17. How to Improve Success Rate

Success rate is important as merchant wants every user to complete the transaction in first go… here are some of the things that merchant and aggregator can implement to improve conversion rate

A. System Uptime:

Basic expectation and goal should be 100% (or near) system uptime for aggregator/payment service providers. Also, aggregator should have business continuity plan in place and ability to handle spikes or overloads.

Even merchant should be able to handle spikes and maintain 100% uptime

B. Bank Integration:

As a merchant, make sure aggregator provides you better acquiring bank and payment processor combination as it plays crucial role success rate of cards.

Note: Aggregator has back-to-back cost with acquiring bank and will be able to enable the best acquiring bank provided the commercials with merchant allows.

C. Performance Based Routing

A merchant can integrate two aggregators or acquiring banks and set-up performance based routing.

An aggregator can enable such routing by enabling two acquiring banks for the merchant.

Note: Sometimes the commercials with merchant won’t allow aggregator to provide two best performing acquiring banks

D. Smart Routing:

Deploy clever routings such as On-Us, BIN based routing based on historic performance.

Typically the On-Us transaction provide better success rate and some BIN/Banks/Scheme work better on particular acquiring banks. Identify these patterns and set the routing logic accordingly

Note: Do not assume such routing works all the time. If ICICI Issuing bank is not performing good then it doesn’t matter which acquiring bank or processor is used for transaction.

E. Bank Alerts:

There are two types of downtimes: Scheduled and unscheduled. Aggregator should have mechanism to alert/inform merchants about both downtimes proactively. So merchant can show the downtime alert in checkout page and customer may use different payment method to complete the transaction

At times, bank may not be performing optimal level so identify the low performance and inform merchant. If merchant can show it on payment page then customer may opt to choose different payment method to complete the transaction

Example: ICICI NB success rate is 70% but if you are observing success rate of 50% then show alert that ‘bank is not performing optimal level, either continue or change payment method’

F. Retry Option:

Show the retry page for failed transactions so that customer can change payment instrument to complete the transaction.

Instead of standard retry page show the best alternative payment method to complete the transaction

Example: If net-banking option is failed then show the debit card option or if debit card transaction failed with OTP flow then show ATM PIN flow

Note: To enable such smart retries, merchant should have required back-end integrations

G. Save Card:

Success rate of transaction done using saved card is higher than regular transaction. If you have business case then save the card with PCI entity (merchant, aggregator, TSP)

H. Alternate Transaction Flows:

• Debit Card + ATM PIN: Implement debit card + ATM PIN flow that is simpler and provides better success rate on majority of banks. This flow is subject to approval from banks and also, different banks have velocity checks on transaction amount and number of transactions per day. So understand all details before enabling the same
• Direct OTP: Implement direct OTP flow on selected banks. Considering it has less/no redirections, the success rate is better than standard ACS flow.
• Intent Flow for UPI: Implement intent flow on Android where customer doesn’t have to enter VPA but on clicking UPI, all installed UPI PSP Apps are shown to customer. Based on the selection, customer is switched to PSP App for completing the transaction and returned to merchant’s App
• Link and Pay for wallet: Wallets provide link and pay feature where customer can link the wallet one time (using wallet credentials) and then wallet balance is shown to the customer. Based on balance either customer will continue to pay or add money for payment or change payment method. With this flow, user dropout related to low balance can be reduced drastically

I. Optimise mobile transactions

Mobile transactions are tedious especially w.r.t. card transaction (entering OTP) and net-banking transaction (pages are not optimised for mobile screens).

Integrate SDKs that auto read OTP and optimise bank pages to enable seamless user experience and better success rate. Such SDKs are provided by aggregators as value added service and JusPay which is specialised in this service.

That looks simple… Right?

No, it is not… to implement these measures one has to consider cost, integration efforts, system limitations and reconciliation efforts.

In summary, there is effort and cost associated with improving success rate. So unless you know what is the value of that number (success rate), you cannot put price on it. And if you know the true value of that number (Success rate) then you won’t mind spending some extra money to improve it.