What the Visa Stop Payment Service Does for Merchants
A key way in which merchants—especially those with subscription services—build their revenue is by using stored credit cardholder data to submit follow-on transactio...
Tokenization Offers Great Benefits: Be Aware of These 5 Pitfalls
Merchants are always on the lookout for ways to improve their security, while keeping as much friction as possible out of their purchase processes. Some of the optio...
High-Risk Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) and Their Risks
What are Merchant Category Codes? A Merchant Category Code (MCC) is a four-digit number used to categorize merchants based on the merchant’s business activities and ...
How Connected Payments Reduce Merchant Risk
Any electronic payment comes with inherent risk: the customer might be using a fraudulent card, forgotten they’ve overspent their credit limit, or end up firing up a...
So you’re a high-risk merchant, now what?
The card networks and payment gateways designate high-risk merchants as less safe than their normal clientele because of evidence like high chargeback rates (above 1...
Enhancing Reliability and Security for Your Tenants
If you are a Basis Theory platform user, action is most likely required for your Production Tenant. What has Changed? We have updated our Rate Limits to better align...
May 2024 Changelog
Managed Connections: Orchestrating Payments We are happy to announce the launch of Managed Connections, which allows merchants to switch between payment processors t...
How to Use Composable Apps in Payments
Software can be designed and implemented in any number of ways, but a core architectural approach can be instrumental in producing tools that are ideally suited to t...
Chargeback Fraud Unmasked
Chargeback fraud, often called friendly fraud or first-party misuse, occurs when consumers fraudulently attempt to secure refunds by initiating chargebacks instead o...
SoftPOS: Turning Devices Into Terminals
The speed at which payments options expand and change has reached a breakneck pace: it’s almost impossible to imagine a time when the only options were to provide co...
Dynamic Payment Routing - Retry Logic Routes
Dynamic payment routing is an essential part of any comprehensive payment optimization strategy: getting the highest close rate at the lowest processing cost demands...
Types of Payment Tokens: Universal, PSP, and Network
Tokenization is a PCI-compliant way to secure and mask sensitive cardholder data in what is called payment tokens. These payment tokens can take one of three forms, ...
Implementing a Second Payment Processor: Considerations
Delivering great service is at the heart of every successful merchant’s business plan - because happy customers become repeat customers, and repeat customers become ...
April 2024 Changelog
April brought showers of updates and enhancements to the Basis Theory Platform, from automatic account updater, to full-featured test tenants, and forwarding APIs.
Multi-Processor Payment Routing and Fraud Prevention: Strengthen Payment Security
Payment security is a key consideration for today’s digital merchants, as acquiring a reputation for not protecting customers’ payment details can be an existential ...
Multi-Processor Routing or Full-Service PSP? Which is Your Best Option?
As a merchant, accepting and processing payments is the lifeblood of your business. The ways in which you do so can significantly impact the future trajectory of you...
Evaluating the ROI of Multi-processor Payment Routing for Subscription Businesses
Digital payments have thrown open the ability to market and sell to an almost unlimited global audience for merchants. And those businesses who offer subscriptions c...
Subscription Merchants: Payments Best Practices
What are Subscription Companies? Subscription merchants are companies with a business model that involves customers paying a recurring fee to access products or serv...
3DS Authentication: The Right Balance Between Security and UX
In a world that seems ever more risky - with digital scam artists everywhere you look, and ransomware in seemingly every other news report - making security as impen...
Tokenization and PCI Compliance: FAQs
The data security rules around payments can be puzzling to new and seasoned payments professionals alike. Moreover, while the Payments Card Industry Data Security St...
One-Click Checkout: Benefits and Drawbacks
If there’s one thing that everyone who’s ever sold anything can agree on it’s this: the harder it is for the customer to close a deal, the less likely it is that the...
Best Payments Resources To Deepen Your Payments Knowledge
As the payments industry continues to grow, expand, and evolve, payments professionals will need to stay abreast of the changes in order to remain competitive in the...
The Importance of Recurring Payments for Merchants
Modern businesses do more than simply make one-off sales of products - they take advantage of the opportunities our digital reality offers. Perhaps the inspiration f...
Are Monolithic Payments a Thing of the Past?
The payment landscape continues to expand each year, offering a vast array of payment methods for end users and processing options for merchants. Payment gateways, p...
Balancing UX and Security in Recurring Payments
Merchants wishing to offer secure payment solutions for customers may find themselves at an impasse: their payment flows may require additional steps to become compl...
B2B SaaS Companies: Avoiding Failed Payments
Failed payments are a key performance indicator for merchants that offer subscription, or installment, payment products or services. That’s because, when a consumer’...
March 2024 Changelog
Expanded Apple Pay JS Support In March, we added support for merchant tokens and Buy Now, Pay Later to Apple Pay JS. This enables merchants to decrypt the Apple Pay ...
How Subscription Companies Grow Revenue and Reduce Expenses
The subscription model - paying for the use of a product or service on a regular basis, rather than purchasing an item outright - has been around for hundreds of yea...
Decrypting Card Payload for Shopify Payments
When this video was recorded, Shopify Payment App documentation was in its early stages and only depicted Ruby code samples.
MRC Vegas 2024: A Recap
We came back from a long but eventful week at Merchant Risk Council's annual conference in Las Vegas. This year, it ran from March 25 until March 28 and was jam-pack...
How Merchants Can Modernize Their Payments Infrastructure
Payments are an inescapable element of any commercial enterprise, yet the whole payment ecosystem can seem like a closed book to many businesspeople. Beyond the exis...
How To Collect and Store Credit Card Data Securely
When merchants accept credit card payments, they also must consider what happens after the transaction is authorized. Can they store the card data? Should they?
Alternative Payment Methods to Offer Customers
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, it is vital to remove every little bit of friction that can cause a consumer not to complete a purchase. Friction can inc...
Unbundling Payments To Improve Efficiency and ROI
For centuries, payments have been “bundled”. Large multinational institutions have led the way in banking, money, payments, investments, and more, becoming large fin...
How Merchants Can Leverage Social Commerce
In our thoroughly networked world, many are constantly glued to their mobile devices, devouring the musings, postings, and comments that are the lifeblood of social ...
PCI 4.0 Updated Requirements: What This Means for Merchants
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is the global standard for ensuring the secure handling of credit card data. It’s designed to protect card...
February 2024 Changelog
In February, the engineering team spent our time working on big picture items as well as granular bug fixes to improve platform performance. Read on for details of h...
How to Choose A Payment Provider
In today’s digital, virtual world, there are vanishingly few businesses remaining who can operate on a cash basis - everyone has to accept digital payments, like cre...
Payments Data Portability and Interoperability
In a digital and connected world, data is the most valuable virtual commodity. Access to, and control of, data is a fiercely competitive and much-debated area of mod...
Credit Card Processing Levels
Any time a credit card transaction occurs, the payment carries detailed data along with it to better classify and analyze the purchase. The amount and type of data i...
What is Batch Payment Processing?
Merchants use batch payment processing to submit multiple transactions at once, rather than in real-time as the payment details come in, generally to reduce fees and...
Merchant Initiated Authentication (3RI) and 3DS
Today’s economy is increasingly driven by complex purchases: beyond the exchange of cash for an item in a retail store, we have become accustomed to making digital o...