Guest Editorial: Payments - best practices for going global



The advent of e-commerce has significantly broken down trade frontiers making cross-border e-commerce, wherein consumers buy online from merchants located in other countries, easier than it has ever been. It is now possible for any business to rapidly expand internationally, and payments is a key driver of this opportunity. This editorial, provided to Airline Information by Adyen, will share some best practices and opportunites for cross-border payments for the airline & travel industry. 

Best Practice 1: Implement relevant payment methods

The customer journey starts long before setting foot on a plane, and the first best practice is to ensure that the whole customer experience is optimized for local consumers and that each country-specific website enables local consumers to pay with the relevant local payment methods.

Two examples: in China, hundreds of millions of your potential customers prefer to pay with local payment methods such as Alipay or UnionPay. In the Netherlands, around 40% of travel transactions are completed with iDEAL. Without accepting local payments in these two markets, as well as many others, you may lose the opportunity to convert these shoppers into customers.

Best Practice 2: Maximize approval rates

Once the relevant local payment methods have been enabled and the appropriate customer experience has been set up, another best practice is to maximize approval rates in each country, especially for card transactions.

Based on Adyen's data, an analysis was conducted in order to quantify the potential uplift in card approval rates when merchants use a local merchant of record (i.e. a local legal entity) to process transactions for a few key markets.

The research showed that in countries such as Germany, Brazil and the US, a local merchant of record generated an uplift in card approval rates greater than 5%, which is a major impact.

Best Practice 3: Optimize fraud management

Most importantly, merchants need to ensure that their fraud strategy (fraud policy, fraud prevention tools and processes, and human resources involved in fraud analysis and manual reviews) evolves in line with their international expansion. The clear best practice here is to adjust fraud policies and tools to reflect the unique nature of each market, because fraud patterns vary by country.

These are just a few examples of best practices for cross border payments, and how you can benefit from a better understanding of international payment processing. To read all the findings from the Adyen and Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) white paper “Cross-Border Payments - Opportunities and Best Practices for Going Global” click here.

To find out more about payment innovation please join us and your fellow industry professionals at the Networking Evening in Amsterdam, hosted by Adyen, on the evening of Thursday 5th of February 2015. You can register for this event by clicking here.

To reach out directly to Adyen, please contact Marcel Koppes at marcel.koppes@adyen.com or see him at one of the 2015 ATPS events.