Merchant Services
Merchant Account Opening
We can connect your operation to our network of Acquiring banks and processors which includes the vast majority of European, US and Asian Acquirers to give your organization all of the available relevant options.
Based on your activity and your current operational state, we can suggest and introduce you to relevant service providers which can prove essential to a rapid yet stable growth
Expansion Strategy
When it comes to establishing a global strategy for your payments, the right approach is not to implement the local payment methods and hope for the best. Many aspects need to be considered, like the need for a local entity and its corporate banking, the tax implications, or just knowing the best local players to partner with for instance.
BPY Services can assist you in making the right decisions and make that global endeavor a success.
See below just a few of the areas where we can help your organization as we do with our clients:
-
Establishing a smart Acquiring strategy. You must answer very important questions and dynamically evolve along the way:
-
How many Acquiring banks should you have in each jurisdiction?
-
Which ones?
-
Which are the most important Alternative Payment Methods in each Geo?
-
What kind of performance is to be expected with the approval ratio in the targeted regions?
-
-
Processing currencies, like to like settlements with relevant corporate bank account opening
-
Introduction to Acquirers, processors, and service providers and help getting approved by them
-
Funnel for the Acquirer/Payment methods review and validation and help choose the relevant third-party service providers
-
Funnel of implementation steps to avoid mistakes and waste of resources. You must ensure the chosen providers match your exact needs
-
Agreements review and redlines on important topics to minimize Company exposure and assist with legal follow up calls with the solutions
-
Pricing negotiation: We have the experience of the right price to pay for the services and can help drastically reduce costs
-
Integration strategy:
-
Full PCI-DSS compliance requirement vs fast integrations
-
Centralized gateway providers comparison
-
When should you do a direct integration or consider a Payment Orchestration solution?
-
Tokenization strategy with redundancy
-
Maximizing Profits
Clients are generally surprised by how much can be done on their current processes to increase their profitability. See below a few of the fields we consider when assisting our merchants:
-
Ongoing pricing renegotiation with all processors. Processors will not reject a reasonable request to lower the pricing and a lot can be achieved here
-
Interchange fees optimization: Local MIDs and level 2 or 3 data when available can really reduce the Interchange and the Scheme fees of qualifying transactions which acquirers are passing through to you
-
Finance - Invoice reconciliation: understanding and matching expected and actual charges from processors
-
Traffic routing, Cascading and Retry logic (see Operational Optimization)
Minimizing Risks
Secure and Stable revenues are key to an organization growth.
It is commonly said that one should not “put all his eggs in one basket”. Indeed, there are several strategies to do just that and make sure that each “basket” is as protected as possible. Merchants should establish their own Risk policy and make sure that this policy do not come at the expense of the revenue.
Here are some important points your organization might consider in order to secure its profitability in long run:
-
Refund strategy (Refund policy, Customer service performance monitoring, implementing the Visa mandate on refunds where available)
-
Chargeback Strategy:
-
Thorough monitoring of all aspects of the chargebacks using available data and relevant reports
-
Implementing a smart Representment strategy to retrieve chargebacked transaction funds and save revenue after a dispute.
-
VMPI, TC40/SAFE, and other alerting networks like Ethoca and Verifi implementation to avoid chargebacks in the first place
-
Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR): A very promising evolution of the CDRN system to reduce chargebacks.
-
3DS 2.0 strategy to minimize risk with minimal or no impact on conversion
-
PCI-DSS compliance and certification
-
-
Risk rules:
-
Implementation of minimal inhouse transaction review before sending to increase acceptance and avoid chargebacks or bad issuer scoring
-
Transaction processing: Implementing best practices like (where applicable) Auth with delayed Settle to gather additional KYC from the customer or Void the risky transactions instead of refunding them and bear the resulting exposure.
-
Processors Risk rules and limits review and optimization to avoid false positive and revenue loss
-
Operational Optimization
When we advise the Management team on ways to improve the operational efficiency of the payment processes, there are potential ramifications across all departments and therefore before reaching any specific proposition, we first conduct a deep Audit of the existing payment practices and procedures, technical backend, integrations, current processing metrics, current providers, current terms etc. to identify flaws and strengths and provide recommendations on potential improvements. Once a decision is made to implement some or part of the recommendations, a roadmap is set and BPY will help implement them in accordance with the current financial and technical ecosystem.
The main areas of improvement where we generally focus our attention are:
-
An Overall Processing Strategy:
-
Approval ratios monitoring and optimization through industry best practices and expert techniques such as BIN routing & management or MCC comparison.
-
Retry logic behavior monitoring
-
Chargeback ratio monitoring
-
Other testing of optimization opportunities (AVS, device fingerprint, etc.)
-
And much more
-
-
Smart Backup & Cascading strategy: We must achieve and ensure constant uptime. This is achieved through Processors contracting review (prioritizing processors with SLA for instance) and the elaboration of a comprehensive backup strategy with redundancy at minimum cost
-
Retry logic initial strategy and ongoing performance monitoring. Revenue can be increased by an average of 20% through efficient and adapted Retry logic. A lot of aspects are involved, such as the reason for the decline, most relevant bank to retry the transaction, the message to give to the end-users to ensure maximum conversion after a decline etc. We should also need to monitor for compliance with Visa/MC rules to ensure highest approval ratios in the long run as well as minimum impact on chargebacks
The payment processing arena is an ever-evolving industry with many innovations. In an effort to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape, the Card Networks or Schemes change their rules almost on a quarterly basis. In order to be on top of the payment game, your teams must be properly trained and educated. This is achieved by day to day assistance through questions/answers or actual training sessions. BPY can also be mandated to lead phone calls with providers so that while the Company benefits from the experienced negotiation, the payment team listens to the call which can also be debriefed to answer questions afterward.
Below are some of the Education related tasks we offer to our clients:
-
Payment processing Advisor to the Company Management: BPY will advise Management with best orientation in crucial decision making
-
Answer questions of the Payment team
-
Updates on relevant Schemes rule changes and recommendations on implementation
-
Explanation of existing and new concepts with a potentially large impact on your operation like: PSD2 SCA with 3DS 2.0, PCI-DSS, Verifi, Ethoca, OCT evolutions, Representment strategy, CDRN, Rapid Dispute Resolution etc.