The realm of payments encompasses a wide range of topics, from fraud and cross-border payments to artificial intelligence, mobile wallets, and compliance. Savvy subscription businesses realize that the payment process is a key element in maximizing their revenue. In fact, how well a business is able to optimize payments can be a significant competitive advantage—along with related data and analytics that can help to illuminate trends and other key insights.

As a subscription billing solution, Recurly addresses many payment-related challenges. We offer an out-of-the-box fraud solution, powered by Kount. We support mobile wallets and other alternative payment methods used domestically and internationally. Of course, we monitor and comply with all privacy and compliance regulations (and are PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant, the highest level of security a business can offer) and provide the necessary assistance and best practices to help our customers meet relevant compliance mandates. 

And, we integrate with over a dozen different payment gateways. Choosing the right payment gateway is a critical aspect of payment optimization.

Gateways and the payment process 

Your payment gateway and how it processes transactions is a huge piece of the payments puzzle. Why? Because all payment gateways are not created alike. So, it’s imperative that you choose the payment gateway or gateways that will best serve your business, now and in the future. Knowing that your subscription billing platform supports a wide range of the most popular payment gateways is also key.  

In addition to processing speeds, uptime, and how many outages or issues they suffer, you should also consider a payment gateway’s error processing and the granularity of the information they provide when a transaction is unsuccessful. This is because decline reasons are not standardized across payment gateways. Whereas one gateway might return the majority of the declines as “Generic Decline” which is very vague, another gateway might return both “Generic Decline” and “Insufficient Funds.” The more granular the information about declines, the more effective the retry process can be.

Machine Learning to address involuntary churn

When a payment fails, this can lead to involuntary churn if the payment is never successfully completed. Recurly’s Revenue Optimization Engine makes us truly unique amongst subscription management solutions in that we use AI and machine learning to optimize the retry process. A higher transaction success rate means greater subscriber retention and increased revenue.    

Finally, Recurly’s custom gateway routing and gateway failover features empower our customers with additional tools to optimize their payments, reduce decline rates, and maximize their revenue. For more on the benefits of having multiple payment gateways, check out our ebook. 

What does the future hold?

The complexity of payments is just one topic in Recurly’s recent guide, “Subscription Predictions for 2020 and Beyond.”  Get your copy today and see what other emerging trends you need to know about.