Benefits of choosing a unified payments platform

There are many payment platforms – some cater to small businesses, others serve enterprises. Some are international payment platforms, others purely local. There are payment platforms that offer end-to-end payment processing, with gateway and acquirer built in. Others are just payment gateways or payment processors. And some are omnichannel while others focus on just online or in-person payments.

To make things more complicated, payment platforms may claim to offer a unified payments platform solution. But, under the hood, they are either just a layer over legacy technology or a patchwork of technology bundled together from mergers and acquisitions. Inevitably, these solutions have blind spots, which lead to downtime somewhere down the payments value chain.

With such an array of choices, plus fragmented solutions masquerading as unified platforms, how can you decide? In this article, we’ll explore how the right payments platform will benefit your business by: 

1. Delivering better customer experiences online and in person

2. Reducing operational costs

3. Combating fraud and boosting conversions

4. Improving scalability

We’ll also look at things you should consider when choosing a new payments platform.

Today’s shopper demands more from every experience. Our recent research found that 56% of Singaporean consumers will abandon a purchase if they can’t pay how they want. So, it’s important to offer the payment methods they expect like Apple Pay and Alipay, as well as the usual credit cards.

Shoppers also expect a unified experience in which they can move seamlessly across physical and online channels. 58% of Singaporean shoppers want to buy things online and return in store, and 53% want to start shopping in store and finish online, or vice versa. Social media is also an important factor, with 51% of Singaporean shoppers using social media to shop in the last 12 months. 

These customer journeys are much easier to deliver with a unified payments platform because everything is connected in the backend. You get a single view of your shoppers, no matter the sales channel, and reconciliation is much faster.

However, 19% of Singaporean businesses still use a different payment platform for online transactions and in-store transactions. And as many as 72% don’t enable customers to shop easily across channels. 

By embracing unified commerce with a unified payments platform, your business will unlock better customer experiences and set your brand apart from the competition. Additionally, Singaporean retailers that enable shoppers to complete transactions easily across online and offline channels saw the following benefits: 

Learn more about unified commerce and how it can streamline and enhance the retail payment experience in the video below, featuring Ben Wong, General Manager, SEA & HK.

In today’s environment of consolidation and optimization, every decision carries weight. This puts a lot of pressure on anyone tasked with finding a new payments partner for their business. When evaluating a new provider, it’s tempting to focus purely on the transaction fees. But, in reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

When every percentage point counts, it’s important to consider all the factors that impact your costs. The deeper you go, the more opportunities to reduce your payment platform costs you’ll uncover. For example, our recent report, Strategies to reduce your total cost of payments, revealed that a unified payment platform could: 

• Lower your global acquiring costs by 59% by routing transactions domestically.

• Reduce your credit and debit card processing fees by 26% by routing payments via the best network.

• Increase authorization rates by 7% with network tokens.

Payments can fail for many reasons: The card issuer might reject the approval request, or the customer's card might have expired. Another reason might be your risk settings. Finding the perfect balance between optimizing conversion and preventing fraud is challenging. But the balancing act gets a lot simpler with a unified payments platform that manages the full payments process.

For example, other than improving your authorization rates, network tokens increase the security of your transactions. After the initial authentication, payment details are replaced by an encrypted network token and subsequent transactions can be charged seamlessly with little risk of fraud.

A unified payments platform comes with a risk solution built in. And it can leverage data from across its platform to train machine-learning algorithms to spot fraud before it happens. The built-in risk solution enables your legitimate shoppers to pay unhindered while ensuring your business remains secure. For example, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Adyen, found that enterprise businesses can reduce chargeback write-off rates by 27% and false positive declines by 40% on average on our platform.

One of the hardest parts about doing business in a new corner of the globe is understanding local business regulations and customs. Do shoppers in the UK like shopping on social media as much as Singaporeans? Will your business be successful in Germany if you don’t support girocard?

Enterprise retailers sometimes dedicate whole teams to handling payments in new markets. But using an international payments platform will save you significant time and resources. Local payment methods should be included as standard and adding new methods as you expand into new markets should be as simple as flicking a switch. Plus, with everything running on the same platform, it’s quick and easy to roll out the latest customer experiences at scale. 

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Adyen, found that enterprise businesses reduced the operational full-time equivalents needed to launch into new markets by 75% with Adyen.

Even if you decide to go for a unified payments platform, there are still some factors to consider when choosing a new provider such as: 

• Do you sell online, in person, and on social media? You’ll need a payment platform that can process online payments and in-person payments in one place. You’ll also want to know they can offer the best hardware solutions, which can be managed and updated centrally, with ease. 

• Do you offer a subscription service? If you process subscription or recurring payments, you’ll want a payments platform that supports network tokenization and offers account updater services.

• Are you a marketplace? If you accept payments on behalf of your users, you’ll need a payments platform that can handle complex money movement in a compliant way across multiple markets.

• Do you sell cross-border? If you want to simplify your global reach, you’ll want an international payments platform that supports all major payment methods and can accept any currency.

Billing model

It’s only possible to reduce your interchange and scheme fees if your payments platform bills you using the Interchange++ pricing model. Blended (which is the standard billing model for many providers) charges a fixed fee on every transaction. This might be easy to understand but it becomes expensive if you’re processing high volumes. Interchange++, on the other hand, charges a markup on your interchange and scheme fees. So, any savings made on these fees are passed directly to you.

Other fees to consider when making your choice are:

• Setup fees

• Monthly fees

• Chargeback fees

• Currency conversion fees 

Your payments platform has the potential to positively affect your bottom line and keep your business on the path to sustainable growth. But this is only possible if it controls the whole payment value chain across all channels and geographies. 

Adyen was created as a unified, international payments platform purpose-built to handle every transaction via any channel and any region end-to-end. We’ve worked with retailers like Love, Bonito, Sephora, SHEIN, and Zalora. And we’ve learned a thing or two about how a unified payments platform can be a game-changer for retailers. 

But you needn’t take our word for it. We were delighted to be included in The Forrester Wave™ Merchant Payment Providers, Q1 2024 report, receiving the highest possible score in six different criteria, including vision, innovation, payment performance optimization, omnichannel payments, POS terminals, devices, partnerships, and payment data enrichment.

“Adyen is the best fit for merchants looking to consolidate on one partner for their omnichannel customer journeys.” In fact, one reference customer cited in the report remarked that, “going from a legacy player to Adyen was, from a product perspective, like going from a Nokia to an iPhone.”