Checkout.com Launches Intelligent Acceptance, an AI-Powered Optimization Engine That Boosts Acceptance Rates and Increases Merchant Revenue

Checkout.com, the global payments solution provider, launches Intelligent Acceptance, its latest product to help merchants optimise acceptance rates and grow revenues.

Intelligent Acceptance is an AI-powered optimization engine, trained on billions of transactional data points from Checkout.com‘s global network and insights from the business’ domain expertise after a decade at the forefront of the digital economy. The new product has so far achieved meaningful results for merchants during beta testing, enabling transactions that created c.$750 million of new revenue, and increasing the acceptance rates by up to 9.5 percentage points for over 30 merchants including the likes of Klarna, Ant Group, NordVPN, Reach and Sunday.

“Since going live with Intelligent Acceptance, the authorization rate of payments processed on Checkout.com‘s rails has increased by nearly 10%. In a game where small improvements drive big impact, this performance improvement is colossal for our business and, crucially, for our client’s bottom line“, said Melissa Pottenger, Head of Key Partnerships at Reach.

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“We fundamentally believe in abstracting complexity for businesses and empowering them to optimise their payments with ease. Machine learning enables us to offer this to our merchants for the first time at scale. Merchants alone lack sufficient data to effectively train an AI algorithm, whereas we can leverage our expansive global transaction data to provide real-time insights. That’s why we’ve built an adaptive AI-powered payments engine to constantly optimise acceptance rates – unlocking more revenue, saving merchants time and offering greater cost controls”, said Meron Colbeci, Chief Product Officer at Checkout.com.

Using machine learning and billions of data points to create a solution for businesses

Intelligent Acceptance optimises across the complete payment flow, including pre-processing aspects like messaging & routing and post-processing with adaptive retries. Merchants also have complete control over which stage of the transaction journey is improved and the criteria that Intelligent Acceptance optimises for, including; maximising acceptance rates, lowering transaction costs, or both. Through continuous live adjustments, learning from performance data across Checkout.com‘s global network and direct relationships with issuers, schemes and regulators, Intelligent Acceptance continually unlocks new optimizations to deliver incremental performance improvements.

Optimization examples

• Acceptance: Network Tokens can offer better acceptance rates, lower interchange fees and a more secure way to share card information. However, not all issuers adopt this credential-sharing method at the same time. Intelligent Acceptance only utilises Network Tokens if the issuer supports them and the predicted cost is lower, or chance of success is higher, than PAN credentials. Additionally, Intelligent Acceptance will automatically format, amend or add SCA, ISO data and more to ensure payments are formatted to scheme and issuer’s preferences.
• Cost: Intelligent acceptance can also be used to drive down costs by dynamically routing transactions to the network with the lowest fees, in markets where multiple debit, local or global payment networks are available – such as the US.
• Compliance: Intelligent Acceptance instantly identifies if a transaction requires 3DS authentication, and if it has not been triggered in the initial payment request, available 3DS authentication data is automatically added to the payment request to ensure the transaction is compliant.

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“Klarna benefits from the improved authorization rates thanks to the adjustments made in the background, which would otherwise result in lost volume. On top of that, Intelligence Acceptance helps to minimise extra payment costs applied by schemes due to the same transaction being processed in a manner which does not fit in issuer preference. Improved acceptance rate resulting in better customer experience, and reduced payment fees are main benefits of the tool”, said Tomer Turbovich, Senior Engineering Manager & Money Movements account group lead at Klarna, a leading online payments provider.

False declines are a $50.7 billion problem for businesses

The launch comes at a time when business leaders seek to drive new revenue and make cost efficiencies across their businesses to reconcile increased operating expenses. Intelligent Acceptance can reduce the number of incorrectly declined transactions through continuous testing, but can be configured to lower transaction fees and reduce operational overheads. Research conducted by Checkout.com alongside Oxford Economics found that $50.7 billion was lost in 2022 due to false declines, where a customer with enough funds in their account has a purchase declined. As a result, close to 25%^[1] of consumers abandoned a purchase due to too much friction, resulting in significant lost revenue for merchants.

“Any friction in the payment process can have a detrimental impact on the adoption of the products we offer as we reimagine the consumer experience inside a restaurant. Reducing the likelihood of an early adopting customer having a bad first impression of Sunday is paramount to our success – Checkout.com is reducing the likelihood of this happening”, said Daniel Hosking, VP of Payments at Sunday.

Intelligent Acceptance is the latest solution from Checkout.com‘s Payments Plus offering. It follows on from recent launches of Authentication enhancements, customisable virtual and physical cards with Issuing, Fraud Detection Pro to help merchants combat fraud and optimise their revenues and Integrated Platforms, a fully flexible solution to support marketplaces and payfacs in an evolving digital economy.

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