Among the key advantages of payments orchestration — which allows merchants and platforms to connect to any combination of payment service providers (PSPs) through a single application programming interface (API) connection — are higher conversion rates and enhanced customer satisfaction.
As Spreedly Head of Product Andy McHale told PYMNTS in an interview, payments orchestration can also improve the security of the transactions themselves.
The conversation took place against a backdrop in which Spreedly reported a 300% year-over-year increase in use of the company’s connection to fraud vendors to prevent fraud.
Read more: Spreedly Use Up 300% by Retailers for Fraud Prevention
The positive ripple effects, he added, mean that more good transactions get through the company’s “funnel” and chargebacks decline, but merchants who connect through a single API and to Spreedly’s platform can choose the solutions they need to optimize both the customer journey and their own back-office defenses.
Using advanced technologies in constructing those defenses is critical, as fraud itself is getting more complex. Merchants must contend with account takeovers, with synthetic identity fraud, with (more recently) incidents in which bad actors are abusing promotions and loyalty programs. And, as always, some of the more basic, tried-and-true fraud attacks remain evergreen.
Basic Attacks and Complex Ones Too
“Some of these attacks are pretty basic, where the fraudsters have a list of stolen credit cards, and they may be trying to get goods shipped to a P.O. box,” McHale said.
Orchestration, he said, enables access to the right mix of services to help catch the full range of fraud attempts. It’s when the fraud gets sophisticated that this access to a comprehensive mix of tools, that the platform becomes especially valuable — where, for instance, fraudsters’ own high-tech tools will impersonate machines and “reasonable IP addresses.”
It’s not too far-fetched to see a session coming from Vermont, but the browser is in Russian, which is why the platform approach and seeing — in McHale’s estimation that “the pieces of a transaction fit,” — can take the mystery out of a transaction’s legitimacy.
Many merchants, he said, as they become more fully digital in their channels and embrace eCommerce more than ever before, might not know the extent of their vulnerabilities. For many of those companies, perhaps, eCommerce was a small part of their business before the pandemic, but coming into 2022, eCommerce is now the bulk of the top line.
Beyond routing payments through the most efficient and fastest routes and to the correct gateways, McHale said that orchestration can also “layer” in multiple anti-fraud vendors and services like vaulting for those merchants who wish to reduce their payment card industry (PCI) scope.
“Fraud vendors obviously are prevalent out there and have [many] different [areas of] expertise,” said McHale.
By choosing among a suite of offerings and using the strengths of the platform, “this helps the merchants focus on their core businesses,” he said. “If a merchant [can significantly reduce their PCI scope], … it takes a huge burden off their engineering teams, the info security teams and other staff.”
The company said earlier this year that it launched a new professional services organization. Among the services offered: implementations, integrations and tech migrations.
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