How Can Merchants Make Their Payments More Resilient?

In today's rapidly evolving worldwide landscape, businesses must strengthen their payment infrastructure to cope with foreseeable circumstances. This blog provides valuable insights to achieve that goal. 

Discover why payment resiliency is vital, the hurdles merchants encounter while pursuing it, and effective solutions to overcome those obstacles. Read on for a comprehensive understanding.

Why Build Resiliency in Payments?

Resilience in payments means the ability of the payment system to withstand and adapt to any unexpected events or challenges, such as fraud, the need to scale, and failures, while ensuring a smooth flow of payments.

Here's why digital businesses need to have resilient payment systems:

1. Optimize Transaction Fees

Integrating and relying on a single payment service provider or processor means you'll pay the same fee for every payment, no matter how high. And this transaction fee can quickly add up, especially if you're a small business owner.

However, if you integrate multiple payment gateways, you can compare the prices and choose the service provider with a low transaction fee and higher authorization rates.

Sometimes, a payment processor offers a low transaction fee on a higher volume of transactions, while another charges less for high amount transactions. In that case, you can route specific transactions (high volume or amount) through the most viable option, saving you money.

2. Go Global with Payments

Individual payment processors often have geographical restrictions. It means you can accept payments from customers from specific countries. Because of this, businesses find it hard to sell their products/services in other countries, hindering business expansion.

However, with multiple payment processors at your disposal, you can take your business global. 

Let's say you want to sell your products/service in Japan. You can switch to one of the available options to accept payments from customers in Japan. This not only helps you go global but offers a personalized checkout experience to the customers.

3. Ensure 99.9% Uptime

Payment service providers, such as payment gateways, are digital products and can malfunction, leading to downtime. And if you don't have a backup, you won't be able to accept payments or sell products, for that matter, resulting in revenue loss and poor customer experience.

By adding multiple PSPs, you can deal with the above issue. With multiple options available, if one service provider faces downtime, you can switch to another option with a flick of a button. This way, you can maintain a better uptime and ensure a seamless customer experience.

4. Offer More Payment Methods

When it comes to offering payment methods, customers always want more. Also, if you have customers from different geographies, they will want you to provide the payment methods they use frequently or are familiar with. And that's impossible with a single payment service provider.

Having multiple payment processors or gateways means you can offer various payment methods. This way, you can meet customers' needs and accept payments seamlessly. Also, offering multiple payment methods will help you reduce checkout abandonment and improve conversions. 

5. Fraud Prevention

Different payment service providers do have their fraud prevention techniques. However, not all are reliable. Integrating multiple payment gateways allows you to route transactions via the most secure payment gateway that poses the minimum risk, thus preventing fraud.

6. Future Proof your Payment Stack

With multiple payment methods, the ability to switch payment gateways as and when required, and fraud prevention, you can future-proof your payment stack. Your payment stack can easily tackle multiple challenges without letting your business suffer, offering you a substantial competitive advantage.

What are the Challenges Associated with Building Payment Resiliency?

Merchants can make their payments resilient by integrating multiple payment service providers (gateways) in their business. While this may sound right, integrating various payment gateways brings numerous challenges, such as:

1. Time-Consuming Process

Integrating multiple payment service providers is a challenging task. Every service provider has documentation, which is often challenging to understand. Because of this, it might take several weeks, even months, to integrate multiple gateways successfully. And during that time, you may be unable to accept payments, impacting your revenue.

2. High Engineering Costs

Even if the business can invest the time required into integrating multiple payment gateways, it's not something an inexperienced individual can do. You need qualified engineers who add PSPs or gateways in your payment stack without obliterating the entire payment infrastructure. And hiring qualified engineers costs a lot of money.

3. Analytics Becomes a Hassle 

Suppose you fight through all the challenges and integrate multiple payment gateways. And now, you want to draw insights from payment data to understand which gateways are working the best and which has the best authorization rate, Uptime, and lowest transaction fee. Sadly, you can't do that. Here's why.

Multiple payment gateways mean numerous data sources. And you won't know which to trust. To draw valuable insights from data, you'll have to consolidate it, which is only possible with a payment analytics platform.

So, on top of integrating multiple PSPs, you need an analytics platform, which means more capital investment.

What should businesses do if integrating multiple payment gateways comes with so many challenges? Well, that's when inai comes into the picture. Let's learn how inai can help.

Checkout : How Can Payment Orchestrators Help Merchants Increase Revenue Through Open Banking?

How To Make Payments More Resilient With inai?

inai is a global payment orchestration platform that offers seamless integration with 30+ payment gateways. And with 30+ payment gateway, you can offer 300+ payment methods to your customers globally without hiring engineers.

Once you sign up with inai, you can integrate payment gateways based on your requirements using our dashboard. Also, you can route transactions through the most viable payment gateway based on different parameters, such as authorization rate, transaction cost, currency support, etc., with a flick of a button.

In addition, with inai, payment analytics becomes a breeze. You can view and analyze all your payment data on the dashboard and draw useful insights to make data-driven decisions. Moreover, inai is PCI-DSS compliant, follows all security guidelines, and has an effective fraud prevention system. So you can detect and prevent fraud from happening.

Want to learn more about how inai can help you make your payments more resilient? Book a trial now!