Hello, and welcome to the subscription sessions. So, today, we will be talking payment strategies and optimizing them for success.
So, myself, I will be moderating this five chat, so I'm Marsha Silious.
I am a consultant in payments, throughout my career. I've been a stay in in payments. Having started at Visa, worked at Microsoft and worked the number of payment companies, until becoming a payment consultant eleven years ago, I work with many merchants, both based in Europe, based in US, and, selling to customers internationally.
So it's always about optimizing, the payments. And and to me, the payments are always at the forefront. But most likely for many retailers and online merchants, they're the last thoughts. So I'm always trying to kind of balance, that's so that, there's no nasty surprises at the end. And I'm very happy to have with me today.
A presenter from SlinkTV. For Santa, would you like to give us a few words about you and your background?
Absolutely. So I handled that head of payments with SynTV.
We are live streaming TV service in the US.
And, I come from more of a banking and retail background on the technology side And in my current role, I'm responsible for everything related to billing payments, chemistries, payment fraud and compliance.
So, I mean, it covers the entire gamut of payments, as you can see, I got bitten by this payments bug. I was, probably twelve, thirteen years back. Working with retailers, like, figure out that payments is something like a black box to most of the people. So I started peeling the onion and layer after layer. I became more intrigued. Anofat really is there. So that's my starting of my journey in Famous, and I got Stully Hube to work as a payment consultant, worked with retailers on the payment side.
And now I'm working with Stengiri to improve our subscription, retail payments, e ecowards business.
Okay. Well, it sounds like, we've got another payment fanatic here. So very a a very glad you you could join us today. So I think, well, maybe if we pick off with, you know, we're talking about, that payments, and there's obviously be a a battle again in every day you'll open any spaces or your read online articles. We talk about fraud and cyber security. So their concerns about the growth of fraud, especially in the online, purchase seeing. But also there's, the the the the really much, the opposite notion of the customer, free actionless experience and one click checkout and so forth.
How do you think, merchants have kind of evolved to manage that. So in your experience, you know, what's it sounds like your job includes both the management of payments themselves and the fraud. So how have you found, that you can find that compromise between, making customers happy and not making many losses?
Yeah. That's that's a very interesting question. As you talk with most of the retailers over the last year, you will probably hear more rank about the payment in security or having a lot of new kind of fraud. So we see, a bunch of different kind of frauds all across our platforms, whether it's it's starting from abusing your, free trials or other generous kind of offers, which is basically for the new customers to understand our subscription service.
And I would say that first party fraud or friendly fraud is probably picking up a little bit, in our world, but where do you think about a balance between your customer journey or customer, ease of making, subscription happen. And the security, it what comes to my mind on top of my concern is how do I ensured customer trust. So to I definitely understand that. It has to be seamless. It has to be as little, as little friction as possible, but at the same time, you cannot really forget about the security benefit.
So, yes, we have implemented all kind of different security we work with. Multiple service providers, right from our networking level to our actual payment, processing service where We look at every payment instruments and see where this particular payment instrument was involved in something fraudulent before.
And, obviously, on the other end of it is your charge backs and how you handle that. So Yeah. It is and when coming back to it, it's all about understanding the data and looking into it to figure out what's actually happening in your case.
Because as you said building that trust between you and the customer, but I think that that's very important because, again, and I remember going back, yeah, twenty years or some, right, for when, there was that concept, especially when I was at Microsoft, they tell where we're looking at, at Amazon and some of the stuff they were doing, and the you know, the risk parameters were very different from first time customer to that of a second time or third time and and subsequent customer. So I think, I guess, in in a way, do you see that, also offering subscription, like, a type of product, making customers well, obviously there's economic reasons and they get more sticky, but does it also help you to know your customer's message?
Does that help you manage your, to, potential forward and the way that, you know, that that you you may approach that customer in the, you know, the the the the one click experience, you might be able to give them versus somebody who's just starting their journey with you?
That's again, correct. Yes. Subscription business really helps.
Our customers to make sure that they really don't need to renew their subscription with Deepgram. And as I mentioned, we are What did you provide her for live events? So you don't want to miss, the next football game because you forgot to redeem your subscription.
So from that perspective, there is an important, news article or a news coverage that you'd like to follow. And you are not able to follow it because you forgot to renew your subscription. That's the worst thing that you can think in the life if you are.
So, yes, that definitely helps our customers. But at the same time, we also need niche sorry. We also make sure that when the subscriber is coming to our website, they understand what are their options, so that we get the customer trust. Like, you can cancel anytime. You get refund if you cancel within this time period. It's an automated refund.
You can come to us if there is you will have our chatbot. We have our different ways of interacting with different kind of customers. You want to email. You want to a social.
You want to be in our chatbot. Or even if you want Paul and talk to someone we have, I'll do the options open. So that is really what we try to do when we are ensuring the customer trust. And that helps us to retain the customer and their subscriptions.
And then it's a very good point. Again, I've I've worked for, A global customer provides a computer security software, and we've experienced a lot of charge backs with them because customers didn't know. Well, if you subscribe annually, you forget, I guess, and the cards expire and and all sorts of things customers were effectively using charge backs as a way of canceling subscription, which of course hurts the merchants. So I think you you absolutely bang on there about having making it easy for customer to communicate with you and not having to resort to stopping the payment as a as a means of stopping the customer.
What what do you think of course? So in your view, from that, you know, we're talking about, making the customer's life easier. But what what do you think is still non negotiable in in order for you as a merchant to protect your, your, you know, your, your products and your revenues.
Yes. So definitely, I would like to make sure that the payment method that we are offering are absolutely secured. We don't we wouldn't like to offer any payment method that we are not confident about, and we do all kind of waiting from that perspective. And then when the customer comes to our website, we make sure that we are into NPCI compliant in terms of handling the customer data. That's another very important piece of the old puzzle because every other day you hear some kind of, breach or customer data being available all over the world. And, an outcome of that is as well that you see a lot of.
People trying to impersonate others using some fake profile.
So that also is, concern for us. And I believe a lot of other subscription merchants where you might see a lot of impersonation and people trying to, use some other account on a regular basis. So we have to identify those. We have to make sure that we protect our worse experience in those cases.
The fraud management is is is is a is a big thing for you. What about so you've mentioned about, I I guess, full management and the types of payment methods. And, of course, US is a big card market, but there are there are other payment methods. There's the buy now pay laters, their wallets.
So how do you see the adult option of those payment methods and a way of helping your customers again, having that, optimized checkout.
Do you a big take up in certain payment methods? And do you see that as a as a good trend for you? Or or, you know, do you have any case studies where you will you will, but in launching a particular be that product or to particular segment succeeded because of a particular payment effort.
Oh, yeah. I mean, one of our newest payment method that we introduced a few weeks back, beginning of this month was Apple Bay in app payment.
Now when you think about the security, it is a no brainer that you are getting a secured payment method. And Apple probably has more data on the customers than you can ever think of or maybe to some extent better than the banks on their payment habits.
So it was a no brainer implementing India. If you think from a customer journey, what can be easier than just using authenticating with your phone and authenticating with your, either your thumbling patient or your facial recognition or your password on your phone to make sure that you are subscribing, through the you get mental piece. You get that kind of, security that you can think of whether you are thinking about a merchant and about payments.
We just launched it. If you look at US, there are almost fifty million customers who are using Apple Pay. And that's obviously a big market, and we are seeing and pay to update in terms of customer's type of using it from day one. So we also implemented other wallets and that because so we have we individually try to figure out what exact this particular agreement method means for us, and we accordingly take our next step whether to include it or not.
Okay. That that's so that's a very good example there, Prasantha. I well, definitely, you know, if I look from my experience in, in Europe, with, and the Europe varies a lot more than, it says, obviously, not homogeneous markets. We'll have each market. We'll have their own favorite payment methods. So indeed, when I worked for Microsoft, some fifteen years ago, we were selling English box in Germany. We couldn't understand why the Germans weren't subscribing to Xbox's life.
We'll offer them nice payment checkouts with a credit card there. And, of course, the Germans, there is credit cards. They're using direct debit. So we had to reach Cheggvat to change our approach the same in Japan.
Again, they were using, convenience store payments at the time. So payments are important, but recently, I'm also noticing that it's not just the country. It's also the demographics and because there's a lot of new payment methods coming out as you send the wallet I think channels would also be important. So if you're selling through the mobile, not to offer wallet, would make it for very different difficult experience.
Nobody wants to type in card details, even though it might be easier to to do on on on your PC.
So, I'm seeing one of my clients in the industry, for example, is finding that to to target the younger demographic. Definitely, we needed to offer the wallets and the buy now pay latest as well because that for some premium products, that seem to, to help the friction. But definitely, for those of you listening, looking at the global markets, to to me, you really need to look at combination of a country and the payment methods available there, also to demographics you're trying to attract, and also the price point, because again, for ten euros, ten pounds, ten dollars, by now pay late is probably not gonna cut it and not gonna make sense, but equally for, two hundred that pounds may be, something like WeChat or Alipay won't work either because it's very expensive payment methods. So you can you can kind of balance, balance ways out accordingly.
So in terms of, how do you how do you, kind of process payments and how do you combine them with your, option, and, engine. Do you use multiple gateways? Do you have any complimentary tools? Could you talk a little bit about that, please?
Oh, sure. So we use multiple, gateways and multiple processors just to make sure that we have we get the best out of, for our customers when they are trying to subscribe. As I mentioned, we are a live, what would be streaming service. And You subscribe to sling because you want to watch something within the next five minutes.
And we really don't want to be in a position or Oops, we can process your payment.
So uptime and being able to process the payment, almost twenty four by seven is a big deal for us. So we use multiple levels of redundancy.
We work with Securly on the billing side and payments so they kind of work as an orchestrator for us.
Which is, again, we are concentrated to the US, so we are not really removed for a lot of different payment options. We are looking at different, wallets, obviously, and hard We are also investigating how we, bank payment method will be for our customers. And we are also looking into different options for, by now, later.
Maybe it is not that great, as we mentioned, for, one time for every for the recurring subscription payments. But we if you are subscribing for a package for three months or six months, then it makes complete sense to pay in four or pay in two installments, especially during the busy season or if you are subscribing to months are yearly packages.
No. Yeah. No. That's a very good point. And, indeed, again, kind of, to the earlier points about, you know, the price points and the type of a product you buy.
So I think there's an interesting aspect of your service. You're talking about, obviously, it's live streaming. So if you get a fraudulent card or a payment method that's getting that has kind of unlimited ability to charge back then they've streamed the service. So you don't get paid if it's when when you have to pay.
I mean, how how do you does that influence you? So we talked about the fraud management, but does that influence you, the type of payment methods you make want to enable for particular customer, because some payments are less risky than others in terms of charge bikes or or recourse.
Now, so to answer that, we don't really distinguish between a safe payment method or, because payment methods that we offer, we have only repeated that those are the best payment methods for our customers.
However, when you come in, it's our responsibility to vet you as the customer, whether you are, the right kind of customer for us. Or if you feel that you have not been served well from our product perspective, you have the right to charge back But, again, there, we want to understand that what really happened with you. So chargeback is one part of that, but the other part is also we would like to really understand what didn't work for you after you subscribe to our, services.
So to answer your question, we're really gonna distinguish between safe harbor or unsafe payment method. It's on us to make sure that If you see the card being used elsewhere in fraudulent purpose, we have our tools and processes so that we can tell the customer. You need to provide some other form some other payment method that you all that you support. We cannot really accept is for some reason.
Okay. Okay. No. That's a interesting point. I mean, I guess it varies a lot. Depending on on what you're selling.
Right? So you talk about digital product, versus, for example, a flight, a travel product or indeed a fridge, refrigerator, sir, purchase. So again, when I I work with many physical goods, merchants, where often, we do multiple fraud checks. So we do a fraud check before completing the transaction.
And then afford check before shipping. And again, I've worked with a lot of Ford management companies that will advocate that approach because they're saying, well, You never know where you are in the peak of a, the, a card, for example, details being stolen. And a fraudulent activity normally only happens within a few days. So you might be at the bottom of the pee, but, a day later when you got that refrigerator ready for, delivery, you might be able to see that that you know, some some items of the transaction, like phone number or address were used in a fraudulent transaction.
Therefore, you decide not to ship and or to do some additional checks.
I also see in travel sector definitely a different approach because, especially with OTAs or online travel agents, because online travel agents selling others inventory.
So not so if there's a charge back, not only you've got a few you you've not got paid for product, but you have to still pay out to the airline for for the flight. So this is quite difficult to, it's a whole long subject for discussion. Maybe for next time, on talk about how how their industry works out, who who pays who. But I think so, again, I guess in summary here, the fraud tools and your approach to kind of charge back and consumer complaints dependent on the product, therefore you need to have the tools. And then again, there are many online mergers that may sell both the service and the physical product.
So that's again, you have you you like Hotwood to have deaf kind of a a a different payment products and different types of forward management.
Different sets of rules, at least for, a product versus a digital service.
I mean, what about, compliance and regulations, because we talked about, a little bit about, the the data. You talked about keeping the customer's data. Safe. That's a big thing for RC and Europe as well, with the GDPR, whether whether you like it or not, or whether it's, as efficient or not.
Again, the different a long term debate. But, what other regulations do you feel about, gonna affect your compliance? And you talked about, to working with multiple payment providers, for example, oh, obviously there's PCI compliance, tokens, and all that. Maybe you can explore that subject with me a little bit into in detail.
Absolutely.
So from my compliance perspective, you, and I'll probably touch a little bit back on data as well. So if we look at our army and my teams daily, time spent, we will say that fifty percent of our times goes into understanding the data that we see in front of us. Twenty five percent is probably scanning and understanding what are the impacts for different regulatory changes that are happening. Other on the world, and the third one would be how we can another twenty five percent, I would say, how can I make our customer journey better?
So when they come for subscribing, not even, you know, when it's monthly subscription.
In the US, if you look for the newer regulatory changes. There are almost every state. Some other day is coming up with a new, regulatory compliance requirement.
If you are aware, the federal, the federal comm telecommunications, I'm sorry. The FTC has come up with a new regulatory requirements.
It is not yet, it is not yet finalized, but whatever we have understood from the initial versions, it is quite comprehensive.
And that doesn't really make, the individual state regulations, long compliant or you cannot ignore the individual state regulations. So when you are in the US, you have to definitely abide by the card brand rules. Everything that changing, you have to abide by the new FTC rule that is coming up.
And you have to make sure that the customer base on which state they're from, you are also complying with those state level regulations.
So altogether it's pretty complex that we need to scan. And then if you go international, you'll, yeah, the third problem is we have to deal with with the way to national complexity.
And and then you talk about the data protection that you guys, do you have to win work with external, again, do you have external suppliers to help you keep that data, especially with, we're going to grab the tokens, for example, and how can you because ultimately, if you want to open multiple providers, it's always a, you know, station is you then you're you're you're gonna be tokens and non exchangeable. So how do you do that? Maybe a few words about scheme tokens as well if you using VAS and the if you see any benefit from it? Yeah. So we are still not using scheme tokens. We are using processor tokens.
Or gateway tokens, but, yes, we use tokens, but we haven't yet implemented, but we are very close to implementing.
Steam tokens as it is kind of usable across providers. So that's really a good thing. We are right now working on an enterprise wide took an additional strategy. So what really works for us, string TVs are of the larger dish organization, the Dish Network, and we are looking at it from a campaign super perspective across all our business units and trying to figure out what really works for as a superset, which will be able to cater most of our or all of our business units.
So, yes, we are what we look going to the towards Kim tokens, but, we are not there yet, but we'll be going there very soon.
Okay. I definitely see a big shift to that. And as you're saying, it's, because they can work across the providers, and it always takes an additional layer for for being that gateway orchestrates are away because if if a merchant wants to do things themselves, they can. Effectively use, and store the, skin tokens.
One of the the last question on kind of compliance. So, obviously, in Europe here, we are on data custom authentication.
I know the schemes I've been keen to implement now globally. The US is not quite mandated yet. Are you guys seeing a big use of that in the US?
And what are the pros and cons for you?
Yeah. So one good thing or whichever way you take, it is still not mandated in the US. So but we have seen, in my consulting live. I have seen different, usage of if you were thinking about three d a implementing three d s, I know that three d s, the newer version is much better from the customer authentication perspective.
And in most of the world, I believe, you have, there is an option for an OTP for validating any kind of payment transaction.
It is stable.
Not there in that much in effect in the US, but it is slowly coming up. So, definitely, we're looking into that, but we don't have a date when we would be, going for it. But if they decrease something, we're giving a strong eye on what happening in Europe and rest of the world and how people are embracing that trend. Because if you want to change it, changing customer behavior, is probably the work or the most difficult thing that you can do as a retailer.
So as a merchant, that is the last thing that we would like to push customers to something else, which they don't want.
We'll definitely look into the customer trend and accept pants, how it pans out in the US.
It's it's a chicken and egg isn't it as well. And I mean, here, when it was mandated, say, if both the UK and in the EU, there was a lot of, obviously, our poor for merchants and and so forth. But then we've seen that stabilize a lot. And, actually, I find with a lot of, clients of mine, that the challenge so initially, the issues would challenge, like, hundred percent of the time. But now we see that going down to fifty, sometimes forty percent, depending on the situation. And again, I'd argue that if you were a subscription merchant as well. So if your customer has a long life cycle and that can be proven, then the issue is we'll look at it a lot more favorably.
But it's it's it's about, getting the the population used to it, ultimately. And that's what I found. Again, I had some European customers merchants who sold in the US and deployed three d s, and then all we had, like, you were thirty percent reject. So we'll, drop out So we had to, we had to change that.
But, you know, we again, sometimes I've seen use a three d as deployed even in the US as an extra fraud measure. So back to what we were discussing earlier, if you're feeling that the transaction is looking somewhat suspicious, it's a one way to still enable the customer to complete the transaction rather than telling them that you can't. So you're still optimizing a valid customer and it wants a product for valid reasons, you know, yes. It's probably a bit of inconvenience, but, it resolves the matter quickly rather than doing some manual review.
For example.
Mobile GPU really doesn't work for us because our subscribers want to watch it right now. Most of the case, that's why they subscribe. So And the cost of goods sold is the next big thing that you should think about, like, you gave the example of the refrigerator, it's a huge cost on the merchant if that's fraudulent. Because they have to pay back where they're getting it from.
And then all the, shipping costs and everything, which are all sunk costs. Because you are not able to authenticate a customer from that perspective. But from our perspective, we would always, unless you really have treated any of those rules that says that you are not a valid customer or it would be fraudulent. We always side with the customer because we understand our customers, mindset that they are subscribing to watch will be the the NBA match or their favorite college football team.
So we would like to side with the customer in those cases.
Yeah, and then let's let's let's introduce you saying the approach. Alani, I see that approach of, whether you take the customer side or you just I mean, it varies so much across across the globe. It really depends again until you know it's all about friction. You could argue that you can add hell of a lot of friction for somebody paying their electricity bill.
Versus somebody downloading a song. Right? So and and everywhere in between. So, absolutely, you know, for for for your listeners, when you think about your strategies, a lot of it, is is to do with, what is it you're selling, you know, how important that is to the customer?
What circumstances they're buying it in? You know, again, buying a ticket to get on a train, then then there's only that much friction you can deal with. I had to deal with that recently myself being late for a trade, not being able to buy the ticket because they wanted to get OTB and they didn't go through it because they're in the tunnel. So, hey, you know, I didn't get their train.
So that you have to think of it in the context of transaction, the contest of, as you're saying, well, it's physical good, amount is being spent and really what, you know, balancing it all out.
I think we're getting close to, the allocated time. So maybe, few a few moments on You know, what are you seeing in terms of new trends? We've discussed some of them, you said, the the schema tokens, new payment methods. You said you're looking at, account to account, open banking. And you think I mean, where do you see the payment industry going in a way of supporting, businesses like yours and then the next few years?
I will take a question from, I know what's happening in payments and what is coming in the future. There are a lot of discussion on that. But I would like to focus on is what can merchants do or what are the merchants, really need to think about when they are thinking about payments in their world.
So the first thing as I mentioned, it's data. Payments is all about data. Right now. And your ability to number one get the data so you need the right partner that you're working with who can provide you that data, and even better if they can provide you the intelligence behind the data. So they can provide you with the right kind of analytics based on the data. Or if you are a big merchant, you probably already have a data analytics team that how you can leverage them to analyze your payment data because we are seeing payments data is changing over time, and you can really take some great steps if you are able to analyze the data properly.
And kind of take a look at it from different perspective. So I can give you a recent example.
We have been working as you know, the quarter four, quarter three, quarter four is the busiest season for the in the Much are in the retailer industry where you will hardly get any bandwidth from your IT team to make any changes. So we have been going back and trying to see what one thing we can do which will not require a huge IT lift, but we can still, get our customers, more satisfaction and can improve our subscription retention rate.
So it has to be something that is relying in front of us, and we have No. We are not able to see it. And the only way I'll see it is probably with your payments data. So it happened for us. We we started looking more into our payments data to figure out what's really that is like in front of us, but we are missing. So we figured out that account update or information is something that we have been missing for quite some time.
And so we have seen accounts which are which got closed because of inability to pay. And it's a hard decline where the customer, where the bank comes and tells you the account is, law the card is lost or stolen or something from that perspective.
And when you get an account updater for those accounts. It's a no brainer because you are getting an intimation that, okay, that card has been replaced with a new card. So the customer really has a new card, and you don't expect the customer to go and I mean, personally, I don't lie. You owe all that ten places where I've got my subscription set, and I want to go and update my credit card, the new credit card in all those places. So that was something, we made sure that we are able to keep those accounts working till the time we got the account updater information And that really improved our retention by two percent for those failed payments. So it was sitting right in front of us. It was it just needed that, like, mindset and that, like, focus on payments data.
So I'm sorry. April didn't answer what's there. Going to Wouldn't password. But it it's the simplest of faith and subtle ties as you say.
And I I see that I mean, I can't update it absolutely by god. That's all. Well, hopefully, the skin tokens will resolve that. About two large degree.
Right? Also, I guess, the, a mobile bullets resolve that because in fact, I had my card defrauded recently. I mean, if I caught it just in time, but, I was in the US at the time, and I have different time zone, couldn't find the bank. But I've got the, card that played it in my wallet, update it, saying, like, Google bullet before I actually got the card so I could start continue playing with that.
So that was kind of a account of data in in action or token as it were the the the token account of data in action.
This is very easy. So, Rosanta, thank you so much. This has been a really great insight.
If you guys have any questions, then, please put them in the chat's function.
It's been a pleasure talking to, to you very much enjoyed that. Enjoy the topic. There's a lot more we can say on the topic. I think we're only interested on time.
So for Santa, thank you very much. Thank you very much to all of you and enjoy the rest. All for the subscription sessions. Bye bye.
Bye.
