Mastercard is taking aim at failed transactions with a new service promising to lift merchant approval rates by up to 15%.
Announced on October 13, the Payment Optimisation Platform (POP) will utilise Mastercard data to perform ‘transactions intelligence’ in order to boost authorisation conversion rates. The service will also integrate AI capabilities shortly after the initial pilot phase.
Payment service providers such as Adyen, Worldpay, Tap Payments and NEOPAY will be the first to integrate POP which Mastercard claims will help them uncover new revenue streams within the first initial phase of its launch.
“The Payment Optimisation Platform is a game-changer – it provides our acceptance community partners with tools and intelligence to deliver the best payment experience and drive higher conversions,” said Sumeet Bhatt, SVP of Payment Optimisation at Mastercard.
“We are excited to continue our pilot program to enable more successful transactions.”
Payment Expert reached out to Mastercard on further details of the pilot phase, with the company stating “(Mastercard) is adding more partners at the moment and the Payment Optimisation Platform is an “on-behalf solution” offered to Mastercard’s acceptance partners. Interested customers should reach out to their Mastercard representative for more information.”
Global approval friction
Mastercard cited limited information and data within acquirers and merchants’ infrastructure as one of the main causes of friction for approval rates.
There is growing demand across the payments industry – from companies such as Mastercard and Adyen – for a unified approach to help merchants optimise conversion rates. Currently, many merchants go through lengthy and costly processes to improve approval outcomes.
Mastercard notes that despite widespread efforts, results have often been limited. The company attributed this to fragmented strategies across its global network, with individual merchants and acquirers relying on proprietary data that lacks the scale needed for meaningful optimisation.
Cutting through the friction with intelligence
Mastercard says it is “uniquely positioned” to access real-time data points, due to its global network of processing billions of transactions.
The POP service intends to streamline this data access approach by evaluating trillions of combinations of data elements to create the best optimal approval rate, with real-time insights into the transaction and its data to merchants.
Mastercard says its optimisation models constantly learn and are being trained on the latest transaction data, which leads to different trends of learning how to optimise the approval rate of said transaction.
A more widespread roll-out of POP will take place later in the year with additional acceptance partners.
