The collective definition of ‘payments efficiency’ for professionals in retail, gambling, sport, forex and gaming runs something along these lines: seamless transactions and getting value-for-money on a business level.
Simple, right? Well, yes and no. Various factors need to be considered. They also need to be looked at on a granular level, which is what we’re going to do in this article.
Measuring performance
Specific measures, such as growth rates, are used to determine payments efficiency. 64% of payments professionals use this metric to differ good performance from bad, according to emerchantpay research. On top of this, just under half of the people we interviewed believe that acceptance rates are important.
It also appears that professionals deem ‘efficiency’ to be a balance between performance results and spending figures. 46% argue that operational costs need to be considered when defining the term. Meanwhile, almost four in 10 believe that the impact on revenue and profitability are important success indicators. These findings suggest that businesses wish to seek a solution that is effective, while not being *too* expensive.
All of these findings highlight that the key pillars of defining payments efficiency are well-known. However, professionals struggle to validate these for various reasons. In the next section, we’ll look at why this is the case in more depth.
Difficulties in defining payments efficiency
Because it has such a big effect on impacting growth rates in a positive or negative manner, an important consideration for defining payments efficiency is gateway processing. This is evident in the fact that 80% of professionals recognise the value of developing an agile infrastructure.
However, almost a third stated that either cost issues or a lack of budget have stopped them from doing the above. Scalability potential and speed-to-business impact were both cited by over half as elements that would help to build a better business case. Presenting plans with these in mind could, therefore, be a viable solution. Before this happens, however, the number of businesses with ‘very aligned’ personal and commercial objectives will need to rise above 14%.
Most professionals also agree on safety being important in how they define payments efficiency. Our results revealed that just 7% of participants felt real-time fraud monitoring wasn’t an important component for performance optimisation. Could more of them be satisfied with their current state of play in this area, though? The answer appears to be yes, with almost a quarter expressing some level of dissatisfaction. Since just 14% of professionals said that they perform daily real-time fraud checks, that could be one way to reduce this.
Conclusion
In general, it seems that payments professionals agree about the core aspects in defining payments efficiency. Our findings also indicate that they know what needs to be done in order to improve their current performance levels and satisfaction rates. At the moment, however, the implementation of these is not happening because of internal divisions. Business demands for better payments efficiency aren’t in-sync with the personal objectives of those tasked with delivering it. To progress in this area, organisations and employees need to – first and foremost – set goals that work together instead of clashing.
Visit our Global Payment Gateway page to learn more about improving efficiency for your business.