Three Things You Need to Know About Open Payments

Open payments have become a necessity for eCommerce businesses. With more payment options than ever, customers expect the businesses they patronize to accept their preferred methods. No matter how niche the option, payment platforms must be equipped to accommodate it or risk losing valuable customers.

While open payments connectivity sounds complicated on the surface, its benefits can be boiled down to three simple facts. First, open payments keep businesses safe and running smoothly. Second, they optimize transaction processing. Third, they allow merchants to take full advantage of open banking protocols.

• Open Payments Safeguard Businesses From Outages
• Open Payments Optimize Transaction Processing
• Open Payments Empower Merchants to Make Full Use of Open Banking
• Unlocking Merchant Potential Through Open Payments

Open Payments Safeguard Businesses From Outages

Service outages can be devastating for small businesses, as customers are unlikely to wait for systems to come back online. The connectivity provided by open payments allows transactions to be seamlessly rerouted, keeping businesses up and running.

Downtime costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

$400B

Annual cost of system downtime or service degradation to Global 2000 companies

One study found that downtime and service degradation cost Global 2000 companies $400 billion annually. This is to say nothing of the costs of downtime for smaller businesses. Compounding these financial impacts are the expenses companies incur repairing customer relationships. Global 2000 chief marketing officers report spending an average of $14 million annually on brand trust campaigns and another $13 million on public and investor relations.

While smaller businesses may not invest as heavily in such campaigns after downtime, they feel losses just as keenly if their customers abandon them. Merchant aggregators can help protect their merchants from these risks by reducing downtime through open payments protocols.

The recent CrowdStrike outage illustrates the far-reaching consequences of a single point of failure.

The July outage was dubbed “the worst IT outage in history,” affecting banks, airlines, hospitals, fast food chains, retailers — essentially any business using CrowdStrike software on the Microsoft Windows platform. While not directly related to payments, the outage serves as a stark warning to aggregators relying on a single payments gateway: A significant service disruption could cripple operations for every merchant partner. This highlights the need for open payments platforms. These platforms dynamically reroute transactions through alternative gateways, sidestepping this single point of failure and keeping merchants operating at full capacity.

Open Payments Optimize Transaction Processing

Implementing open payments streamlines and accelerates transaction processing. It also provides merchants with a significant competitive edge by helping them lower costs and avoid transaction fees.

Open payments help merchants avoid transaction fees.

Transaction fees and authorization rates differ not only across payment gateways but also by country of origin and the currency involved. This means that using a single gateway for all payments can lead to burdensome and unpredictable costs, depending on the customer mix at any given time. Open payments platforms can be configured using the transaction fee for each payment type based on a mix of variables to route them through the gateways with the lowest expected costs. This approach reduces merchants’ fees and leads to increased margins.

16%

of consumers say payment methods influence their purchase decisions.

Improving payments processing leads to increased sales.

A PYMNTS Intelligence study revealed that 16% of consumers said payment methods influenced where they made their most recent purchases. This underscores that retailers who fail to adapt to evolving consumer preferences risk losing a substantial share of their customers. Open payments platforms offer one of the most efficient solutions for ensuring that customers can access their preferred payment methods. This in turn can help merchants compete more effectively for limited customer attention and ultimately drive higher sales.

Open Payments Empower Merchants to Make Full Use of Open Banking

Open payments platforms provide the essential connectivity merchants need to leverage open banking. This integration creates new opportunities for businesses to boost revenue by offering enhanced financial services within their applications.

Open payments unlock the benefits of open banking for merchants.

46%

of U.S. adults are highly willing to adopt open banking payment methods.

Spreedly President Peter Dougherty noted in an August interview that open payments and open banking go hand in hand. Open payments can organically integrate open banking APIs, enabling merchants to use value-added features like saved payment capabilities or customer data tracking. This offers customers a more personalized and streamlined payments experience, promoting brand loyalty and driving higher revenue for the business.

Consumers express high demand for open banking products.

A PYMNTS Intelligence study found that 46% of American adults are highly willing to adopt open banking payment methods for at least one transaction. Interest levels are highest for using open banking payments for monthly bills (40%), followed by groceries (35%) and subscriptions (33%). In addition, 26% of customers who already use open banking payments would consider switching businesses or service providers to access these payment options. These findings highlight the potential value of open banking for merchants, which merchant aggregators can tap into by enabling open payments platforms.

Unlocking Merchant Potential Through Open Payments

Merchant aggregators can greatly benefit from adopting open payments to streamline their operations and enhance the services they provide to merchants. By implementing an open payments platform, aggregators can offer their merchant customers a unified interface for managing multiple payment gateways, methods and currencies. This centralized approach simplifies payment integrations, allowing merchants to add new payment options easily or expand into new markets without increasing operational complexity. Consequently, merchant aggregators can attract and retain more merchants by offering a flexible, scalable payment infrastructure that adapts to diverse business needs.

Moreover, the connectivity enabled by open payments allows merchant aggregators to optimize transaction processing and introduce advanced payment features like open banking payments. Merchants can intelligently route transactions through different gateways based on factors such as transaction size or customer location, potentially increasing acceptance rates and reducing costs. By offering these same services as a value-add for their merchant customers, aggregators can enhance the payment experience for their merchants’ customers while creating new revenue streams through premium features like advanced analytics or specialized routing rules.

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