How your business can thrive by modernizing your cross-border strategy

In today’s hyper connected world, customers have become more comfortable shopping for the best deals, sales, and products online regardless of whether the store they’re buying from is based just around the corner or on the other side of the world. But, as a merchant, are your payments optimal to make the best of out of cross-border opportunities???

As we’ve entered 2023, many regions predict and prepare for a potential economic downturn. These economic pressures may vary by geography and while shoppers in some regions might be tightening their belt, it is likely that other customers across the globe will continue to shop. Expanding your business beyond your physical borders through a cross-border strategy may help your business survive and potentially grow during the next phase of uncertainty.??

While the growth opportunity is exciting, most merchants experience payments related challenges when it comes to cross border commerce, such as, but not limited to, poor approval rates, cost, and fraud. By working with a local acquirer, you may achieve higher approval rates – as the issuers will view the transaction as domestic, and typically have less stringent approval criteria. But engaging a local acquirer in a new market may also come with complexity of both implementing and operating in a new geography. Beyond the constraints of physical proximity, your business will need to come to speed quickly on working with local acquiring banks, laws, requirements, and regulations.

How to have a winning cross-border strategy

Choose a partner that manages the local complexity for you

While continuing to accept payments from different countries with your primary payment service provider or acquiring bank is something you may do – there may come a point, as your international reach continues grow, that benefits of using local acquirer connections, especially in markets you are seeing sizable volume will outweigh the benefits of simplicity. That’s when you may think about partners who can make this switch as painless as possible for you.?

Individual integrations with local acquirers in different countries can take months to go live. Instead, by partnering with a global gateway, as a single point of integration, you may reduce costs and complexity while also offering consumers the local payment options they may be used to. Our Mastercard Payment Gateway offers connections to over 200 local acquirers and can help you expand quickly into new markets in an increasingly competitive climate.?

With a focus on developing digital payment solutions that encourage borderless payments for a broad range of types and sizes of businesses, we are here to help you minimize the complexity of going international.

Protect your checkout from fraudsters without compromising customer experiences

It’s not news to anyone who has a digital commerce presence that fraud rates and friction continue to be a pain point. But as your digital footprint and geographic reach increases, so can different types of fraud and fraudsters you deal with. Coupled with the fact that in times of economic downturn, fraud rates appear higher – not because there is more fraud, but because there are less good transactions with consumers tightening belts – you may be tempted to add more and more steps to filter out fraudsters but it’s key to resist the urge to make shopping with you a 20 step journey.?

Customers expect convenience without disruptive fraud prevention tactics, and declining genuine customers not only means lost sales but can also pose a risk of reputation. Within Mastercard Payment Gateway, we deal with this dilemma by taking advantage of smart fraud tools like NuDetect to minimize friction securely. NuDetect provides real-time online fraud prevention and protection via behavioral biometrics and analytics. NuDetect measures keystroke count, total time entering the data, characters per second, alongside other key metrics to establish that every user is unique, it also flags abnormalities in real time to protect your checkout system.

Provide local, relevant payment choices?

Selecting among domestic, international, and alternative payment options is one of the most complex decisions to cross-border commerce, particularly with the rise in popularity of local payment methods. However, ignoring local payment preferences may result in lower shopping cart conversions and lost revenue.

As you consider which geographies to move into, it may be beneficial to also evaluate the local payment preferences. Afterall, according to our payment method partner, PPRO, 77% of global online purchases are made with a local payment method.

The need to support local payment preferences becomes especially true in emerging markets, that have lacked established payment infrastructures and can open a whole new segment of consumers for you.

Read more about alternative payment methods here

Through a single, secure connection, our gateway services can enable you to drive revenue and profits, support you to reduce complexity and risk, and enhance customer experience by delivering the choice, certainty, and speed that people and business expect.?

An effective cross-border strategy can increase the speed to market in new geographies, minimize losses through smart fraud tools and bring merchants local and relevant payment methods. Through one connection you can reduce restriction on where, when, and what can be bought online furthering your businesses stability in an unpredictable economy.???