The intricacies of acquiring and ensuring a smooth customer experience are something that present a constant challenge for retailers, Marc Docherty, Head of UK Acquiring / Large – Strategic Business, Ingenico, writes for PaymentExpert on the process.
With every transaction there are a multitude of different players working tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure the payments are being made quickly, correctly, and securely.
However, with many providers and multiple stages in the process, there remains the possibility of error and/or additional time added to the transaction. This can leave the customer with a poor experience and make them potentially less likely to return.
What’s more, multiple failed transactions could ultimately prove costly for retailers over time. Such businesses are already hard pushed for time and resources as they focus on ensuring their business not only survives but thrives.
Therefore, it is important to understand how they can take the hassle out of managing payment processing, so they are free to focus their attention on providing quality goods and services to their loyal customers.
Simply put, by providing a complete payment solution including acceptance and gateway, advanced acquiring services enables a complete and powerful Omnichannel approach. Retailers now have a seamless payment experience, ensuring transactions are managed safely, quickly and smoothly. Here, I will explain more about how to make this a reality.
The benefits of advanced acquiring for retailers
You will find many providers profess to offer full-service end-to-end payment capabilities. However, very few can turn this into a reality and achieve it. The benefit for retailers of those vendors that do have these capabilities is that they now get the value from revolutionary technologies. This includes consolidated reporting, security control and transparency, and an overall improved service for their customers.
Additionally, true acquirers can provide competitive rates for each transaction made, along with a centralised payment gateway that will handle omnichannel payment transactions from the point of sale to the transaction acquirer. The result is an end-to-end seamless payment solution with simplified integration and certification processing, along with eased reconciliation and fast settlement for retailers.
Multiplication of payment methods requires a partner able to process and centralise all payment methods into the same platform and provide clear monitoring, improving time spent on admin. It’s for this reason the solution provides acceptance in addition to payment processing.
How can advanced acquiring provide flexibility for retailers?
Critically, this type of advanced acquiring offers increased flexibility for retailers in several ways. In terms of cross border capabilities, retailers and brands typically need a local bank account and contract in order to accept local scheme payments.
However, advanced acquirers are able to handle this centrally. This means that for those that want to expand internationally, they can easily accept payments in foreign territories without the stress of managing the process, accessing more than 160 transaction currencies and 21 settlement currencies, as well as quick settlements from D+1.
What’s more, by having access to a gateway that resurrects transactions with the most competitive acquirer for each payment scheme, it ensures a low fee for each transaction. This is key for retailers at a time when it has never been more important to lower costs and protect their bottom line.
With this type of solution, everything is all housed under one roof, meaning all merchant payment needs can be serviced, providing one expert point of contact, making the process as seamless as possible. This ensures a positive experience for the customer.
The platform scales automatically, enabling retailers to deal with large card volumes at any given time. Operated as a managed service, this will significantly optimise acquiring costs, as well as by centralising transactions, simplifying installations, maintenance and international updates, in addition to the guaranteed availability of the entire system.
Consolidating all this information in a single, comprehensive view via an end-to-end solution to cover all payments needs both in-store and online is a key asset for retailers, providing them with full visibility over their processes. This seamless way of operating also ensures all payments are completed through an effective and easy to manage reconciliation process with detailed IC++ reporting, along with an API layer for real time reports.
Finally, with security a bigger concern than ever before, this must be integrated into the technology to avoid negatively affecting the customer journey while respecting its state-of-the-art security process. By simplifying the process, this will result in a faster, secure, and seamless payments process.
Prioritising payments
The aim of offering a service to retailers is to empower them to provide the best service they can to their customers, both online and in store. This means making the payments process as simple and scalable for both. Therefore, our full-service solution is a modular offering that addresses their needs for a more unified experience, including acceptance, payment gateway and acquiring.
This allows businesses to remove added complexity, process all transactions whatever the channel, reduce risk and fraud and improve the user experience. This generates cost savings and maximises profitability by increasing sales and conversion rates.
That’s why instead of trying to do it all themselves retailers should make it a top priority to partner with a competitive acquiring provider who can do this for them ensuring full visibility over the payments process empowering them to manage costs effectively, thereby increasing room for profit and growth.
