Payment consulting for online merchants

We work on the payment setup you already have: what it costs you, what it declines, what it exposes you to, and what it can carry next. Every engagement starts with an audit, never with a recommendation.

Operational optimization

When we advise a management team on the operational efficiency of its payment processes, the ramifications reach every department. So before reaching any specific proposition, we conduct a deep audit of the existing practices and procedures, the technical backend, the integrations, the current processing metrics, the current providers and the current terms, to identify the flaws and the strengths, and to recommend where the improvements are. Once you decide to implement some or all of those recommendations, a roadmap is set and BPY helps implement it within your existing financial and technical ecosystem.

The main areas where we generally focus our attention:

An overall processing strategy

Approval ratio monitoring and optimization, through industry best practice and expert techniques such as BIN routing and management, or MCC comparison.
Retry logic behaviour monitoring.
Chargeback ratio monitoring.
Testing of other optimization opportunities: AVS, device fingerprinting, and more.

Smart backup and cascading strategy

Constant uptime has to be achieved and then held. That comes from reviewing processor contracts and prioritizing those with an SLA, for instance, and from building a comprehensive backup strategy with redundancy at minimum cost.

Retry logic, from the initial strategy to ongoing monitoring

Revenue can be increased by an average of 20% through efficient, adapted retry logic. A great deal is involved: the reason for the decline, the most relevant bank to retry on, the message shown to the customer to maximise conversion after a decline. Compliance with Visa and Mastercard rules has to be monitored alongside, to keep approval ratios high in the long run and the impact on chargebacks minimal.

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Maximizing profits

Clients are generally surprised by how much can be done on their current processes to increase profitability. A few of the fields we look at when we assist a merchant:

Ongoing pricing renegotiation with every processor. A processor will not reject a reasonable request to lower its pricing, and a great deal can be won here.
Interchange fee optimization: local MIDs and level 2 or 3 data, where available, genuinely reduce the interchange and the scheme fees on qualifying transactions, the ones your acquirer passes straight through to you.
Finance and invoice reconciliation: understanding and matching what a processor was expected to charge against what it actually charged.
Traffic routing, cascading and retry logic: see Operational optimization above.

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Expansion strategy

When it comes to a global payment strategy, the right approach is not to implement local payment methods and hope for the best. A lot has to be weighed: whether you need a local entity and the corporate banking that comes with it, the tax implications, or simply knowing which local players are worth partnering with.

BPY Services helps you make those decisions, and makes that global move a success.

A few of the areas where we help an organization, as we do with our clients:

Establishing a smart acquiring strategy

There are important questions to answer, and to keep answering as you grow:

How many acquiring banks should you have in each jurisdiction?
Which ones?
Which alternative payment methods matter most in each geography?
What approval ratio should you expect in the regions you are targeting?
Processing currencies, like-for-like settlement, and the corporate bank accounts that go with them.
Introductions to acquirers, processors and service providers, and help getting approved by them.
A review and validation path for acquirers and payment methods, and help choosing the right third-party providers.
An implementation sequence that avoids mistakes and wasted resources: the providers you choose have to match your exact needs.
Agreement review and redlines on the topics that matter, to limit your exposure, with follow-up legal calls alongside the solution.
Pricing negotiation: we know what these services are worth, and costs come down substantially.

Integration strategy

Full PCI-DSS compliance against a fast integration.
Comparison of centralised gateway providers.
When to integrate directly, and when to consider payment orchestration.
A tokenization strategy with redundancy.

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Minimizing risks

Secure, stable revenue is what lets an organization grow.

It is commonly said that one should not put all one's eggs in one basket. There are several strategies for doing exactly that, and for making each basket as protected as it can be. A merchant should set its own risk policy, and make sure that policy never comes at the expense of revenue.

Some of the points an organization might consider to secure its profitability in the long run:

Refund strategy

Refund policy, customer-service performance monitoring, and implementing the Visa mandate on refunds wherever it is available.

Chargeback strategy

Thorough monitoring of every aspect of chargebacks, using the available data and the relevant reports.
A smart representment strategy, to recover chargebacked funds and save the revenue after a dispute.
VMPI, TC40/SAFE and alerting networks such as Ethoca and Verifi, to avoid the chargeback in the first place.
Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR), a promising evolution of the CDRN system for reducing chargebacks.
A 3DS 2.0 strategy that minimises risk with little or no impact on conversion.
PCI-DSS compliance and certification.

Risk rules

A minimal in-house transaction review before sending, to raise acceptance and avoid chargebacks or poor issuer scoring.
Processing best practice where it applies: authorise with delayed settlement to gather further KYC from the customer, or void a risky transaction rather than refund it and carry the resulting exposure.
A review of processor risk rules and limits, to remove the false positives and the revenue they cost.

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Education

Payment processing is an industry that never stops moving. To keep up with it, the card networks change their rules almost every quarter. Staying on top of that game means your teams have to be trained and kept current, through day-to-day questions and answers, or through real training sessions. BPY can also be mandated to lead calls with providers: the company gets experienced negotiation, the payment team listens in, and the call is debriefed afterwards.

Some of the education work we do for our clients:

Payment processing advisor to management: BPY advises on the orientation to take in the decisions that matter.
Answering the payment team's questions.
Updates on the scheme rule changes that concern you, with recommendations on how to implement them.
Explaining existing and new concepts with a potentially large impact on your operation: PSD2 SCA with 3DS 2.0, PCI-DSS, Verifi, Ethoca, OCT evolutions, representment strategy, CDRN, Rapid Dispute Resolution, and more.

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Optimize your payment strategy. Get in touch.

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