What happens in 336 ms? The journey of a payment transaction

What can you do in 336 milliseconds? Blink once – and that’s about it.

And yet, 336 milliseconds is the average time Checkout.com takes to authorize a payment.

As I covered in my talk at Thrive Barcelona 2024, there’s a lot behind the scenes of that blink-of-an-eye moment: over 600 technology experts from Checkout.com, in-house built machine learning algorithms, and dozens of specialized services ensuring your payment request is secure and successful. 

Here’s an overview of the stages:

1. Edge gateway: This is the first line of defense, with DDOS prevention to prevent malicious traffic and rate limiting to ensure the system is protected.
2. Access: We validate the API keys to ensure the user is allowed to access the system and we assign the right privileges into the scope.
3. Gateway: Gateway is the main orchestrator that will call all other services in the platform and look after the lifecycle of the transactions. As part of this process it will call other products like the Vault, Fraud Detection Pro or Card Info API to enrich the authorisation request during processing.
4. Intelligent Acceptance: Our in-house AI platform that learns from 8.5 petabytes (that’s 8500 terabytes) of data to adjust hundreds of optimizations within the transaction to maximize the acceptance rate and overcome any potential issues.
5. Authentication: When applicable, the payment is either authenticated using available data, an exemption is applied, or the customer is asked to authenticate.
6. Financial impact API: Ensures the funds are available to you as soon as the payment is authorized.

Our network of payment data improves your payment performance

Your business may have lots of data about your customers – but we can access far more. Let’s look at the benefits of our secure data networks:

Better visibility for fraud prevention 

When you send a payment request through, you’ll get a response back that includes the transaction status, fund value captured, customer name, and payment method used. You can use this data to run loyalty programs, make marketing decisions, and forecast revenue figures. How about fraud, though? You can only access a limited dataset to assess the legitimacy of a payment attempt.

When it comes to detecting fraudulent online transactions, we can detect velocity, location, and related data from the same payment instrument across our network. We aggregate data from payment cards and devices as they’re used across multiple merchants to gain a deep understanding of customer and merchant behavior.

That means we detect a credit card payment from a customer in China – but the same digital wallet was used one minute prior in the UK – we can flag that as a fraud signal.

Smart payment routing

We know what it takes to get a payment request accepted. And our machine learning algorithms learn to do it better minute by minute. We have developed hundreds of network optimizations that Intelligent Acceptance leverages to navigate complex scenarios and find the right path for acceptance. We improve the ratio of attempted-versus-accepted payments by choosing optimal payment paths informed by real-time data.

When issuer A accepts transaction requests containing the customer’s delivery address more often, we’ll format future requests accordingly. When issuer B rejects payment requests without certain required data , the engine learns to pull this data and include it. This is how we chase basis points and drive digital commerce.

The more of our payment technology you have access to, the better your payment performance will be. And the network effect is huge: with every transaction we process the, more powerful our algorithms become. This ensures the benefits of machine learning and AI apply to everyone connected to our system.

Modular payments technology for your business

When business products and services are only available as a single, gigantic package, we know it can cause frustration. We want to equip you to build the custom tech stack that suits your exact business. In short: modularity is everything. This aligns with our principles on how we build products and technology. For instance, Checkout.com Authentication is available as a standalone product that readily fits in with your modular payments strategy.

We develop our payment technologies and services to provide you power with freedom; that means we have all the tools that you need, yet you choose which ones to use and how to deploy them in your business. We will always help you get the best out of our platform and build solutions that fit your business in the best possible way.

We know your business needs a custom strategy to succeed. That’s why our Payment Success Managers dive so deep into specific payment flows to identify opportunities. We’re committed to providing the tools, technology and expertise you need to power your payment performance. That means we’ll help you process payments that are secure, compliant, and convenient for customers. Ultimately, what we want is to drive a better acceptance rate for you and better performance for your customers. Nothing matters more to us than your performance.