E-commerce fraud prevention specialist Forter has revealed its Forter Smart Routing, an automated payment routing solution, to help merchants prevent the revenue loss driven by false payment declines throughout the payment process.
The payment process involves gateways, credit card issuers, processing banks, merchants and more, all of which make fraud decisions in isolation. This can lead to many cases where a trusted customer is known by one of the players, is completely unknown to the others, resulting in one out of ten legitimate purchases being declined.
The newly launched tool seeks to combat this problem by uniting all parties in the payment process through the creation of a trusted data network. This allows for accurate and consistent decisions throughout the process, ensuring legitimate transactions to be approved.
Nitish Pandit, Senior Director of Finance at Priceline, detailed: “Improving our approval rate is a major focus for us, especially because we have legitimate transactions that are potentially being declined during the payment flow. Improving our conversion and approval rates enables us to deliver a better customer experience, which drives repeat business. With Forter, we have automated decisions that provide us with the best ways to process each transaction to boost approvals.”
The decline of legitimate transactions has never been a bigger issue for merchants, costing up to 10% of their revenue. These false declines are occurring at the payment or bank level, where merchants have little to no visibility into the decision-making process, meaning they lose control over whether the transaction is ultimately approved once the customer hits checkout.
This issue has been amplified significantly by changing customer purchasing habits, from in-store to online – accelerated by COVID-19. This means that as much as 30% of customers purchasing with a merchant are new to them – double the amount typically seen – and are therefore more likely to get falsely declined.
Michael Reitblat, Co-founder and CEO of Forter, noted: “By partnering with the world’s largest issuers and acquirers, Forter creates a unique, trusted network across each player in the payments ecosystem to improve their risk evaluations and authorisation approvals at every level.
“This prevents legitimate transactions from being declined or lost at various points of the purchasing process, which hurts not only the merchant but their customers as well. Forter provides merchants with automated decisions throughout the entire payment flow and determines the best routing for a transaction to ultimately be approved.”
Forter Smart Routing provides the following capabilities:
· Accurate Pre-auth Fraud Detection: Improve business’ risk profile and increase authorisation rates by blocking fraudulent transactions before bank authorisation.
· Dynamic 3DS: Increase conversion while meeting all risk and compliance requirements by triggering 3DS authentication only when required.
· Smart Routing: Determine the optimal processor for every transaction with advanced AI models to avoid authorisation declines and minimise processing costs.
· Recovery of Declines: Recover legitimate transactions and revenue that would have been lost entirely after being declined during the payment flow.
