Payments optimisation: How to improve your payments processes

As new payment methods and innovations continue to emerge, businesses - especially enterprise businesses managing payments at scale - face new challenges with accepting, tracking and managing payments while offering their customers comprehensive choice when it comes to how they wish to pay.

What is payments optimisation and who should be thinking about it?

Payments optimisation refers to a business’s strategic approach to managing their payments portfolio. Fundamentally, a business can streamline its payment processes by integrating systems, methods and partners that improve the customer experience, reduce fraud, reduce costs and minimise payment failures. As a result, an optimised payments ecosystem protects revenue and trust in the brand and can directly lead to business growth.

Without a bullet-proof payments strategy, a business risks complicating its payments ecosystem with manual processes and poor risk management, leading to lost revenue and a subpar user experience.

What to consider when optimising your payments strategy

To identify the right payment optimisation strategies to implement for your business, you need to understand the wider payments landscape and identify where friction and risks occur in your own processes. Consider four areas where payments processes can be optimised:

1. Optimise payments for mobile

According to Statista, e-commerce sales in South Africa are growing at 10.42% each year and 77% of consumers make these purchases using a mobile device. Therefore a robust payments optimisation strategy should include supporting mobile-first payment methods.

Mobile-first payment methods include digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Wallet, contactless and QR code payments in-store, and one-click checkout solutions with optimised flows like Pay by bank or card. With Stitch checkout, returning customers can store card or bank details for a faster checkout process whenever they return to the same app or site.  

2. Enhance payments authorisation and real-time fraud detection

Payments authorisation optimisation looks at improving authorisation rates through tools that can secure payments and detect fraud in real-time. Providers like Stitch partner with merchants to enable technology such as dynamic 3D Secure authentication and tokenisation, while ensuring PCI DSS compliance, to help them protect their users’ funds and data, while optimising for conversion.

• 3D Secure (3DS): This key authorisation protocol helps protect online card transactions from fraud by authenticating the cardholder’s identity before processing the payment. As a result, merchants effectively reduce chargebacks and disputes while customers build trust and confidence in the e-commerce platform. With dynamic 3DS, merchants can set their own rules to determine when they'd like to require 3DS authentication, to balance security with a seamless experience
  
• Advanced encryption and tokenisation: Protecting sensitive consumer data is essential to enable secure payments. Tokenisation replaces sensitive data, like credit and debit card numbers, with a unique identifier or token, which is then encrypted. The substitution ensures that the original card information is protected should there be a data breach or unauthorised access to the payment system. It also enables a seamless, one-click payments experience for returning customers
  
• PCI DSS compliance: Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) is mandatory for payment service providers (PSPs) and merchants processing card payments. These international standards ensure compliance with anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC) and other enhanced due diligence regulations. Merchants who choose to process through a PSP should ensure that the provider is certified, relieving them from obtaining their certification.
  

Stitch is PCI DSS Level 1 certified, and we also recently obtained our ISO 27001 certification. Stitch Shield, our proprietary fraud solution, detects and prevents fraudulent transactions based on custom rules and criteria.

3. Automate payments processes

By automating payments processes, you can streamline operations, remove complexities and reduce risks that could deter customers or place unnecessary strain on your back-office teams. One way to achieve automated payments is by using a dedicated orchestration solution that can help your finance teams manage and track payments, as well as access standardised reporting and reconciliation in a centralised, intelligent platform. The platform should apply smart routing to reduce payment failures, alert your teams to suspicious transactions and centralise reporting across all payment methods.

Key benefits of payments automation include:

• Enhanced fraud prevention and detection
• Lower admin burden
• Reduced costs, particularly by limiting human error
• Better customer experience
• More secure and efficient transactions

4. Unify the payments experience across all sales channels

Synchronising customer data, orders, product information and payment experiences on a centralised platform can help to ensure a consistent experience for your customers, particularly in spaces where unified omnichannel experiences are key to conversion.

Having clean and reliable data in one place provides a comprehensive view of your operations and customer behaviour, and reduces admin steps required from customers, allowing you to make better decisions that boost revenue and growth.

How can businesses measure the success of their payment optimisation strategies?

Here are a few ways merchants continue to monitor their payments processes and ensure payments are optimised across the customer journey:

• Monitor transaction success rates. If you have optimised for multiple payment methods such as card, Pay by bank and digital wallets, for example, and you have enhanced the checkout process to ensure it is seamless both on desktop and mobile, keep an eye on transaction success rates. Look in particular at where any customers are dropping off during the payments process. This could be a sign that customers are getting confused at a certain step, or there’s a problem with a particular bank or provider, requiring further optimisation.
  
• Monitor customer queries. You should be able to see a decline in enquiries related to transaction issues coming from your customers if the payments experience is operating at peak optimisation. Transparency in the payment and order processing process, as well as real-time success or failure notifications, should make it easier for your customers to understand if their transaction went well or not, and if they can expect their order to be processed, encouraging checkout completion.
  
• Monitor chargebacks and fraud. Implementing strong security solutions, and amping up fraud monitoring and prevention strategies, will help keep illegitimate transactions to a minimum and result in reduced chargeback requests for unauthorised transactions.

How can enterprises get started with payments optimisation?

The Stitch API and payment gateway can help enterprise merchants in South Africa achieve payment optimisation through purpose-built, customisable online payments solutions, a unified dashboard and reporting solution and a robust fraud detection offering.

Our one-click pay-ins solutions enable enterprises to accept payments from returning users with minimal friction, resulting in more successful transactions and higher conversion.

All transactions can be monitored automatically through our dashboard, with standardised reporting. With payment automation, refunds and withdrawals can also be initiated over API with our 24/7, 365 Payouts solution.

Get in touch with our sales team to see how Stitch can help you optimise your backend payment processes at scale.