In the past that's meant my wife and I in our 96 Bronco. These days with two kids, it's harder to get away, but I'm looking forward to showing them many of the places I've been fortunate enough to visit and I'm existing to discover new places with them that I've never been to before.
Kansas prairies burning:
Cleveland, OH panorama:
A selfie with some California redwoods:
Salutations. My name is Mark Cafiero, and I'm the Program Manager for Vantiv O.N.E.
My goal for Vantiv O.N.E. is simple: to create a resource that's just as valuable to expert-level payment integration experts as it is to young developers, just getting their feet wet in payments tech. If I could have it my way, Vantiv O.N.E. will continue to become a community where innovation is the paramount underlying theme behind all that we do. After all; we're immersed in an exciting transition from boring old cash / checks / magnetic stripe transactions to mobile / cloud / VR / IoT / omnicommerce, which is a lot more fun. Amazing what happens when you cross payments with our favorite tech devices.
I believe that Vantiv is the ONLY payments company who cares THIS MUCH about our partners. I expect that Vantiv O.N.E. will be the ongoing testimony. We have a sincere desire to see our partners succeed and become leaders in payments integration.
So far, in my first year, I'm most proud of the live-streaming webcast studio that we've built. "Death by Powerpoint" is a lot more tolerable when you can see the presenters, witness conversational dialogue, see products work right in front of your very eyes, and even participate in the discussion. Vantiv O.N.E. Live is still in it's infancy, but we're getting a lot better at it, and hope you'll attend our next webcast. The set needs a little TLC where decor is concerned, but our half-living "token fern" has been enjoying its time in the spotlight.
About me: I'm a Colorado Native with no desire to leave this great state. All of my proudest personal accomplishments are in one way or another tied to my place in Colorado. Here are some things about me that most people don't know:
- I spent a total of 6 months living in a two-man tent, working as a whitewater raft guide. The local adoring term for this is "river rat".
- 3 years of my life were spent ski patrolling at Keystone ski resort. I didn't live in a tent for this, but I did live in a cool A-Frame cabin
- 3x Pikes Peak Ascent finisher and 1x Pikes Peak marathon finisher. One marathon was enough, and that remains my only marathon under my belt. Never again, thanks
- I have spent several years racing bikes on a track called a velodrome, which ended in 2013 but I always think about jumping back in in the "old man" division. My best go at it got me to 9th in the country among 35-40 year-olds, but some say that 9th is the 8th loser.
- 22 14-ers under my belt and the list continues to grow!
- I love working on my '72 bronco / 4-wheeling and camping.
- I love photography.
- I love cooking.
(from left to right: what we have here is my signature eggplant parm and rigatone with Nonnie's home made meat-a-balls. And for Thanksgiving, I made a delightful bisque with "creme fraishe" (that makes me feel like such a chef), toasted pine nuts and pomegranites.)
- Consequently I love food photography, and I moonlight as a food photographer (among other kinds of photography)
- And finally, I now enjoy a family that makes it so easy to gracefully surrender certain things of youth and move on to the best chapter yet: fatherhood.
Hello all
My name is Jean-Francois Claeys, and I'm the programmer specialized in payment processing here, at Multidev. We provide a retail management, head office and Point Of Sale solution to a wide variety of business. Everything is written in Delphi, a variant of Pascal language code, in our offices in Montreal Quebec.
Joining this community seems to be the logical step in order to be able to integrate Vantiv line of products in an optimal way. Although not fluent at all in (what I call) C based languages, it is the concept that is important. And therefor exchanging ideas, success and failures simply allows better advances 
When not coding, I share my time between my family, music and photography. I have a 13 years old boy that becomes an exceptional young man everyday. As a guitar player since early 1980s, I am simply amazed at what this current years offer technology wise. When we had massive pedal boards way back then, now everything stands on a laptop, even less!
Bloody Time Zones - Friday Afternoon Buzz.mp3 - Google Drive as to give a small sample of a composition of mine
When time allows, I love to go outside and shoot pictures of whatever is going to attract me. Today's cameras are just too fun!
So... glad to meet you all and let's go to work!
Hello Chris.
I guess it can be said that humans are never satisfied and are always looking for something different hehehe 
Right now I am implementing the triPOS PC interface. It's going smoothly, although the signature is giving me headaches, triPOS always rejecting it. The hardest part is that all the samples provided are using libraries that I do not access to. So I have to find equivalences in the Delphi world. Right now, I found that the openssl approach is the one that gives the best results. There are some relatively easy to find and use code examples. Hashing with tp-hmac-sha256 give me consistent results, so this is good. But I'm obviously not there yet totally...
Eventually, I will have to choose an API for doing the eCommerce portion of it, mainly doing a MailOrder/TelephoneOrder and post-authorization of pre-auth coming from a web service.
About you?
Hey everyone - Holy smokes! radialstudios (George) and mcafiero have set the bar high for these Introductions - LOL - Well done. I'll take a crack at this too:
I'm a consultant / contractor working for Vantiv out of Canada. I've been enjoying learning a ton about payments from lots of smart people across Vantiv's various business lines. To quote a notable public figure - "Who'd have known payments could be so complicated ! 🙂
I'm interested in getting a sense of what developers are doing with the materials on the site and how we can make them better and more consumable. In a previous life I owned a small ecommerce company so I have a decent appreciation of the challenges that small business owners / developers face. I think the power of Vantiv's offerings are in their breadth and sophistication, but this often comes at the price of complexity. I've learned the hard way that all those features are all there for good reasons, but packaging up the capabilities such that they are digestible and easy to understand and implement is a challenge indeed. (Appreciate any thoughts on this one?)
I live in Wasaga Beach, Ontario with Michelle, my wife of 27 years and two sons. I maintain a personal website http://sissons.ca where I write about what I'm interested in and have been keeping up a new years resolution to walk down Wasaga Beach every day rain or shine documented here - http://wasaga365.com.
My big thing is playing the piano - I put myself through University playing in various piano bars and music was always a big part of my life. Now I just play just for fun. Most people in this part of the province have cool toys like support but I have a Yamaha S90ES and my "baby" pictured below. 🙂
My name is Jessamy Carruthers, and I'm a product manager at a company that writes software for the ag retail industry (SSI | A Leading Developer of The Agribusiness Platform, Agvance ). I've headed up our bankcard integrations for the last 10 years - which means my first integration was before PCI Compliance! Wow have things changed. We've gone from the wild west, to a full PA-DSS assessment, to P2PE, to P2PE with EMV. Our offerings and our customers are very diverse and bankcard processing is involved at many points - we have point of sale transactions happening in farm stores and gas stations, salespeople out on the road needing to collect payments from farmers through native iOS and Android apps, and the farmers themselves paying off their balances online. We also hope to introduce wallet functionality to allow farmers to save their payment information for later use.
What do I hope to get out of Vantiv O.N.E.? Our last bankcard integration (with a different partner who was recently acquired by Vantiv) was an excruciating year-long nightmare. Basically Vantiv has a low bar to clear here. I'm hoping for basic competence, but I'd settle for them not actively obstructing my integration efforts. If I can ask a question and get an accurate answer I would be over the moon! It would also really be wonderful to be able to draw on the experiences of others that are also working on integrations - to be able to ask best practices questions, or "what did your users think of X" would be so neat!
I loved reading in the other posts about what everyone does outside work! I play the pipe organ pretty seriously and spend a lot of time practicing and trying to add more Bach to my repertoire 🙂 I'm really interested in landscaping with native plants and wildflowers and like to unwind by working in my garden, or caring for my much-loved pet succulents indoors. The town we live in is located on a large lake that has extensive bike paths (and even mountain bike trails!) that start about a mile from my house, so I'm often out on my bike in nice weather. I enjoyed everyone else's pictures, so here is one of mine from my last ride:
Welcome Jessamy
Hope you'll find success here
Hi Eva! Welcome to the TechTribe
Hello, I'm Asterisk and I do UI/UX design and front-end development at Vantiv. You can see the type of work I do here: Asterisk Loftis Portfolio .
I hope to communicate with different teams and people here at Vantiv as well as see if there are opportunities to help out our customers on Vantiv O.N.E .
I have a toddler who looks like a clone of me and I enjoy playing video games, Dark Souls 3 is what I play currently.
Hey everyone, my name is Andrew and I work on the engineering team for Vantiv Integrated Payments.
From the ground up, I have played a part in the payment world for a little over six years now. Constantly learning and growing and working with so many awesome and talented people and teams.
When I am not working on a product design through means of UX, visual, animation, research, analysis, prototyping, or business strategy; I am hanging out with my beautiful wife, rad two year old son, and hyper five month old Labradoodle named Mabel. One of our favorite summer time activities is to travel in our tiny travel trailer. If you want to check out some of our adventures you should run over to (@tinytraveltrailer) • Instagram and take a peak. We just wrapped up a 12 day trip through southwest Colorado that was a blast!
When I am not hanging out with the fam and need a little mental health break I tend to find myself in the mountains wondering on a trail with my camera or trying to find the perfect line on my quest to conquerer gravity.
What I hope to get out of Vantiv O.N.E. is to be part of a community that is interested in making payments awesome.
A home to provide real-life experiences of the good and bad variants, and all of us working together to create an ecosystem that provides resources for one another. I love the platform that consumes the internal and external side of things and produces an organic repository of wisdom. This is Vantiv O.N.E.
- Your role in your company or organization? My name is Ashley and I work for a software company. I am an account manager. I also handle our social media accounts and write the occasional blog. I perform demonstrations of our product to new prospects and work with them to make sure they get the best software at a price they can afford.
- What you hope to get out of Vantiv O.N.E.? I am hoping to gain a better understanding of the credit card processing world and be able to offer my customers competitive rates.
- Something about yourself? When I am not at work I enjoy spending time with my family. I have two little girls who are my absolute world. We are always very busy and on the go. We love to check out new children's museums and spend quality family time.
In my quiet time I love to read new books, paint, and I dabble in photography.
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Thanks Gord. I'm very interested in reading House By The Lake. Love the polar bear art too!
What a beautiful smile!!
Hi! My name is Danae and I work for Spreedly, we're an API that makes it easy for people to connect to over 100 different gateways through one system, Vantiv being one of them.
I am a member of our support team and would love to see Vantiv O.N.E. become a place where I can debug issues and figure out best practices so that we can keep our integration with Vantiv up to speed.
I have a house rabbit named Boo who's really cute:
Hi from New Zealand!
My name is Mark and I'm a contract (freelance) Software Developer currently with a global leader in Cinema software (Vista Entertainment Solutions Limited). We work with a number of payment gateways including triPOS and Vantiv Express.
There's a small disconnect between GMT+12 and North American time so I am hopingVantiv O.N.E. will be a vehicle to answering those small, niggly issues that present from time to time. Your support during both of our integrations has been superb, but we have a day turnaround and on small things it seems like a long time.
I also want to see the Vantiv developer tools and documentation improve over time with constructive input from the community here. I'm also interested in best practice for working with Vantiv and in the Payments Industry generally.
While at work, I work hard, but it's a means not an end.
When I am not working, I enjoy family times, reading books (sci-fi, cyber-punk, biographies, alternate reality and dystopian post-apocalyptic), music, gardening, cycling, trying to take photos and enjoying the natural wonders of our beautiful country. From our very own marine volcano:
To our pristine streams and rivers:
Waterfalls:
Beaches:
Et cetera:
Hi Mark and welcome
What's the best book you've read recently?
The best dystopian sci-fi book I've read lately was American War by Omar El Akkad, about a futuristic civil war that rips America apart after climate change has flooded the coasts and changed the country's landscape. The president outlaws fossil fuels and the southern states secede, starting a war that plunges America into chaos. It's dark but gripping and very well-written. Akkad writes so well about the American South and Southern nostalgia/memory that I assumed he was from there - but he's Egyptian. It's a great read.
My name is Tammye MacKenzie- I am in Hospitality Sales for CRS-RDS working out of Kalamazoo MI. We have several offices across the country. I recommend Vantiv to many of my customers I hope to stay updated by be involved with Vantiv One. When I'm not working--I run professional rodeos, training horses and snuggle with my dog.
oh my gosh! those ears are precious
Hi Michael and welcome ThriftCart sounds so cool! I've probably used it - I'm a big fan of thrift stores for finding vintage clothes to upcycle into new fashions.
I'd love to see a photo of your sheep!
And like you asked, here's a sheep picture:
And yes, the whole flock is made up of black sheep. (One could probably make a black sheep joke of some sort, but I'm not creative enough ). The flock is from the super-rare breed called Black Welsh Mountain Sheep. Whidbey Island, WA, where I live, is much like Wales, where the breed is from. It is cool and damp most of the year - so the sheep love it. I, on the other hand, am not such a big fan of 9 months of cool and damp, but you take what you get.
Hello, my name is Matt Olson, and I'm an SAP developer at Room & Board, stationed just outside of downtown Minneapolis. Many times while looking for 3rd party support, I feel like the odd duck as there doesn't seem to be as many SAP/ABAPers combing the forums with SAP-specific questions. Fortunately we've learned to play well with REST protocols so I'm happy to see that quickly becoming the interface of choice.
We're in the middle of rolling out triPOS across all of our retail stores. Since our POS system is a customized SAP order-entry system, we ABAPers have had to learn a lot about payments. I'm looking to stay on top of the latest & greatest triPOS offerings. Additionally, we're looking to implement a new gift card solution, and would be excellent if we could leverage triPOS and our existing Ingenicos for that.
I'm a big fan of the Twin Cities and it's wonderful interweaving of urban areas and parks. I can literally "mountain" bike to work, as there are miles of single track trails leading from my house all the way to Room & Board. Yet I can also hop on my road bike and head the other direction via paved bike trail and be downtown at Target Field (where the Twins play), or at a farmer's market along the Mississippi River in 10 minutes. That's my little plug for any and everyone that hasn't visited the Twin Cities...I spend most of my free time with my 2 kids, watching them grow up way too fast and attempting to photograph their wonderful goofiness.
