August 2024 Changelog
As summer months come to a close and we move into the Autumn months, we have a few helpful updates.
The Anatomy of a Credit Card
Learn the meaning behind the different parts found on a credit card, as well as their function and relevant PCI DSS requirements, with this overview and FAQ.
Omnichannel Tokenization
In today’s personalized e-commerce environment, any friction in the payment process can be the difference between a successful sale and a missed opportunity. Online ...
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...
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 Network Tokenization Improves the User Experience
The most valuable pieces of data in payments are the Primary Account Numbers (PAN), the core details from a credit card that are used to initiate and close a transac...
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...
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 ...
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...
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’...
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...
A Fintech’s Guide to Payments
What are Fintech Companies? Fintech is a broad term (shortened from financial technology) that encompasses technologies aiming to improve, simplify, or modernize fin...
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 ...
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...