The rise of the digital economy continues to unlock opportunities for businesses to break free from geographical boundaries and tap into a vibrant global marketplace. Yet, while the promise of selling globally is tantalizingly within reach, legacy frameworks and foundations are prone to preventing even the most ambitious companies from realizing their cross-border ambitions.
That’s where Reach comes in. Reach is a payments platform that simplifies how businesses sell cross-border and empowers its customers to stay local and sell globally. It acts as the Merchant of Record for its clients across 170 markets. This enables the clients' customers to unlock local acquiring, eliminating the complexity and expense of setting up local entities.
As a fellow innovator striving to empower businesses and their communities to thrive in the digital economy, Checkout.com has much in common with Reach. These shared ambitions—combined with Checkout.com's belief in an open ecosystem—have led the two companies to join forces, with Reach leveraging Checkout.com's Intelligent Acceptance solution to drive optimized payment performance for the businesses it serves.
Here are some results Intelligent Acceptance has delivered so far:
Payments are a game of iterative gains where small incremental improvements can drive a significant impact. Impact that extends to the bottom line. It's a game Melissa Pottenger, VP of Payment Operations at Reach, is acutely aware of and one that she's determined to win for Reach's clients.
"Our clients expect Reach to deliver high authorization rates; it's core to our offering," says Pottenger. "That's why we're working with Checkout.com and leveraging Intelligent Acceptance. It allows us to unlock performance improvements like no other solution on the market."
Since going live, the authorization rate of payments processed on Checkout.com's rails has increased by over 9.5%. "In a game where small improvements drive big impact, this performance improvement is colossal for our business and, crucially, for our client's bottom line," Pottenger adds.
Intelligent Acceptance delivers these results by analyzing billions of data points across the Checkout.com ecosystem and leveraging sophisticated machine learning to route payments optimally for performance, cost and compliance.
Here is more detail on how Reach has benefited from Intelligent Acceptance.
Few businesses escaped the frustrations caused by the introduction of SCA. Reach was no exception. As a Merchant of Record, accepting payments for many businesses across Europe, Reach couldn't take a one size fits all approach to SCA. The challenge was compounded by the disparate implementation of the requirements and risk appetite of Issuers across Europe.
"Our customer's revenue was at risk so we knew a robust solution was required to address this challenge," says Pottenger.
With Intelligent Acceptance, Reach found a solution to this challenge. The solution checks each transaction automatically to identify if 3DS is required. And, if 3DS has not been triggered in the payment request, available 3DS authentication data is automatically added to the payment request to ensure the transaction is compliant and is completed successfully.
Network Tokens are an innovative tool that allows merchants to increase authorization rates, protect against fraud, and reduce payment costs while improving the customer experience.
The problem is they can be complex to deploy for merchants operating in multiple markets—like the merchants that Reach serves. That's because issuer adoption of Network Tokens isn't uniform. Some have enabled Network Tokens, while others haven't and using Network Tokens with an issuer that hasn’t enabled them will mean that a transaction will fail. So without precise insight into issuer readiness, merchants roll the dice every time they process using Network Tokens.
Intelligent Acceptance solves this complexity by continuously experimenting and learning from transaction data to find which issuers support Network Tokens. That way, Network Tokens can be used wherever they are supported. And, if they fail, automated fallback capabilities will retry the transaction with PAN details keeping authorization rates high and transaction fees low.
These capabilities have been vital for Reach in delivering lower costs and higher approval rates to its merchants.
As Pottenger explains, “With Network Tokens, we can know that we are meeting the latest security standards without hampering performance or increasing the cost of a transaction. And, most importantly, our merchants can also give their customers the best seamless experience because no matter if a card is compromised or expires, their transactions will be successful for the duration of the token.”
When creating an optimized payment experience, businesses need to take advantage of industry-wide data and make unique situational improvements. To do this, you need a partner that can offer expert advice but also roll up their sleeves and look beneath the hood.
“The access that we have had to a team of payments experts through Checkout.com has meant that Intelligent Acceptance has been more than a solution,” says Pottenger. “We’ve been able to customize everything and have bespoke configurations—including SCA management, consulting on our API payloads and efforts to understand our needs overall and customize accordingly. We now have a suite of optimization tools uniquely shaped to meet the needs of our business.
Checkout.com has also looked at our data and found specific optimizations accordingly—this is a game changer when compared to providers that only do broad optimizations on an aggregate level.”
This level of partnership has meant that not only are the big fixes taken care of, but also those that take place on a granular level. She cites an example of a prominent retailer, which Reach now routes to Checkout.com. “We received fantastic information from Checkout.com on how to optimize some of our transaction information,” says Pottenger. These recommendations centered on payment messaging to help ensure all fields in the payment load had the best descriptions based on scheme and issuer preferences. After implementing the recommended changes, we saw as much as a 17% approval rate improvement across a range of currency and card combinations.”
Pottenger concludes, "Having Checkout.com by our side to dig into code, scrutinize our sending process, and offer suggestions for improvement—that's priceless."
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