Looking Ahead to 2024: Payments Teams Balance Growth with Optimization

2023 was the year that merchants pivoted from top-line growth to bottom-line optimization. This shift in focus proved to be the dominant factor that helped drive product and technical winners and losers. 

Bottom line optimization resulted in several notable shifts in the payments industry. This included price wars at the largest processors in the U.S. and the resulting fallout for major industry players. Technologies like network tokenization, with their promise of higher authorization rates and lower interchange and other cost-saving tools, moved to the forefront of interest for many merchants. 

We also witnessed a wane in enthusiasm for alternative and local payment methods (APMs / LPMs). Typically thought of as helping capture incremental revenue by offering multiple choices to consumers,  the complexity of managing so many different payment methods for a relatively small percentage of total revenue came under scrutiny in a more resource-constrained world. 

In terms of Payments Orchestration, our customers moved from a primary focus of  utilizing orchestration for global expansion to honing in on creating the right set of routing and rules to maximize the success rates of payments already in hand. Many of our customers use  failover to re-route transactions when a preferred gateway is down, alongside customizing routing logic to increase acceptance rates, lower costs, and develop effective payment architecture across geographies.  

Looking ahead to 2024, we believe the year will be a blend of the last two years – with the focus shared between growth and optimization. This careful calibration will be done with an eye on our more resource-constrained reality. 

Payments continue to grow and remain highly complex and critical to businesses everywhere. Enabling payment technology, like orchestration, will continue to play an essential role in helping payment teams focus on optimization, payment method vault management, and connectivity. ‍

A Quick Look Back ‍

Our solutions enable and optimize over $50 billion in annual transaction volume – which creates an incredible amount of data and insights. 

Our teams continuously measure and monitor transaction data to grow and optimize our solutions. This enables us to observe trends and uncover insights for our customers and partners across the payments networks.

Here’s what we saw in 2023:

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