Everyone has. Research shows that 98% of online shoppers prefer to pay in their own currency when given the option. Even more telling, cross-border ecommerce is growing nearly twice as fast as domestic ecommerce. Whether booking a hotel overseas, dining while...
Payment Infrastructure
What happens when AI starts clicking “buy now”?
ChatGPT is redefining everything from how half the internet gets written to how you can enjoy perfectly cooked rice. Industry by industry, AI is reshaping not just how customers decide, buy, and consume, but also how payments work. Think about the last thing you...
What is the most expensive payment gateway mistake?
Failing to ask the right questions before you choose. As new gateway platforms enter the market, merchants are often presented with a long list of features, integrations, and capabilities. But gateway decisions rarely fail because of missing features. They fail...
The card number is losing its importance. Why?
The payment industry's focal point is the card number. Whether it's a business asking a customer to read it off their plastic card, a cardholder keying it into a website checkout page, a number stored in a CRM, saved in a billing platform, or secured inside a payment...
Data quality is replacing rate negotiation.
Visa has recently made changes to its Level 2 and Level 3 enhanced data programs for commercial credit card transactions. The changes are prompting many B2B merchants to reevaluate how they capture, validate, and transmit transaction data because their fee structure...
Why 1% more approvals may matter more than 10% more traffic.
Executives obsess over acquisition while overlooking acceptance. Boosting payment acceptance by a single percentage point can often deliver the same or greater revenue impact as driving much more traffic, and at a far lower cost. For example, on $1B in volume a 1%...
Patients don’t care why their Health Savings Account card was declined.
they only know the payments didn’t work.
Because that’s how we have always done it.
Companies cling to fragmented payment stacks, spreadsheets, legacy gateways, separate fraud tools, and reporting systems because "that's how we've always done it.” Switching up your payment environment can feel risky and overwhelming. A recent McKinsey study found 70%...
The end of multi-gateway chaos.
Author Caroline Banton What if you only needed one? If you are a merchant who uses Elavon for your payment processing, you'll be familiar with its range of payment channels — in-person, contactless, online, and mobile. What you might not be familiar with is...
Should we blame Visa?
Or did VAMP simply expose risk practices that were already broken? VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program) is Visa's framework for monitoring fraud and dispute activity across merchant portfolios. Did Visa break merchant onboarding? Or did it just make unmanaged...