1. What is orchestration at APEXX?



Payment orchestration is an essential aspect of payment processing for all merchants seeking to create value by reducing the payment processing costs and increasing revenue. 


The 4 main key aspects of payment orchestration are:

  • Increasing transactions acceptance rate

  • Intelligent payment routing

  • Providing a seamless customer experience

  • Lower costs


Another key aspect of increasing acceptance rates is intelligent payment routing. This type of routing seeks to provide the merchant with lower processing fees and higher acceptance rates, particularly in case of inter-regional transactions. These efficiencies are achieved as a result of connecting the most suitable acquirer to the merchant. Some of the factors taken into account are the merchant location, shopper region, currency and card type.


A seamless customer experience leads to a lower number of abandoned shopping carts and rejected transactions. 

 

APEXX has partnered with large enterprise merchants that have complex payments, who often use multiple acquirers and Alternative Payment Methods (APMs), and have multi-faceted integrations. These integrations soon grow to be too large and complex, to the point where they can be difficult for a merchant to manage.


As a consequence, it may become arduous for merchants to identify whether their transactions are processing optimally, to understand their declines, and where the potential improvements lie to save on fees and costs. 


For example, a true like-for-like transaction (e.g. same card, same amount, same retailer) that is sent to two different acquirers can have two very different results. One transaction can be declined, or the acquirer processing that transaction can be more costly, all of this unbeknownst to the merchant who may not have enough visibility on their own transaction processing and associated fees. 


As such, orchestration is twofold:

  • it starts with identifying who is processing transactions optimally by analysing a host of metrics including acquirer fees

  • once the analysis is done, APEXX will discuss potential avenues for improvements and for implementing a better payment orchestration


In order to support and help merchants identify opportunities for growth, we have developed orchestration via our APEXX Intelligent Routing Engine (AIRE). 





2. How is it implemented at APEXX?


Orchestration at APEXX is performed via our routing engine and the multiple rules that are set-up. There are various steps in our orchestration approach that truly allow merchants to get a better grasp of their payment processing performance.



First step: Acquirer fee analysis

We have been ingesting acquirer fees in our analysis to identify the fees and costs associated with each acquirer that we have partnered with.  We can see what acquirers charge which amount per transactions. This helps our merchants get a better understanding of better and clearer picture of the acquirer cost per transaction.



Second step: Smart Split

After building our analysis of the acquirer fees, we provided a better understanding of the fee structure to our merchants but still could not do any like-for-like comparison between acquirers that would truly allow our merchants to optimise their transaction processing with the best-suited acquirer. Enter our Smart Split feature. 


Smart Split to allow merchants to do their own A/B testing in a true like-for-like fashion so that merchants can make educated decisions as to where to send their transactional volumes. They can send a portion of their transactional volumes to different acquirers to compare costs, decline rates, acceptance rates and overall acquirer performance.


With Smart Split, we enable merchants to send small percentages (i.e. 5% of the volumes) to perform their testing, there is no need to send the merchant’s entire volume to be able to conduct A/B testing.


Third step : Cascading

Through Smart Split,  merchants are in full control of their payment orchestration and can determine the best acquirer for their transactions. However, we wanted to go further and to mitigate against any decline risks while using Smart Split even with a low percentage. Enter our Cascading feature.


Merchants can combine Smart Split with Cascading, which is the ability to automatically retry transactions that have been soft-declined. Cascading can enable any transactions that were declined using Smart Split and sent to a different acquirer, to be routed back to the original acquirer. 


 NOTE  

Both Smart Split and Cascading are standalone features in their own right and can be implemented separately although they dovetail.



Check our Cascading article to find out more about Cascading.



Fourth step: Revenue Protect

Via our Intelligent Routing Engine, transactional volumes are sent to multiple acquirers, supported by our routing rules and features like Smart Split and Cascading. There is a risk, which has become an increasingly concerning reality for several merchants, that at any moment an acquirer may go down and experience a full outage. 


This kind of event is absolutely out of the control of merchants, who can only hope for a quick resolution of the outage if they do not have a payment orchestrator. Enter our Revenue Protect feature.


Revenue Protect provides the ability to merchants to switch the entire acquirer volume to another acquirer in the case of an outage. All merchants have to do is click a button to re-route all volumes from the affected acquirer to new acquirers. As such, instead of hoping for a quick resolution, merchants can divert their traffic to a new acquirer and experience minimal disruption to their operations.


Revenue Protect can also be used in conjunction with Cascading, for example some transactions can be sent to the affected acquirer to test if the outage is finished but be cascaded back to the new acquirer if the outage is ongoing. 




 Cascading   - https://support.apexx.global/a/solutions/articles/19000167267