Scale your business with these international payment optimization techniques
Every business needs an efficient payment method for smooth business dealings. If you have an optimized medium for international payment, your business will grow exponentially.
In this era of digital technology, every business worldwide chooses its payment methods wisely because late and unprotected payments can cause huge losses. Moreover, the business relationship among businesses gets badly affected if payments are delayed.
To keep your business operations smooth, you should optimize your international payments. You can use many strategies and techniques to enhance your payment process.
From automation to mobile optimization, fraud detection, and beyond, we will share some impactful techniques to optimize payments for scaling your business internationally.
What is payment optimization?
Before delving into the topic, you should know what payment optimization means. Payment optimization is improving payment processes and operations to enhance business performance by lowering costs, improving authorization rates, minimizing the risk of fraud, enabling mobile payments, and automating fund transfers.
By using payment optimization strategies, businesses can maximize their financial performance. For instance, companies that deal internationally can make their business more profitable by optimizing their payment systems. They can do so by reducing the currency conversion fee, speeding up transaction times, and complying with local regulations.
Payment optimization strategies depend on the business goals and objectives. When choosing the best techniques, businesses should know what they aim for and their future plans. For example, if the business deals with international payments, it must adopt specific strategies to achieve global success and operate in different countries smoothly.
Hurdles businesses face in payment optimization
Whether you are a big company or an e-commerce business, payment optimization is an essential part of your business. However, many challenges and hurdles can hinder the implementation of optimization techniques.
We will discuss some important hurdles you can overcome to gain significant profits.
Security Concerns: Implementing security measures in payment transfer systems is challenging. It needs more technical staff and meanwhile more investment. Therefore, enhancing security in payment systems is costly. So, companies need to allocate specific funds to protect sensitive data.
International Transactions: If a business deals in international transactions, it needs to deal with different currencies, wire transfer fees, fluctuations in exchange rates, and long processing times. These factors make it difficult to optimize payments and can lead to unexpected costs.
Budget Management: Optimizing payment systems requires various strategies and techniques. Businesses are on a tight budget, and these strategies need a budget for training technical teams and implementing action plans.
Lack of automation: Various payment providers in the market do not offer automation. Lack of automation in a business's financial management can be a serious challenge in optimizing the payment process.
Transaction limits: If a business uses a payment method that does not allow the transfer of big amounts, it will be an issue in optimizing payments. To expand the business horizon, you should choose payment methods that provide you with greater sending and receiving limits.
Complex Regulatory Compliance: Every country has regulatory compliance to control money laundering, fraud, and tax collection. Following the rules implemented by governments might cause problems in transferring funds if the payment method does not follow them. So, international vendors should choose payment providers that follow international regulatory compliance.
5 Proven techniques to optimize payments
According to a financial report, the digital payments market is projected to reach a staggering US$11.53 trillion in 2024. This growth underscores the critical role that efficient international payment systems play in scaling businesses.
Therefore, every business must optimize payments to achieve success. We will share some payment optimization strategies you can implement to grow your local and global business.
1. Mobile optimization
In the past few years, mobile payments have exponentially increased worldwide. A recent study of PYMNTS on 12,299 consumers across the United States, UK, Germany, France, and Brazil with the collaboration of Google Wallet reveals that 39% of U.S. consumers already use them in-store.
The study also found that within the next 3 years, this trend will grow to 41% of consumers using digital wallets for financial transactions.
For this reason, optimizing mobile transactions is more important for businesses than ever. They can use different strategies, including developing user-friendly mobile apps, integrating multiple payment options, enhancing security features, fast transaction processing, and utilizing SDKs and APIs for seamless integration.
Businesses can unlock the full revenue potential by optimizing mobile payments and increasing their profitability.
2. Detect and prevent frauds
With an increasing number of digital payments, the risk of fraud is also increasing. According to the AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, around 80% of businesses faced payment fraud in 2023, and the top payment method affected by these fraudulent activities was ACH credit. Moreover, 30% of organizations were not able to receive the loss.
If the transactions are not secure, it creates trust issues in customers, and the reputation of businesses gets affected badly. Every business should detect fraud on time, use fraud detection software, and implement additional security verifications in high-value transactions.
Payment providers should also provide an extra layer of security in transactions to detect and prevent fraud. They must make their security systems strong and unbreachable to ensure secure transactions.
Businesses can leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect and stop fraud quickly. This way, companies can build more trust and make more profits.
3. Optimize recurring payments with automation
Some tasks are repetitive in a business’s financial operations. For example, they send funds to the same vendors or merchants monthly. Therefore, companies should leverage the power of automation tools provided by the payment systems.
Automating payments minimizes the risk of late payments. Intuit Quickbooks survey report shows that in 2022, around 73% of small businesses faced adverse financial effects because of late payments. So, to improve the relationship with your business partners, companies should automate recurring payments to avoid problems due to late invoices.
Automating recurring payments is faster than manual payments every time. It also reduces the risk of human error. Moreover, automation also reduces the cost of financial operations in a business because it reduces the involvement of the human workforce in administrative tasks.
4. Processing payments through a local gateway
Businesses operating across borders should use local payment gateways. A local payment gateway is a payment processing system based in the same region or country as the customer.
By introducing local payment gateways for customers, businesses can reduce transaction fees because the payments are domestic rather than international. Moreover, local gateways may offer more favorable exchange rates, reducing the cost of currency conversion.
One of the main advantages of using a local payment gateway is that it is quicker because the customer is dealing with a regional bank in local currency. This built the customer trust in the business, and they will become a recurring customer.
Local gateways help business to improve their conversion rates. Customers always look for seamless payments and are comfortable using payment methods they are familiar with.
So, businesses looking to optimize payments should leverage local gateways. This strategy allows companies to grow their customer base by acquiring local global markets.
5. Payment acceptance optimization
Businesses should optimize payment acceptance to ensure accessibility, provide a seamless customer experience, cater to the needs of international customers, and expand into new markets.
Integrating multiple payment methods, including credit/debit cards, digital wallets, mobile payments, bank transfers, and region-specific payment methods, helps businesses improve payment acceptance rates.
Moreover, businesses can use a global payment gateway that offers extensive international reach and support for multiple payment methods.
How to optimize B2B international payments?
Companies dealing with B2B international payments can optimize their payments using various strategies. According to a report, B2B payments will increase by 10% from 2022 to 2030 and reach a market size of $2,146.70 billion in 2030. So, Efficient payment processes can reduce costs, enhance cash flow, and improve business relationships.
Establishing favorable payment terms with suppliers and partners can optimize cash flow for B2B businesses. Negotiating extended payment terms or discounts for early payments can provide financial flexibility and reduce business costs internationally.
Collaborating with a global payment provider that offers comprehensive B2B solutions can simplify the complexities of international transactions. These providers often offer features like mass payments, real-time tracking, and multi-currency support, which are essential for scaling international B2B financial operations.
By adopting these strategies, businesses can optimize their B2B international payments, reducing costs and improving efficiency in global transactions.
How does Mural help with payment optimization?
Old ways of payment transactions, such as wire and bank transfers, do not provide speed and cost-effectiveness. However, Mural utilizes real-time technology to provide fast and secure transactions to its customers.
With Mural, businesses can optimize their payments by using services like fast global payments, invoicing clients, customizable product catalogs, cost-saving vendor payments, and receiving payments in stablecoins like USDC.
Mural supports 40+ currencies in 170+ countries. Businesses, freelancers, and e-commerce companies worldwide can leverage this advantage of making payments using over 40 fiat currencies and stablecoins.
In addition to the multiple currencies option, Mural provides users with an easy-to-use transaction tracking and management system. You can easily track your billing and invoicing, which keeps you updated about the transactions with full control of your funds.
Mural offers an amazing feature that helps you optimize your business payments. You can keep the USD in your virtual dollar account, and when you want to convert it into local currency, you can do it instantly.
Final Words
Businesses that want to prosper in this digital technology era must adopt strategies that assist them in payment optimization. This will help them to make their financial operations seamless and flawless.
Payment solutions like Mural help every business in fast and secure transactions. Whether you are a small business, a freelancer, or a global B2B business, you can use Mural’s payment features, which align with your business goals and objectives.
