Striking the balance between fraud prevention, omnichannel, and the customer journey

4-minute read

Challenging times can call for adaptation, scaling at pace, tightening up security processes and platforms, and much more. The common thread that ties all businesses together is the need to play to strengths, and to seek expertise from partners, where you don’t have it within your organisation.

  • The implementation schedule for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) reflects the complexity and challenge of improving security without damaging conversion rates, as you:
  •  
  • go about business as usual
  • work out how to adapt your business model
  • build your omnichannel strategy

Challenging times can call for adaptation, scaling at pace, tightening up security processes and platforms, and much more. The common thread that ties all businesses together is the need to play to strengths, and to seek expertise from partners, where you don’t have it within your organisation. Research shows that 75% of corporate businesses don’t have an in-house team to combat online fraud, and three in five businesses don’t work closely with their online gateway provider to improve protection1.

Protecting your business from payment fraud is something we can help with. Draw on our knowledge of trends, level of clientele, access to the market and data insights, to help you build the right approach

Ben Sanderson, Sales Director, UK and Europe, Corporate Payments, Barclaycard.

What is the best way to minimise conversion risk?

Online retailers want to make transactions simple and safe. Face-to-face retailers looking to adapt their business model to online, want to get set up quickly and safely, and start generating revenue as fast as possible. The goal for both is to maintain a positive customer payment journey, from browsing to buying, while ensuring the highest levels of payment security and fraud prevention.

According to a survey of CFOs, 22% say the businesses they represent are looking at introducing new products or services, or expanding into new markets in the next 12 months (by June 2021)2.Because the introduction of SCA means buyers will face more stepped-up authentications, what’s the best way for you to minimise conversion risk?

It’s about developing a multi-layered approach. A pragmatic application of SCA, designed to reduce pain points and minimise the number of transactions that need to be stepped up (a payment transaction flagged as potentially high risk in terms of fraud, where an additional layer of authentication is triggered) . A strategy supported by tools to: 

  • manage fraud
  • interpret data in real time
  • optimise payment journeys

Ensuring optimal payment conversion for retailers has meant that we at Barclaycard, as both payment acquirer and gateway provider, must continue to develop and incorporate new techniques and technologies. And we have. These include:

  • Big data analysis
  • Machine learning
  • Advanced and bespoke fraud tools
  • Smart routing with 3DS
  • SCA exemption engines
  • Soft decline management systems  

Protecting your business from payment fraud is something we can help with

Ben Sanderson, Sales Director, UK and Europe, Corporate Payments, Barclaycard

Barclaycard Transact

As one of the few acquirers to cover the entire payment ecosystem, we harness a wealth of data from across the issuer-acquirer-gateway domains, and work with a wide range of fintechs in order to develop best-in-class products and services. 

Transact is designed to help you find the balance between security and the customer journey, by making use of exemptions to SCA, to achieve seamless payment journeys for the transactions you take.

Considering the customer journey

With SCA, every customer journey will need to be carefully considered. 

Smooth transactions can help increase conversion rates and generate repeat business. But conversion rates must be balanced with the ever-increasing need for robust fraud protection. 

With SCA regulation deadlines on the horizon, focusing on data analysis now could see benefits to your business go beyond SCA compliance and frictionless transactions.

Payment innovation and optimisation

With digital and mobile technology now the bedrock of global commerce, there’s a real business opportunity in building omnichannel payment platforms. A focus on customer preferences and buying habits and a widening of payment options, while improving the customer journey and maintaining security, could be what sets you on the right path. Innovation and security are the pillars of PSD2, and the focus now is how to successfully combine the two.

Beyond transactions

While basic transaction processing is still the goal of payment service providers, retailers could gain a clear competitive advantage if payments add value to the consumer journey. It’s about making innovation and optimisation a key part of your business strategies, and working with partners who have global perspective on how technology and regulations are affecting commerce and customer expectations. 

Today’s multichannel (and increasingly omnichannel) payment systems generate huge quantities of data. This data can yield actionable insights to increase efficiency and enhance customer journeys. Because SCA prioritises data gathering and analysis for fraud prevention, it has the additional benefit of providing information that can also help with business improvements. 

Barclaycard has developed solutions to unlock the business value from post-acceptance transaction data. For example, examining patterns behind transaction declines, and analysing data from different industry sectors, payment environments, countries, currencies and channels. 

How can data from payment service providers help your business?

By:

  • Analysing your business’s individual payment acceptance
  • Benchmarking your business’s payment acceptance
  • Analysing the root cause of payment failures and monitoring performance trends
  • Identifying the customer journey and structural pain points
  • Analysing transaction batch time, card type, scheme, issuing bank and geography
  • Providing recommendations to improve payment processing setup, so that ‘good’ transactions are passed, and fraudulent transactions are blocked. 

More than payments

One-dimensional payments are a thing of the past. Every transaction today is an opportunity to find
out more about the customer and to offer greater efficiencies and wider services. Barclaycard processes nearly half the UK’s credit and debit card transactions. That means we can add value at every payment stage, while helping you stay protected from payment fraud.

1 Source: YouGov survey of 503 businesses, August 2019. Percentages exclude businesses which do not accept online payments 

2 The 51st Deloitte quarterly survey of Chief Financial Officers and Group Finance Directors of major companies in the UK. The 2020 first quarter survey took place between 8th April 2020 and 22nd April 2020. 104 CFOs participated, including the CFOs of 23 FTSE 100 and 43 FTSE 250 companies. The rest were CFOs of other UK-listed companies, large private companies and UK subsidiaries of major companies listed overseas. The combined market value of the 72 UK-listed companies surveyed is £418 billion, or approximately 21% of the UK quoted equity market.

A multi-layered approach to fraud prevention could have multiple benefits

Every transaction today is an opportunity to find out more about the customer and to offer greater efficiencies and wider services. Barclaycard processes nearly half the UK’s credit and debit card transactions. That means we can add value at every payment stage, while helping you stay protected from payment fraud.

Find out more about SCA