Every failed transaction represents lost revenue for today’s commerce businesses; whilst successful transactions have a cost.
That has thrown the spotlight on how payments actually route, because modern payment systems must do more than simply process transactions. They must be responsive to business strategy, third-party processing fees and market conditions to maximize approvals, control costs, protect uptime and improve latency across the whole ecosystem from online to in-person to unattended.
Performance varies because the issuer, acquirer, card type, payment method, transaction channel and geography of each payment all affect whether a transaction is approved and at what cost. Those conditions are not static. A route that performs well today may deliver a different approval rate, cost or level of availability tomorrow.
Businesses that can instantly manage these variances across different payment flows, volumes and multiple markets, will find that every marginal improvement in acceptance rates or transaction costs quickly adds up to significant commercial gains.
Sweating the small percentages
Payment performance optimization starts with taking control of how payments move. The optimal route depends on what the business needs to achieve. For one transaction, the priority may be securing an approval; for another, it may be controlling processing costs, balancing volume across providers or maintaining resilience.
That means routing transactions based on business rules, card type, amount, channel, geography, cost, volume distribution, ecommerce versus card-present activity, metadata and acquirer or processor availability. And it means responding in real time to performance signals like decline rates to keep approvals high and costs low.
When conditions change, the routing strategy can change with them. If one provider’s performance deteriorates, transactions can be redirected, volumes redistributed or payments sent through the route most likely to secure an approval.
It also means being able to see what’s happening under the hood. Approvals, costs and performance across every acquirer and channel, in person, online and unattended, can be brought together into a single real-time view rather than reconstructed from separate reports after the fact.
The outcomes this enables look different in every environment, but the principles are the same: when performance can be optimized, payments cease to be a cost center and become a revenue lever instead.
In parking, more sessions turn into collected revenue because every transaction has multiple paths to approval; fewer legitimate payments are lost to processor issues. At the forecourt, pumps keep selling and EV drivers keep charging even when systems fail. In vending, where the whole sale rides on a single tap, it means capturing more sales on the first attempt and defending thin margins with least-cost routing.
Why finding the optimal path feels like searching for a needle in a payment stack
Every payment has an optimal path, but identifying that path in real time and across hundreds of parameters is impossible with the fragmented payment stacks facing most commerce businesses.
Complexity makes the overall payment estate hard to manage, and revenue slips away through declines, downtime and operational inefficiency. Visibility is obscured where it’s needed most and optimizing outcomes gets harder still.
This status quo has become untenable in the era of omnichannel commerce, which is why businesses are turning to payment orchestration.
One layer, every payment
TNS optimizes the entire payment ecosystem from a single platform, API, and dashboard across in-store, unattended and online environments. Each payment is automatically sent down the path that best supports the business’s objectives, accounting for current performance, availability and cost.
The result is fewer failed payments, lower fees and considerably less complexity. And our approach doesn’t stop at software and card-not-present payments, because only by giving every transaction its best possible outcome, can businesses improve performance, simplify operations, and unlock growth.
That’s orchestration that performs online and where payments are most complex: in-store, unattended and at scale. And that’s where, for a growing number of commerce businesses, the real optimization opportunity lies.
The next article in this series explores how payment orchestration helps more parking sessions end in a completed payment.
Learn more at https://payments-marketing-team.foleon.com/po-campaign/payment-orchestration/