How AltoPay delivers for its cross-border merchants

AltoPay, a leading payments processor headquartered in Miami, Florida, needed a solution that would enable its U.S.-based merchant customers to seamlessly expand into the European market. As former merchants, AltoPay’s team knew it needed scalability, connectivity, and the ability to work with multiple acquirers to help its merchants meet their cross-border growth and conversion goals. The processor partnered with ACI Worldwide to enable a fully white-label, multi-acquiring strategy, highlighted by new revenue-driving capabilities.

The challenge

While a U.S.-based company, roughly 70% of AltoPay’s portfolio consists of EU-based merchants targeting EU customers. Over the years, this has meant relying on a handful of acquirers to service these merchants — something AltoPay planned to expand upon by adding local and regional acquires to improve both acceptance rates and costs.

These expansion goals included several of AltoPay’s larger U.S. merchants who were expanding into Europe and using their U.S. merchant accounts to do so. Unfortunately, this led to high decline rates, and in some cases, accounts were being closed, as U.S. acquirers were uncomfortable or unable to meet compliance mandates with handling these overseas transactions.

To help ensure its merchants were meeting their business objectives, AltoPay had to rethink its acquiring strategy and enable a multi-acquiring approach. As a result, merchants gain greater flexibility in routing transactions intelligently, along with enjoying a host of benefits, including higher conversion rates, reduced transaction fees, lower risk, and greater availability and uptime.

The solution

AltoPay ultimately selected the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform to not only enable this multi-acquiring strategy, but also to achieve the scalability and connectivity demanded in this cross-border payments ecosystem.

Merchants need the peace of mind to know that when they expand into new markets, their payments gateway can handle new and unexpected volumes. The customer experience depends on this, and it is essential for merchants looking to create loyalty to provide a great experience from day one. The proven scalability of ACI’s solution not only helps merchants today but will enable growth into the future.

Connectivity is another absolute when deploying a multi-acquirer strategy. AltoPay’s ability to seamlessly connect with a host of acquirers throughout Europe and beyond allows it to deliver a superior, fast, and flexible experience to its merchants. This connectivity also ensures uptime and high availability for merchants.

In addition, as a forward-thinking global player, AltoPay understood the need for a solution that could support global mandates and remove the burden of compliance for its merchants. From PCI to 3D Secure V2 currently in Europe, AltoPay is ahead of the curve and can enable their merchants to confidently provide a secure and seamless payments experience for its customers.

Lastly, ACI Payments Orchestration Platform allows AltoPay to provide its merchants with the same experience across all channels and all geographies, while being flexible enough to address individual merchant needs — via a single API. This powerful capability gives each merchant a unified business process, helping teams optimize their efficiencies and decision making.

The results

The partnership of AltoPay and ACI has been very beneficial for AltoPay’s merchant customers. AltoPay’s work to enable seamless cross-border expansion has allowed its merchant customers to enter new markets and accept more business now than ever before. Its merchants typically see a 12% increase in approved sales at checkout.

AltoPay has not only reaped the benefits of this additional business, it has also been able to easily enter new industries and expand its portfolio of business.

Looking ahead, AltoPay is seeking to leverage the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform to move into new industries and help its larger merchants expand their acquiring options. The processor is also seeking to increase its fraud management capabilities through ACI, with a focus on helping merchants to optimize chargebacks and fraud ratios.

About AltoPay

AltoPay is a worldwide payments solution provider specializing in global card acquiring for online businesses. For more than a decade, AltoPay has provided internet businesses the ability to transact in nearly every country of the world, in local currencies, and connect with every major card brand globally. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, with offices in Amsterdam, the company’s drive is in simplifying global eCommerce by removing payment barriers with a dedication to client service and payments optimization.