As we brought Payment Optimization to market, we regularly asked ourselves the all-important Why: Why this? Why now?
The short answer is that with the decade of evolution ecommerce has experienced in the last 18 months, firms have rushed to grow their payments functionality and now have the opportunity to tailor that payments ecosystem in innovative ways.
For those who are not already familiar with the concept and our product, Payment Optimization is a no-code payments command center where clients can:
- Tactically and strategically route transactions across any number of gateways, PSPs, and 3rd party APIs
- Keep all card-on-file information automatically up to date across their payments ecosystem
- Increase the types of payment methods accepted, allowing for swift global, horizontal, or vertical expansion
All from VGS, the industry standard in data security and compliance.
The product’s capabilities are almost as numerous and diverse as our clients, but what are some of the big problems we are solving for our clients day by day? To answer that, I direct you to Jordan McKee’s recent article in Forbes, COVID-19 Puts Payments Into Focus For Retailers.
Jordan is the Director of Research for 451 Research at Standard & Poor’s. His article captures (more effectively than your correspondent yet has!) some of the specific pain points we are solving today with Payments Optimization.
1. Fraud is Growing
Over 2/3rds of merchants surveyed indicated increased levels of fraudulent charges and accompanying chargebacks as well as overloaded fraud analysts and false-positive declines.
VGS Payment Optimization provides a single source to deliver 3DS/3DS2 data, ensuring integrity and consistency. All cardholder and transaction data is centralized for use in behavioural fraud analytics. Finally, the platform automatically keeps card information up to date in cases when an expiration or reissuance takes place.
2. Limited Payment Methods Accepted
The surge in ecommerce, online payment methods, and cross-border transactions mean merchants lacking the ability to efficiently accept diverse payment methods will continue to lag.
VGS Payment Optimization comes with Universal Checkout functionality, providing a single, branded checkout experience (drop-in or hosted). This functionality supports all sorts of payment rails (ACH, IBAN, SWIFT, SEPA, push payments, etc.) and new service providers/digital wallets (Apply/Google Pay and regional based service providers).
3. Single Gateway / PSP Dependency
Even a momentary outage in critical payment functions can mean lost revenue and customers. Diversifying providers and building in failover is the only way to hedge these risks.
VGS Payment Optimization eliminates single-provider dependency in a seamless user experience. Swiftly integrate to any number of gateways, PSPs, and 3rd party APIs. From the VGS platform, users can route transactions to a provider of choice based on size, cost, acceptance rates, card-type, MCC, or any other number of characteristics, while building in failover for when the primary gateway is unresponsive.
4. False Declines Persist
False declines due to stale information, aging fraud infrastructure, lack of local acquiring, and more hit top-line and diminish customer confidence.
VGS Payment Optimization has a three-tiered approach to keeping card-on-file information up to date with our Card Account Lifecycle Management (CALM) feature. This is combined with our 3DS/2 support and Network Token functionality to maximize transaction throughput.
5. Disparate Channels = Disparate Data
The growth in order capabilities (online, delivery, store/curbside pickup) left data streams isolated in their channels. 73% of merchants indicated aggregating channel-specific data streams to better understand customers and their business was a high priority for 2021.
VGS Payment Optimization puts your information back in your hands. Your transaction data, across all endpoints, is centralized on the VGS platform. We also enrich the data available with features like BIN data, 3DS fields, and proprietary metadata attributes. The upshot is that data is consolidated, owned by you, and includes more detailed information for each cardholder and transaction than many have thought possible.
These use cases are just the beginning of what clients can do with Payment Optimization. There is a tremendous opportunity to refine and customize a payments environment in ways never before seen with minimal developer work. We at VGS are proud to be making that happen.
Which of these resonate with your business? Maybe you anticipate these problems in the future. In either case, we would love to hear from you.
