No entry, no pitch: just our API docs and two awards

Good developer experience is mostly invisible. It’s how quickly someone can understand your API, whether an error message tells you exactly what to fix and how many steps sit between “sign up” and a first successful payment. It’s the type of work that often goes unnoticed — until it’s missing.

That’s why it was particularly rewarding when, last month, someone outside our team noticed anyway. The Strawhecker Group (TSG) reviewed publicly available API documentation across the payments gateway market. There were no submissions, no pitches — just the docs as they stand. TSG named our gateway, Access, the winner of two 2026 GEM API Awards: Best Emerging Technology and Best Developer Experience.

We built Access Gateway around a simple idea: Integration shouldn’t get in the way. There’s one point of entry instead of multiple accounts to juggle. The documentation is as easy for a person to read as it is for a machine to parse, helping both people and tooling move faster. And the API itself guides developers to the right next step instead of leaving them to guess.

Ultimately, this isn’t about winning awards. It’s about what merchants feel on the other end. Less time integrating, fewer support tickets and a faster path to taking their first live payment.

This recognition doesn’t change our roadmap, but it’s useful and provides independent validation of our API-first approach. When an external assessment highlights emerging technology and developer experience, it reinforces that we’re solving the right problems for our customers.

If you’re building on Access Gateway — or if you’re curious what the integration actually looks like — our Developer Hub has the docs, sequence diagrams and a Postman collection to help get you started.