COMMENTARY: Five Ways Global Payment Orchestration Is Key to Payment ROI

Payment orchestration has entered a new phase, evolving from a gateway or regional solution to include sophisticated global capabilities and services. This unlocks a set of powerful capabilities that allow businesses to customize on a global scale, turning on and off services by region, product, and sales channel, increasing authorization rates, and eliminating unnecessary fees.

Leveraging this new era of payment orchestration allows businesses to scale globally with ease, reduce technical debt, and build a compelling return on investment for payments.

Here are five ways global payment orchestration is key to payment ROI.

1. Decreased checkout abandonment
   When the checkout experience doesn’t have the shopper’s preferred currencies or payment types, or isn’t a seamless flow, shoppers will abandon the checkout. Global payment orchestration platforms allow businesses to cater to shoppers throughout the world, displaying the right currencies and payment methods for each country or region. Ultimately, this leads to higher checkout conversion, repeat purchases, larger average order size, and positive reviews—which means more revenue.
2. Increased authorization rates
   In our research, 40% of businesses don’t know their authorization rates, so businesses don’t know how much money they are losing. Low authorization rates mean lost sales and revenue. Approvals may seem like a no-brainer— either customers have funds or they don’t—but if you have global customers, there are other factors a bank considers when authorizing a transaction. These include location, transaction value, and/or currency mismatch. What you want is a global payment-orchestration platform with connections to multiple banks within regions and the ability to intelligently route transactions to the bank most likely to approve the transaction. More approvals mean more sales.
3. Reduced payment fees
   Payment fees can add up when global payments are not optimized. Extra fees include charges for multiple gateways or cross-border payments. A true global payment-orchestration platform has all the local banks, payment types, and technology built-in, so there isn’t a need for multiple gateways. When cross-border transactions are routed to the appropriate local card-acquiring region with intelligent payment routing, not only do businesses reduce their cross-border fees (by up to 2%) but also see an increase in authorization rates of 3% to 6%.
4. Enhanced payment analytics
   Taking payments globally can mean reconciliation is a global mess, with multiple statements, currencies, and terminologies. Global payment-orchestration platforms streamline the reconciliation process with enhanced payment-data analytics, synthesized transaction reporting, and a single view of payments across regions. Businesses also gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and payment trends, which can be used to optimize the payment strategy, improve customer experience, and increase revenue. By leveraging data analytics, businesses can gain a competitive advantage, identify new business opportunities, and maximize their payment ROI.
5. Scalability and flexibility
   As businesses grow, their payment needs will change. Global payment orchestration offers scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to add new payment methods, adopt new payment use cases like subscriptions and marketplaces, and expand into new markets. This ensures businesses can continue to offer a wide range of payment options to their customers while also minimizing costs. With the scalability and flexibility of global payment orchestration, businesses can adapt to changing customer needs, increase their customer base, and maximize their payment ROI.

The new generation of global payment orchestration gives businesses a new way to improve their payment ROI. By simplifying technical debt and eliminating the need for multiple payment gateways, businesses have the agility to enable new strategic objectives that increase sales and revenue. In today’s economy, global payment orchestration can be the key to unlocking the much-needed payment ROI many businesses need to stay ahead of the competition and impact their bottom line.

—Ralph Dangelmaier is chief executive of BlueSnap.