Report: Five Payment Services Providers on Serving Merchants’ Global Payment Needs

For many merchants, the prospect of managing the seamless payments consumers want while navigating fraud risk and regulatory compliance is daunting. Acquirers, tasked with facilitating key credit card transactions, must often serve as merchants’ first defense against fraud and inefficiency.

In Enabling Payments In A Global Connected Economy, a PYMNTS and technologi collaboration, we examine the practical challenges facing acquirers and how they can improve user experience outcomes for the merchants they serve. According to our findings, some of the merchants’ most persistent challenges are due to the rapid modernization of the payments space.

The evolution of the global payments ecosystem has altered the way merchants approach transaction management and risk mitigation. Digital transformation is now a permanent characteristic of the retail industry, and advanced technologies have become the principal catalysts of a new age of user experience-focused innovations.

New tools and payment features often add new risks, even as consumers demand the seamless payments they use online at physical stores. While the speed and efficiency of artificial intelligence (AI)-based user authentication and payments processing tools made shopping easier for consumers, it also made it more important for merchants to access the same simple processes for critical tasks like user authentication and suspicious transaction flagging.

Acquirers must address merchants’ desire for a simple process to clear and settle transactions at scale and across multiple devices. Merchants must manage downstream risks, such as foreign exchange (FX) conversion costs and increasingly sophisticated card-not-present (CNP) fraud, all while providing smooth customer payment experiences.

In addition, acquirers are often merchants’ lead resources when it comes to helping merchants find the solutions they need for their current customers and supporting technical strategies for future growth.

Acquirers face the formidable task of making innovation possible by removing the barriers to merchant adoption of new payments technologies. Eliminating these barriers requires improving the technical infrastructure of conventional reserve and holdback processes, making them more transparent for merchants without compromising efficiency or security.

The report examines the range of technical and functional challenges facing merchants attempting to modernize payments through five case studies, featuring insights from North American Bancard, Paya, PNC Treasury Management, Salesforce and Wells Fargo.

Other highlights from the report include:

The risk of noncompliance can multiply exponentially alongside business growth — compliance strategies should be in place long before merchants begin to scale.

Vetting merchants properly requires understanding the entirety of their business models, not merely how fast they are growing. A thorough onboarding process can help identify potentially noncompliant business transactions before they are complete.

Compliance monitoring must be a proactive, continuous exercise, even with existing B2B relationships. The use of enterprise-grade, third-party solutions can streamline compliance monitoring when acquirers prepare to scale.

To learn more about how acquirers can streamline merchant onboarding and offer cutting-edge payment and anti-fraud tools, download the report.