Three opportunities to optimize payments and drive value for your business

1. Comprehensive statement analysis

Merchant processing statements are often confusing by design. It takes an expert’s eyes to spot miscellaneous charges, buried mark-ups and misleading contract terms. On top of that, transaction downgrades—which are largely preventable—raise rates and limit opportunities for optimization. Identifying hidden fees and following best practices to prevent downgrades are two easy and effective ways to save your business money.

How to win: Partner with a payment provider that offers consultative services and value estimation tools to calculate total savings. Their expertise can help you analyze merchant statements and find buried interchange markups, hidden fees and punitive terms.

2. Authorization optimization

Payment optimization is complex. Business owners may understand the potential for cost savings but lack the internal expertise and resources to implement programs. Approval rates, cash flow and productivity are all impacted when cards on file for recurring payments expire. Additionally, maximizing savings on commercial cards requires sending 25 data points from invoices with each transaction. Finally, while PIN validation lowers transaction costs, expecting customers to properly select PIN debit limits potential savings for merchants.

How to win: Find a payment provider that offers a mix of solutions to help increase authorizations and lower acceptance costs. The right partner has technology in place that enhances data and transaction routing, so merchants automatically qualify for the lowest possible rates. Account updater solutions increase authorizations and improve cash flow by keeping card details up to date. Automatically including Level 2 & 3 payment data on 100 percent of qualified B2B transactions saves customers time and money. With cost-effective PIN debit routing, you can eliminate manual prompts, mitigate the risk of certain types of fraud and provide a better cardholder experience.

3. Cost acceptance relief

Fee programs that are compliant with card brand rules can help offset acceptance costs—typically from 1% to 3%— by transferring some or all of the acceptance costs to the cardholder. There are strict enrollment requirements and customers must be able to avoid the fees by opting out or switching to an alternative payment method which does not incur the acceptance costs. Further, some states have laws that forbid or limit participation practices such as surcharging. Implementing fee programs in adherence to state laws and card brand guidelines can be confusing for your customers and doing it incorrectly can hurt your business’s reputation and provide a sub-optimal cardholder experience.

How to win: Work with a payment provider that offers a range of programs – from credit card surcharge and service fees to Dynamic Currency Conversion. The right partner should provide guidance and best practices that maximize savings while keeping your business compliant based on industry segment, acceptance channel and peer benchmarking. They work with merchants to ensure the right balance between cost savings and the customer experience.

Tap into experience and put cost savings to work

Working with a trusted payments provider can help you uncover opportunities to save money by offering payment optimization solutions that lower or offset transaction acceptance costs. A processing partner that has a suite of solutions backed by a dedicated team of payment optimization specialists will differentiate your offering in the market, build trust with your customers, demonstrate value and ultimately win and retain more business.

A payment provider can also deepen relationships and build trust by providing you with access to an experienced team of payment optimization consultants. You can help drive value to your business with detailed transaction analysis and selecting the solutions that optimize payments. A provider like U.S. Bank cuts through industry jargon to calculate savings and provide recommendations so you can decide what makes sense for your business.

Ready to learn more? Visit: wha.fyi/payments