When better managed, payments offer any company the additional opportunity to transform more users, build trust with their customers and even generate new revenue

KPIs in payments, a key element to never lose a sale again

In order to improve your payment performance, it is necessary to understand your customers’ profiles and behaviors as well as your providers’ risk profiles, looking at it from the gateway to the issuing bank.

If you are not yet familiar with payment ecosystem here are a few articles which will make you a payment nerd in seconds:

• The secret life of a transaction
• The Payment Crew
• Payment fees at a glance

Key Metrics to watch

When talking about monitoring and analytics it is important to first define the KPIs that matter the most. Each business has its own specificities but usually have a common base with essential metrics.

• Authorization rate
• Cost per transaction
• Chargeback ratio and 3DS activation rate

With only those 3 standards metrics you have the right elements to start analyzing your payments and will soon be able to leverage this data to boost your performance.

Few examples of how to leverage those metrics

It is now time to dive into the power of payment analytics.

Authorization Rate

It tells you a lot of things when you know what you should be looking at. Here are 3 examples about how you cloud analyze your Authorization Rate :

• A bad AR for a specific issuing bank might tell you that this specific bank is struggling to assess the risk profile of your transactions. It might come from the fact that your acquirer or you are not sending enough information or security to the issuing bank, or that your risk profile or even your acquirer’s risk profile with this specific issuing bank is not good

• A bad AR for a specific country might tell you that your acquirer might not be the most relevant for this country so it could be interesting to explore a new local acquirer.
• Last example, a bad AR for high amount transaction values might tell you that your acquirer risk model could not be the best fit for your business type or that you should send more information regarding your transaction details.

Fees

The cost per transaction is easier to understand as the only point of attention is the variation of the cost depending on the transaction parameters.

• If you are observing a high cost per transaction it might come from the region where you are selling your products or because of the type of card used by the buyer (i.e. when you have an IC++ pricing, business cards will definitely cost more than the consumer ones) so you might want to integrate alternative payment solutions like SEPA to avoid high fees or local acquirers.

• On the other hand, paying more fees could also benefit your business! Indeed, adding alternative payment solutions that are more expensive can also bring you more sales as new users will probably select APMs to feel more secure when buying online and thus bring new sales.

Chargeback ratio and 3DS activation rate

3-D Secure helps online merchants shift the risk of each transaction on the issuing bank (note that the Reviewed Payment Service Directive -PSD2- introduced 3DS2). This is a powerful tool to drastically reduce fraud but at the same time can lead to a lower conversion rate as it adds other steps in the checkout process.

As a merchant being able to monitor your 3DS activation rate and your customers’ profile is key to find the right balance between security and conversion.

• Monitoring a high 3ds activation rate for a certain product/service can help you identify the need to integrate a new provider who knows how to accept riskier transactions
• If you are observing a high chargeback ratio, for certain countries you can think of adding fraud detection rules, fraud-score based 3DS activation or even an external solution focused on your industry

Those were only a few takeaways that show how much information and actionable insights you can deduce from your payment data. It is even more interesting to be able to use your data to create custom charts that will serve your business specificities around payment.

If you want to get a first audit of your payments and start monitoring your data feel free to reach out, we developed an amazing Data Explorer tool which works with no technical integration! Isn’t it magic?