One of the most vital elements of a successful scaling up of a company to international climbs is the ability to tailor your payments needs to your new markets. Payment acceptance is at the core of commercial capability and getting the best deal – or even a good deal – is difficult because of the niche and opaque nature of the payments landscape. What you need to bear in mind is that the typical single-acquirer model that most merchants operate with is fundamentally ill-suited to giving a competitive rate on international payments acceptance.
The reason for this is that cross-border payments incorporate various additional elements of complexity that serve as potential reasons for acquirers to hike up their rates. These can include costs for currency conversion, perceived increased risk of international payments, but overwhelmingly acquirers put these prices up because they can. Most merchants looking to expand into new international markets simply do not understand their payments acceptance options well enough to look for alternatives, or they are so fully engaged with the other challenges of expansion that exploring new options is not a leading priority.
If they had the time and appetite to explore properly they would discover that integration with multiple acquires, particularly those local to their new markets, can dramatically increase conversion rates of transactions as well as save money on FX and basic payments acceptance. It is just good business sense not to leave yourself immured with a single provider of such a fundamental service, diversification drives competition and the more acquirer integrations you can get the more you drive competition and consequently competitive pricing.
So, how can merchants integrate multiple gateways and acquirers into their payments suite without having to spend large amounts of time, energy and money in entering into negotiations themselves? This is where APEXX can help. A single integration into the APEXX gateway gives access to multiple gateways and acquirers. Further to this, the dynamic routing function of the APEXX Optimizer gives merchants the functionality of choosing to route transactions to the most appropriate acquirer according to whatever criteria they choose. So if merchants wish to route domestic transactions to their existing domestic acquirers whilst routing international transaction to the local acquirer with the best conversion rates they can do just that. This functionality can be permutated to include acquirers with the best FX capabilities by currency, or route the transaction by APM (alternate payment method) acceptance rate, the possibilities are myriad and are all achievable through a single integration.
All of this is finally reconciled to a single unified reporting interface, allowing in-depth analytics of this complex process in one single comprehensible report allowing you to properly analyze your payments performance. Understanding your payments acceptance options is central to maximizing your expansion potential.
