The Term We Pioneered: Making the Case for "Alternative Payment Methods"

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Few companies are in a position to speak to the history of a term from the inside. At 2000Charge, we are one of them. We were founded in 1999 with a straightforward mission: give US e-commerce merchants the technology to accept payments beyond the credit card. We called those payments "alternative" long before the phrase became industry shorthand - and the debate now swirling around whether the label still fits is one we follow with more than casual interest.

Our motto has always been simple: more options make more sales. The question of what to call those options matters less than the underlying reality - that 87% of internet users are outside the United States, and a US merchant who limits checkout to card rails is leaving an enormous share of the global market unreachable. That was true in 1999. It remains true today.

Why we used the word "alternative"

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When 2000Charge was established, the card networks were the undisputed default for online payments. Everything else - direct debit in Germany, bank transfers in the Netherlands, local schemes across Latin America and Asia Pacific - existed outside that default. For the US merchants we were building for, those methods were genuinely alternative: not inferior, not marginal, but structurally separate from the payment infrastructure they already had.

Many of the methods in our early portfolio were, in fact, early forms of what the industry now calls open banking: direct connections between consumers and their banks, payments authenticated through banking credentials rather than card details, with no network intermediary. Products like DirectPayEU and later DPMax - a fully automated bank transfer system built in-house - were doing open banking before the regulatory frameworks that formalized it even existed.

"We pioneered the concept of alternative payments long before it became a mainstream term - because the gap it described was real, and it was costing US merchants sales every day."

"Alternative" was not a value judgment. It was a map reference: here is everything that sits outside your current setup, and here is why accepting it will grow your revenue. That framing served our merchants well then, and the underlying commercial logic has not changed.

The mainstream argument, examined

Critics of the APM label point, correctly, to global adoption data. Open banking transactions in Europe are now governed by PSD2 and are growing rapidly as a share of digital payments. In Brazil, PIX overtook card volumes in its first years of operation. In China, mobile wallet penetration has been near-universal for years. Calling these methods "alternative" can feel like describing the highway as an alternative to the dirt track.

But this criticism tends to conflate two different reference points. In the markets where these methods dominate, they are of course not alternative - they are simply payments. No argument there. The APM category, however, has never been defined from the perspective of those markets. It has always been defined from the perspective of the merchant making an integration decision, and for that merchant - particularly one based in the US and expanding internationally - the category is as operationally meaningful as it has ever been.

The merchant's reality has not changed

A US business that decides to accept iDEAL for Dutch customers, or to integrate an open banking payment solution for the German market, is still making a deliberate addition to a card-first default stack. That integration requires a decision, a technical implementation, and a partner with the right local reach and regulatory standing. That is what 2000Charge has provided for over two decades - and the operational structure of that decision has not fundamentally changed, even as open banking has made the payment experience on the consumer side smoother and faster than ever.

DPMax our Open Banking solution is a good illustration of this dynamic. For European consumers, paying via DPMax feels seamless - they authenticate through their bank, no card details required, transaction confirmed. For the US merchant who has integrated it, it represents exactly the kind of deliberate alternative payment decision that the APM category has always described: a choice to go beyond the default, reach a broader audience, and close sales that would otherwise be lost at checkout.

A category that continues to evolve

The healthiest version of this debate is not whether to retire the term, but how to use it with precision. APMs are alternative to a specific starting point - the card-based default stack - not to payments as a concept. They encompass an increasingly sophisticated range of options: open banking payments, SEPA direct debit, local bank transfers, wallets, and more. The category is not shrinking; it is deepening.

At 2000Charge, we have been expanding that portfolio since before most of these methods had names. We were the first company to globally support SEPA. We added iDEAL, Giropay, and Sofort in their early years. We built DPMax as an in-house open banking system before the term "open banking" was common. The label "alternative payment methods" has travelled with us through all of it. 

More options still make more sales. The word "alternative" still points to the right gap. And the merchants who understand that continue to win in international markets.

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Whether you work in payments, fintech, or follow the industry closely - do you think 'alternative payment methods' still deserves its name, or is it time for a rebrand?"

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