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For the last few months, here at Transact365 we have been focusing on our core message. Internally we talk about globalising payments, localising payments and optimising payments and we’ve grown extremely quickly by sticking to the values that this mantra carries. Every day we consider these 3 pillars of our business and how they can be imparted onto our client base. Localise, Globalise, Optimise.

Whilst localisation and globalising payments remain a technology focused strategy in terms of the acquiring reach of our gateway, it is the optimisation part that has become a real passion for improving payment processing conversion rates within the company. Embracing the challenge of how to optimise a merchant’s traffic has thrown up a new dynamic of communal thought. There is real questioning of how merchant accounts and integrations are setup and ultimately it has yielded astonishing results.

So how would we define optimisation? At Transact365, optimisation is a mutual and ongoing learning process for both us and our merchants to improve, continually, on the transactional flow of our client base. It’s brought the team closer together on an analytical level with our account managers often debating and sharing thoughts whilst sensing an opportunity within the challenge of improving a merchant’s conversion rates. Optimisation for us therefore creates an internal and external cultural identity. Internally it is an enjoyable detective investigation if you will, to uncover a problem based on deep knowledge. Externally it allows us to show how we will categorically improve your global acceptance rates. 

The key to optimisation revolves around understanding the behavioural patterns of merchant category codes and the requirements that issuers have in conjunction with all of the data that they receive. Whilst we reluctantly accept that 100% conversion rates are a nirvana and an unlikely month-long metric, what we do not accept is equal to or sub- standard acceptance rates by industry type because, when they drop below the normalised thresholds, which we monitor daily, we know that something isn’t right.

Quite often the famous error code 5, “Do Not Honour,” tends to be greeted by most IT and support teams with a “please have the cardholder contact the issuer.” This feedback always feels like an easy way to distance the PSP from the responsibility of actually optimising a merchant’s traffic. Over the years I’ve made it something of a mission to look more closely at the Do Not Honour response and whilst I accept that it will form a portion of declines naturally, what I do not accept is that repeated and increasing error code 5s are simply down to the issuer.

Interestingly what we’ve uncovered as the requirements for enhanced data capture come in, is that the declines are more frequently related to the technical setup rather than issuing banks being overly cautious. Within the technical flow we’re talking about a merchant that integrates to a platform that then completes the journey to an acquirer. At times there may even be inter-connecting switch platforms to connect to additional acquirers… That layering yields a huge scope for additional errors. Here at Transact365, we operate directly with acquirers, thus reducing the length of the chain and potential declines. Furthermore, tiny adjustments around the fields and data that are passed and subtle changes to settings within our platform often result in an uplift simply because the issuer is now more satisfied with the information they receive.

As a growing business that we are, Transact365 relies on individual and collective experiences and we have spent significant amounts of time working on the why and the how. Why did it fail and how do we improve it? Crucially it is the outcome of the combination of why and how, that ultimately forms the foundation of our optimisation strategy. Because our account managers are both technically minded, skilled, and driven to optimise, we have seen dramatic uplifts in throughput, whilst still implementing essential fraud tools and running traffic on 3Ds v2.0. A consultative approach to growing our clients’ businesses has allowed our optimisation strategy to thrive. Whether technical, geographical or commercial, this project what has taken us from an average 80% conversion rate on medium and lower risk MCCs into the 90% range whilst maintaining an overall chargeback portfolio of under 0.03% on our book.