Quick Overview

Slate Payments is a built-in gateway and payment processor for Slate, providing the best experience for processing event payments, application fees, enrollment deposits, donations, and other payment types.

Slate Payments typically has lower fees than other payment processors that an organization may be using, supports the greatest diversity of payment methods, provides the most robust international support, and provides the most direct integration with Slate. If you need to capture payments directly on a form/event, Slate Payments is very much the right tool to use.

Slate Payments is powered by the Stripe platform. In 2024, collectively, all the businesses running on Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in total payment volume for a calendar year. Stripe is used by half of the large Fortune 100 companies.

Benefits

1. Slate Payments allows payment capture directly in a form/event via the Slate payment widget, allowing for a form submission to be conditioned upon successful payment.

2. The payment form displays all the available and accepted payment methods for the payer’s location and device type.

3. Slate Payments provides a highly competitive cost:

   1. For merchants in the USA/Canada, debit and credit card payments incur a processing fee of 2.6% + $0.30 USD/CAD per transaction. For payments processed prior to April 1, 2026, the processing fee is 2.3% + $0.30 USD/CAD. Payments by ACH incur a fee of $0.25 per transaction + a fee of $1.00 for NACHA-required bank validation and verification.

   2. For merchants outside of USA/Canada, please contact us for specific rates.

4. Manage refunds directly inside Slate (refund initiation from the payment activity or via the payment history). Refund trace IDs automatically appear when and where available.

5. Flexible payouts and and built-in reconciliation reporting (via the transfers/pre-filter payment history) with the option of creating custom payment-base reports (and turning those into scheduled exports to update your ERP/SIS via FTP or webservice).

6. Self-service setup and easy testing mode.

7. Ability to easily enable/disable ACH and/or CC by payment account prompt value (i.e. any custom fee type you define in Slate).

8. Tap-to-pay feature inside the Slate mobile app, allows you to accept contactless in-person payments on your mobile device without having to use extra hardware. You can accept payments from contactless credit or debit cards, Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and smartphones with other digital wallets.

9. In-person / card present payments via secure hardware that accepts tap, chip, swipe, and manual entry.

Fraud Mitigation

Regarding fraud - it is a bigger drag on the global economy than many might think: one report found that fraud cost 3% of a typical online business’s revenue. Fraudulent actors today operate on an industrial scale, with teams of engineers, managers, and data analysts. Stripe’s reputation network is the most effective lever to keep businesses safe. Data from $1.4 trillion in annual payments volume means that each payment makes the next payment safer. Stripe Radar develops a notion of trust for not only credit cards but email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, devices, and many more details besides.

Scale matters. When a credit card is used for a payment, there is a greater than 92% chance that Stripe has encountered the same card before (and can thus compare this transaction to prior behavior). Fraudulent actors adapt their behavior as soon as they’re thwarted. Stripe enables their models to adapt in real time, so that future decisions benefit from all prior data. When a Stripe Radar fraud model makes a decision on a payment, it knows about events that occurred 100 milliseconds ago across the Stripe network. With these and other techniques, Stripe reduced card testing on their platform by over 80% in the past two years, protecting customers from billions of fraudulent transactions.

Card testing fraud remains a serious challenge; a lot of effort and activity takes place behind the scenes of Slate (and at Stripe) to try to prevent fraudulent activity and ensure a smooth experience. Please see our Dispute documentation for further details.

For the Slate Payments platform the overall dispute (0.07%) and fraud (0.05%) rates are very low, as is the overall disputed volume (especially compared to other average figures reported about the education/training industry as a whole). Over the last year, only about 40% of clients using Slate Payments had any type of dispute in any of their deposit accounts; fewer than 3% had more than 10 disputed transactions. Only about 60% of disputes (as measured by Dispute reasons) were due to alleged ‘fraudulent’ card use.