When expanding to new markets, most online merchants face a variety of challenges from logistics and legal issues to local taxes and cultural differences. Payments and credit card processing are also key issues that require considerable attention. When scaling to untested locations, businesses often experience inflated processing fees, lower conversion rates and high chargeback ratios.
High-risk industries, such as gaming, travel, casino, legal and health services, and hospitality, not only face the above-mentioned challenges but also reluctance on the part of banks and processors to deal with their credit card processing and global payments.
When is an industry defined as high risk?
Industries deemed as high risk may feature some or all of the following features:
- Payments conducted in currencies and countries with high fraud levels
- Subscription-based products or services
- High chargeback ratios
- High credit card fraud rates
- Excessive transaction volumes
What can you do to mitigate risks?
- Fight credit card fraud
Fraud levels vary from country to country. Use an adjustable fraud screening monitor to apply the required level of fraud detection at each of your markets. In addition, check if there are any deviations from usual shopping habits such as the use of a new IP, a change in transaction times and a different country of origin.
An advanced online payment platform uses machine learning to apply smart fraud detection at each market, thereby decreasing false positives and ensuring high capture rates. Chargebacks are reduced due to diminished fraud attacks.
- Apply robust security methods
In order to protect data related to recurring payments or large advance payments your system must be PCI compliant. It is also recommended to use highly secure storage methods, tokenization, hosted payments, 3D Secure and other high-level protective layers.
Sophisticated payment platforms include all of these security means to prevent hackers from obtaining credit card data for money laundering or other criminal activities.
- Monitor recurring billing
Recurring billing may worry customers because they fear they will forget to pay on time or lose track of their payments. A payment solution includes effective billing management features that facilitate recurrent billing processes and track any anomalies in subscription payments in real time.
Tokenization enables secure storage of all the card data and easy retrieval for repeat payments. You can reassure your customers that their payments are being monitored regularly.
- Test your infrastructure
Some industries, such as gaming, travel and hospitality, must handle heavy traffic volumes either all year round or during specific seasons. Test the infrastructure of your website and mobile app in order to ensure that your systems can handle large transaction volumes.
A robust payment solution is capable of handling extremely high volumes of transactions in a wide variety of payment methods and currencies at all times, even during your busiest seasons.
bm2Pay has the experience and expertise to handle your high-risk credit card processing at highly affordable rates. Contact us for more information.
