Pagos

The letter F in our ✏️ ABC's of payments education series 🍎 could stand for nothing other than Fraud. You know it, you hate it, you can't expect to process payments without encountering it. Fraud is unfortunately an inevitable cost of doing business—and one that can really eat into your bottom line if you're not vigilant. Worst of all, fraud has expanded over the years beyond criminal parties with stolen cards; fraud now comes in so many forms, it can be hard to keep up. From customers disputing legitimate transactions they don't recognize on their bank statements (friendly fraud), to fraudsters requesting a refund and chargeback on the same transaction (double dipping), to false claims of products not arriving in pursuit of a refund (refund fraud), fraud is truly everywhere. If you're not sure where to start, here are some key strategies for combating fraud: 🔨 Build Custom Fraud Rules: Tailor your fraud rules with each payment processor or your fraud platform provider to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions effectively. By analyzing transaction data to identify patterns indicative of fraud (e.g. BIN values, issuing banks, issuing countries, and card types associated with fraudulent declines or chargebacks), you can configure rules to flag suspicious activities. 🚨 Pursue Real-time Fraud Detection: Proactive monitoring and detection of fraud attacks as they occur is essential to minimize losses and protect your business's reputation. If you don't find out about a fraud attack until the fraudulent chargebacks start rolling in, it's even harder to mitigate associated costs. 📋 Optimize Your Chargeback Response: This is critical in reducing the financial impact of fraudulent transactions. By implementing efficient dispute resolution processes and providing compelling evidence to refute fraudulent claims, you can increase your chances of winning chargeback disputes and recovering lost revenue. Pagos has everything you need to pursue all these avenues. If you're ready to take a stand against fraud, contact us today! #payments #paymentseducation #paymentsdata

Visa is in the news this week with the Department of Justice filing an antitrust lawsuit against their debit card business. If this has you thinking about your own business's opportunity to save 💰💰 by routing Visa Debit transactions through secondary debit networks, you might want to take a look at your data in Peacock by Pagos! In our Opportunities dashboard, you can see the total value of transactions you've processed that could have qualified for lower costs if you'd taken advantage of relatively new US debit routing regulations and routed them to an alternative debit network instead. With our filter options, you can even look specifically at only those transactions made with Visa debit cards! In this example, the merchant could have routed over $60M in Visa debit transactions to an alternative debit network in July alone. Now THAT'S quite the opportunity. If you've dreamt of some day seeing your payments data in this level of detail, you need Pagos. Contact us today to get started!

Would it benefit your business to benchmark approval rate? What could you learn from a data visualization directly comparing your company's approval rate over time to that of an anonymized industry cohort? Does this sound like something out of a dream? In our latest blog post, learn more about how Pagos is making direct benchmarking a reality: https://lnkd.in/gQVn3XUm

Next up in our ABC's of payments processing is the letter E, for Effective Rate! Effective rate is an essential metric for any business accepting payments, and it's all about knowing how much you're spending in 💰 fees 💰 compared to how much you're earning in sales. Put simply, your effective rate shows the percentage of your total sales revenue that goes toward covering payment processing fees. At Pagos, we calculate effective rate by dividing your total fees by your total processed sales—giving you a clear view of what percentage of your revenue is spent on the cost of accepting payments. But we don't stop at just showing you the big picture. With Peacock by Pagos, you can break down your effective rate by processor, payment method, card network, settlement currencies, and more, helping you pinpoint which segments might be eating into your profits the most. This granular view of your effective rate is key to making smarter, data-driven decisions. Whether it's negotiating better rates with processors or optimizing your mix of accepted payment methods, understanding these details can have a big impact on your bottom line. Traditionally, you'd be stuck pulling all your transaction and fee data into spreadsheets to calculate effective rates and filter for specific segments all on your own. With Pagos, you get it all at your fingertips. How are you currently tracking your effective rate? Let us know in the comments! And if you're ready for a more efficient way to monitor and optimize your payment costs, check out Peacock by Pagos today! #payments #paymentseducation #paymentsdata

Are you ready for the next lesson in our 🍎 ABC's ✏ of payments processing? Today's word is D for Declines! As you well know, not every transaction you attempt to process results in money in your pocket. Declines are inevitable, and happen when customers input the wrong payment method details, don't have enough money in their accounts, attempt a payment method you don't accept, are blocked by your or your processor's fraud rules, and many more reasons. A cardholder’s own issuing bank may even refuse to approve the transaction because they suspect fraud or the customer has reached their credit limit. 🚨 But just because you expect declines doesn't mean you can't avoid some of them!! Every decline comes with a ✨ decline reason code ✨ assigned by the processor, indicating why the transaction didn't go through as expected. Breaking down your declines by these decline codes is a great way to identify opportunities in your payments setup to address some of these failures. Maybe your fraud rules are too strict, maybe you need to talk to your processor about why certain card types are never resulting in successful transactions, or maybe you need to adjust your retry strategy. Sometimes just a small tweak to your processing strategy can result in hundreds if not thousands more approved transactions. If you're not currently analyzing your declined transaction data, it's time. Pagos has everything you need to view your decline data, aggregated across all your payment processors and broken down by decline reason codes. With just a few clicks, Pagos can have you identifying addressable decline issues and increasing your overall transaction approval rate. Reach out today to learn more! #payments #paymentprocessing #data #declines

Thank you Infinity Ventures for the Founder Spotlight on our high fliers, Klas Bäck & Albert Drouart. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/ghHaYumB

Continuing our payments education series, it's time for the letter C. And if we're talking important payments basics, C can stand for nothing other than 🚨 Chargebacks 🚨 Chargebacks occur when a cardholder disputes a transaction, thereby kicking off a process that affects both merchants and their payment processors. While chargebacks are designed to protect consumers from fraud or poor service, they can also easily become a significant challenge for businesses of all types. Here's the basic flow: A customer disputes a charge because they don't recognize it on their bank statement, didn't receive or weren't satisfied with the purchased product, or suspect fraud. The issuing bank may try to resolve it with an inquiry, but if that doesn't work, they submit the chargeback with a reason code explaining the customer's issue. The merchant then has a choice: accept the chargeback or fight back by presenting evidence that the charge was valid. Going through this chargeback process—regardless of whether you accept or fight the dispute—can mean paying additional fees, losing revenue from sold goods or services, or even potentially facing future challenges with your payment processor. But for merchants, knowledge is power! By understanding chargeback reason codes and common dispute triggers like fraud, product fulfillment, or return policy issues, you can take proactive steps to prevent excessive disputes from causing long-term damage. When chargebacks do occur, having set customer service processes in place and documented records of consumer interactions can provide you with a strong case when you do fight back. How does your business handle chargebacks? Let us know! And if you want to dig deeper into your chargeback data, Pagos can help you monitor incoming chargebacks and find ways to minimize their impact on your business.

Visa Flexible Credential cards are here! Customers now have the ability to choose from multiple funding sources when initiating a transaction with a single card. This is huge and it's time to start thinking about how you may need to adjust your payment operations to accommodate processing these cards. The first step is just to know when customers have cards with this functionality. Good thing Parrot has your back! Our direct-to-network BIN database now has a field that indicates if a card is VFC enabled. Check out our latest blog post to learn more about Visa Flexible Credential and how Parrot can help navigate customer usage of VFC cards: https://lnkd.in/gJ2Ubp9j

For our next micro lesson on the ABC’s of payment processing, we’re tackling B for ✨ BIN data✨ . Ah BIN data. The Pagos team and our customers love BINs and the wealth of information they provide about payment cards and customers who wield them. And you will, too, once you realize exactly how many data points you can get from a single 8-10 digit BIN. We’re talking about issuing bank and country, card brand and product name, details about authentication requirements, eligibility for Level II & III processing, and so much more. BIN data gives you a well-rounded view of who’s transacting with your business and provides more parameters by which to segment your payments data during an analysis. Even more, when used as a part of your greater payments strategy, it can help direct processing decisions! Want to route transactions to the processor most likely to approve it? Or to the processor with the lowest processing costs for that card type? Want to perform a quick fraud screening at checkout by comparing a customer’s country to their card's issuing country in the checkout flow? The possibilities with BIN data are greater than you might expect. Want to learn more about BIN and the Pagos products that can help you make the most of your BIN data? Schedule a demo today! #payments #BINdata #paymentseducation

If we’re going to do a series on the 📝 🍎 ABC’s of payments basics 🍎 📝, we must start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) with A, as in Approval Rate! Approval rate is calculated by dividing your total approved transaction count by your total attempted transaction count. This metric is fairly straightforward and represents the proportion of customers who had a positive experience with your business or the percentage of potential transactions that actually contributed to your revenue. With this single metric, you can gain a baseline understanding of the health of your payment processing setup and where you have opportunities to do better by cutting down on the number of good transactions that are either blocked from being processed (e.g. gateway rejected) or declined during the payment processing cycle. To increase your approval rate, you must dig into the decline reason codes assigned to declined transactions. These codes show how many of those declines were unnecessary and caused by issues like setup problems or overly strict fraud rules. A small change to decrease a specific type of decline can often increase your approval rate by multiple percentage points (which depending on your processing volume, could mean big revenue jumps)! On the flip side, you can see what portion of your declines were legitimate, either because of insufficient customer funds, incorrect payment credentials, or fraud. If the majority of your declines aren’t addressable, you can rest easy knowing you’re processing strategy is working at peak efficiency. This is only the tip of the approval rate iceberg. Let us know in the comments how your business approaches approval rate. And if you’re looking for new ways to monitor approvals and declines, including viewing decline code breakdowns for individual segments of your transaction volume, check out our payments visualization service, Peacock by Pagos! #payments #paymentseducation #paymentsoptimization #data