High-Value Payment Monitoring Best Practices

Effectively monitoring payments is a powerful way for businesses to boost revenue, develop deeper customer relationships, and improve payment performance. When it comes to high-value payments, this is even more true—mismanaged payments of large value can seriously impact customer trust and affect credit ratings.

Read on to find out more about the best industry practices for high-value payment monitoring.

1. Keep an eye on key metrics

When monitoring high-value payments, it’s crucial to keep an eye on the right metrics. Focusing too strongly on less valuable data will only waste precious time and resources—so make sure to keep your eye predominantly on the following KPIs:

• Cost per transaction
• Chargeback ratio
• 3DS activation rate
• Authorisation rate

2. Understand how to leverage data analytics

Once you’ve learned which metrics to watch, the next step is to understand how to leverage them. Let’s go through a few metrics together.

Chargeback ratio

Monitoring chargeback ratios is essential for identifying why chargebacks occur and reducing their frequency. For example, if you notice a high ratio within a certain country, you can put appropriate fraud detection rules in place.

Authorisation rate

The authorisation rate reflects the percentage of submitted transactions that the cardholder’s bank accepts. You might notice a specific bank has a poor rate, which could indicate a bad risk profile or that your business isn’t sending enough information to said bank.

Cost per transaction

The cost per transaction metric weighs up your operating costs (i.e. hardware and server costs) against your business’s number of transactions. A high cost per transaction can result from customers using certain cards, which means you might need to implement alternative payment options.

3. Ask the right questions

Along with focusing on essential metrics, it’s just as important to ask the right questions. When your team collectively understands your businesses goals and objectives, it’s easier to achieve the expected results.

Through effective payment monitoring, you can find answers to critical questions like:

• How well is my business performing month to month?
• What are the most and least profitable areas of my business?
• Are we losing or gaining financial power?
• Are we following our business plan and hitting KPIs?
• What price point must we achieve to maximise profits?
• How much income do we plan to generate in the next year?

Asking these questions will help your business understand which metrics to focus on and how to organise your payment monitoring plan for optimal results.

4. Take advantage of software solutions

While it’s possible to monitor high-value payments manually, this approach isn’t recommended. It’s best to take advantage of sophisticated software solutions.

Using payment monitoring software, your business can:

• View key accounts all in one place,
• Identify and quickly address anomalies (before they impact high-value customers),
• Prevent bottlenecks and backlogs in transaction queues,
• Troubleshoot in real-time,
• Customise the payment monitoring experience to suit your business’s unique needs.

Conclusion

By following the best practices listed above, you’ll maintain high levels of customer trust, improve payment performance, and even boost revenue for your business. And remember—taking advantage of payment monitoring software is the simplest and easiest way to achieve these goals.