6 Key Aspects to Look For in An Enterprise Payment System

No matter the current scale of your business, your goal is likely to become an enterprise-level company at some point. And one thing that all enterprise-level companies have in common is an enterprise payment system.

These systems offer detailed analytics, automation, deep payment integrations, and much more. Although these may be called enterprise payment systems, they're not just for enterprise-level companies. Some of the highest-quality solutions work with companies of all scales to help them reach the next level.

What Is the Enterprise Payment System (EPS)?

An enterprise payment system, or EPS, is a payment solution designed with all the tools enterprise-level clients might need. These payment hubs offer secure solutions for one-off and recurring billing alongside a wide range of payment methods, reporting and analytics tools, and more. The best solutions are highly configurable to the needs of the merchant and support a variety of go-to-market strategies.   

EPS products and services also typically integrate well with leading accounting platforms and offer high-level compliance and security tools, alongside access to real data and performance insights.

6 Key Aspects of an Enterprise Payment Platform

The best enterprise payment platforms handle every aspect of the payment process on a single platform with top-tier payment infrastructure. There are six key aspects you should look for in an enterprise payment solution.

1. Subscription Management Tools

Subscriptions are often at the center of enterprise-level companies. These companies take advantage of the power of recurring revenue as they grow. As such, a key factor in EPS management is subscription management.

The best enterprise payment platforms have tools that automate much of the subscription management process. For example:

• Billing Dates: EPS platforms track billing due dates and automatically charge the customer's payment method when the payment is due. A more advanced feature will adjust dates based on when the payment will likely be authorized and provide the options to change and adapt billing dates to customer requests, automatically handling proration. 

• Billing Options: Enterprise payment solutions also allow for several different billing options, which makes it possible to sell multiple packages and add-ons. Billing options are not the price-product configuration, but rather the flexibility to create complex billing plans or offers that can be managed in sequence or stack. For example, supporting an offer that bills $10/month for the first 3 months and $25/month for the months thereafter, discounts to $12/month regardless of the current offer, and/or combines multiple subscriptions under a single customer.   

• Declines: EPS platforms will have advanced features, such as intelligent payment routing, least cost routing, and a variety of processing configurations that will greatly reduce the likelihood of a payment declining in the first place. In addition, it will have automatic retry logic that will look at all the payment data and determine when a retry will likely approve and process a retry at that time, with data that’s most relevant to the issuing bank. Other features that are imperative are the ability to utilize existing or generate new Network Tokens, support real-time and batch account updater, provide options for PINless debit routing, and support across geographies where your business operates. 
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• Accounting: These systems integrate with accounting software to automate much of the accounting process. Top-tier enterprise payment platforms can even automatically include revenue recognition rules.

2. Flexible Payment Methods

You'll need to offer a wide range of enterprise payment methods to appeal to the largest audiences, but considering there are 600+ payment methods globally, offering all of them to everyone would be impossible. The most popular forms of payment include major credit cards and ACH through EPS check verification. The growth of digital wallets like GooglePay and ApplePay are now commonplace.

As you expand geographic coverage, payment options become increasingly important to serve consumers where they are. You will want a provider who can recommend and enable alternative and local payment methods such as the Boleto in Brazil, WeChatPay, Buy Now Pay Later, or other card networks like Interac.

Advanced authorization optimization allows you to instantly analyze each transaction against hundreds of fraud detectors and risk attributes before the transaction processes. This helps eliminate bad actors and reduces fraud risks, chargebacks, and losses.

Beyond fraud, enterprise systems should be capable of routing through the lowest cost network on a transaction, manage data for the highest approvals, and constantly adapt to changing circumstances. This helps increase your rate of approval for a couple of reasons:

1. Customer Experience: Customers don't want to input data multiple times or from several payment methods. The better you're equipped to have their transactions approved the first time, the better the experience is for the customer. Eliminating false declines keeps good customers paying longer with less friction.  
2. Customer Retention: Declined transactions are a leading cause of customer churn, so increasing your approval rates can decrease customer churn. This has the ripple effect of reducing cost. With more transactions approved on the first attempt, there are less customers in retry status, which leads to less fees for retry transactions.  

3. Payment Gateway Integration

Processing payments typically involves multiple parties. One way of accomplishing this is by using a payment gateway. This technology charges payment methods from a digital platform like a website or mobile application. More advanced EPS systems can be used as a gateway or eliminate the need and cost of a gateway and provide direct integrations to the processors. Using a provider with direct and fully certified integrations provides the highest value and performance as there is less data loss in the transaction message.  

4. Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting are crucial to the growth of a business. Could you imagine trying to run and grow a business without knowing how many people signed up for your service or how many refunds you've processed over the last month? That's where EPS reports come in, as well as a wide range of other analytics and reports.

Typically, enterprise businesses have a team of analysts and are looking for raw payment data. They want a system that will drop the processing, platform, and payment data into tools like Snowflake, AWS, DynamoDB, Aurora, RedShift, or Azure SQL, etc. Despite their internal analytics, most enterprises (and companies aspiring to be at that level) benefit from additional insights, KPIs, and ideas generated by 3rd party analytics in an EPS portal.  

Business owners and managers need data to optimize their processes. Typical enterprise payment platforms offer deep analytics that let you see how long your customers stay with you, what actions may lead to customer churn, and more. The best platforms provide data and insights on card BIN/Account Range, approval breakdown by MCC and BIN combinations, and approval metrics by billing tenure. You can use this data to improve digital experiences for your customers, resulting in higher customer retention and revenue. The best merchants can work with their providers to link this data by marketing channel to identify problematic spending or reallocate marketing funds to better long-term channels.  

5. Compliance and Security

Any time you collect payments, compliance and security should be your priorities. You don't want security breaches leading to your customers' data getting into the wrong hands, and the last thing you need is a compliance problem within the payments ecosystem.

The good news is that PCI and GDPR compliance and security are automatic when you enlist the help of quality enterprise payment solution providers. These standards are compulsory, but even some of the largest brands in the world choose not to store payment data given the security risk. The best payment providers can provide insight on what is necessary for your business, and what value the added risk may (or may not) bring to your business type and strategy.   

6. Integration With Partners and Customization

Enterprise-level companies work with several partners across unique businesses. This can make working with some payment solution providers a challenging experience. To ease this burden, enterprise payment platforms must:

• Integrate With Partners: In many cases, your partners will need access to your payment solution. If so, these integrations are crucial to the seamless operation of your company. In most cases, these integrations are fairly standard and creating the link for the right solutions could be an easy task. Choosing vendors tied to only one provider eliminates your business’s freedom on the backend.   
• Customization: Your business isn't like any other business on earth. Certain data is important to you that may not be important to your neighbor. Moreover, your customers have grown to expect a particular look and feel when visiting your website and purchasing your products or services. It's important to maintain that brand image and offer consistent customer experiences. The best enterprise payment systems provide the configurability you need inside a framework that eliminates the need to run a billing company inside your business.  

Streamline Your Customer's Online Payment Process

If you're looking for a new payment solution, skip the hassle and turn to an EPS processing platform like Revolv3. When you work with Revolv3, you'll enjoy a platform that hits all the figurative EPS nails on the head.

Revolv3 isn't just focused on credit card processing: we pay special attention to approvals. You'll never pay processing fees for declined transactions, and increased approvals cut down on your customer churn enabling longer tenure and additional billing cycles per customer. Schedule a free demonstration to discover what Revolv3 can do for your business today.