As the payments world can be incredibly complex and eCommerce on a global scale continues to expand, customers are demanding straightforwardness, openness, and standardization with their payments. This can all be in the form of paying with a credit card at the point of sale, performing an international transfer, or making a transfer via mobile application. Meanwhile, small to medium-sized businesses are accelerating their efforts to meet this need, in the hopes of simplifying and meeting these standards.
The problem is that payment systems, especially those on the international scale, are largely fragmented. The reasons are that different payment methods and countries have different requirements. This greatly restricts consumers’ possibility of obtaining international payments both readily and immediately. In addition, the challenges of handling this complicated and fragmented ecosystem often translate into significant costs for financial institutions, which they then pass on to their customers.
Challenges For Merchants
Ideally, merchants would simply have one payment service provider for all their business needs. However, this is simply not sustainable. A single payments service provider (PSP) cannot meet all of the merchant’s needs. First of all, by sticking to only one PSP, a merchant believes that they will be keeping their payment processing costs low. Not so. What does happen is that merchants are essentially giving up their bargaining power to negotiate the best terms on their contract. This also means less flexibility when it comes to their business operations.
It was reported that, in Europe, 76% of payment gateways suffered complete outages in the last year. Worse, 39% reported that these outages took place at the worst of times, during peak sales seasons. Although the outages were averaging between 15 minutes, up to an hour, the results were devastating. A total of 11% of merchants said that these outages directly contributed to a loss of more than one million euros. Merchants must have a solution to mitigate risk when their only payment gateway fails to deliver.
Merchants Need Payments Orchestration
What merchants need to prevent loss is a Payments Orchestration Layer (POL). POLs obliterate the need to support payments functions over several platforms. Any card scheme modifications can be made within the same layer. This allows the merchant to remain compliant within those schemes. By combining all payment data and functionality within one individual layer, compliance functions such as PCI DSS can be supported.
POLs are robust in that they were developed to be “fault-tolerant”, robust, well-protected, and efficient by processing thousands of transactions every second. They were also designed to reduce the possibility of complete outages. It accomplishes this by using cloud-based distribution, resiliency, scalability, and security.
Merchants can rest assured that POLs work to immediately and automatically switch merchants’ transactions from failing or slow payment service providers (PSPs) to other backup PSPs to avoid timeouts, outages, and the dreaded customer cart abandonment.
Increase Conversion Rates With Payments Orchestration
Evidence of a good customer payment experience is marked by a fast, secure, and straightforward experience. Payment platforms must never be unavailable. The entire payment process must be seamless. Most importantly, customers must be allowed to pay in their local currencies, using their most preferred payment method. Using a Payments Orchestration Layer in your business will help you accomplish just that, and so much more.