The Easy Way to Accept Payments in a New Country

Want more content?

By subscribing to our mailing list, you will be enrolled to receive our latest blogs, product updates, industry news, and more!

Are you looking to expand your business and customer base in a new country or market? Selling your products and services in a new country can help you reach additional potential customers, increase your revenue and speed-to-market, and improve your business success. While there are numerous benefits to accepting international payments, challenges such as understanding new customer payment habits, finding the best payment solution, and providing a seamless checkout experience for international customers must be addressed. Only using a single payment processor to accept payments in a new country can negatively impact your business. Specifically, this can affect your payment flexibility, authorization rates, payment processing fees, integration requirements, and speed to market. This article will discuss an easy approach to securely accepting payments in new countries by adopting a multi-processor strategy.    

Quick Hits:

  • A single payment service provider can limit your ability to accept payments in new markets quickly and easily. 
  • Partnering with a cloud tokenization platform that allows you to use a multi-processor solution can increase your authorization rates, revenue potential, and speed-to-market while reducing processing costs and integration time.  
  • Stay competitive by adopting a payment solution that helps scale your business, drive sales, and reach a new customer base in new countries. 
Don’t Limit Your Business to One Payment Processor

A single payment processor may seem like a good option since it typically provides an all-in-one payment solution. However, you can hit roadblocks when you need to accept payments in new countries or markets. For example, your payment service provider (PSP) may only process payments in a limited number of countries and currencies. As a result, this can prevent your business from accepting payments worldwide. In turn, this can harm your ability to scale, reach new customers, and unlock unrealized revenue. 

How Can Multiple Payment Processors Help You Easily Accept Payments in a New Country?

No matter what type of digital business you are, every business has a few universal requirements. These needs include sustainable business growth, consistent revenue, fast speed-to-market, flexible payment options, and an excellent customer checkout experience. If your company processes payments, it’s crucial that your payment processor helps meet your needs. However, several issues can arise by limiting your business to using just one PSP.  

Benefits of Using Multiple Payment Processors:

  • Accept payments in countries that current processors may not support. 
  • Utilize the right processor for a new market with minimal integration work. 
  • Smoother user experience. 
  • Increase authorization rates. 
  • Reduce switching costs.  
  • Limited impact on PCI scope. 

Gain Access to New Markets Without Switching Processors

Your current payment processor may not support all the countries that you want to do business in. But changing your processor can be a difficult, and sometimes expensive process. Depending on which PSP you work with, you may encounter significant fees to switch to a different payment processor. One of our fintech clients, Acima Credit, ran into this issue when they needed to switch processors while using a single payment processor. Acima VP of Engineering Ryan Christensen says, “We had a partner that wanted to charge us over $100,000 to move our cards to a different processor.”  

A better option is to utilize multiple payment processors so that you don’t need to change processors each time you want to expand to a new country that your current processor doesn’t support. A cloud tokenization platform like TokenEx offers you the flexibility to connect with multiple payment processors. This flexibility means you can quickly and easily redirect your tokens from TokenEx without paying to retrieve or create new tokens for different payment processors. It also makes it easy to add, remove, or change payment processors as your business needs evolve. 

Increase Speed to Market

Companies must find ways to quickly and easily open new markets to reach a broader customer base in today’s competitive landscape. The last thing you want is to be held back by a single payment service provider that takes too long to allow you to accept payments in new markets. Thus, you can lose sales, revenue, and new customers to your competition that penetrates a market faster than you. Having the ability to quickly add new payment providers can speed up the process of expanding into a new market. 

One of our multinational clients, VIVRI, utilized a multi-processor strategy with TokenEx to improve their speed in expanding to new markets in new countries. VIVRI IT Director Fernando Flores mentions, “For our old model, if we want to open a new country, that could take us around two to three months to see if we can process payments in that country.” Flores says, using the TokenEx model, “… takes us one to two weeks from a technical side to be ready or to say that we can process in that country.”  

Optimize Payments by Geographic Location

Geographic location is a huge driving force for optimizing payments in a new country. Each country has different payment processors, banks, currencies, and costs for accepting customer payments. This is why your business needs to conduct market research and know what is required to set yourself up for payment success. A cloud tokenization platform that allows you to utilize multiple payment processors can be a game-changer for entering new markets. 

Working with multiple payment processors can offer more control over your payment data than with a single PSP. Complete control of your payment process makes accepting payments in different countries and markets much easier and quicker. According to Flores at VIVRI, “By having full control of the process, we can build a hub or gateway…” that internally enables us to route payments to all of our payment processors. “This payment flexibility isn’t always possible when you limit yourself to a single payment service provider.” 

By utilizing multiple processors, businesses have access to data that can improve their payment outcomes on a country-by-country basis. This data is crucial because it can help them determine which processor to send a transaction to. The payment data is based on authorization performance and processing costs (e.g., transaction, authorization, and conversion fees). Additionally, businesses can look at the BIN ranges of issuing banks to identify which payment processors have higher authorization rates in a particular country for a particular card. 

Improve Authorization Rates

In general, combining a cloud tokenization platform offering universal tokens with a multi-PSP strategy can help your business increase its authorization rates. Authorization rates are increased by minimizing downtime and helping you route transactions to the best processor.  

However, there are additional benefits when accepting payments in multiple countries. A key benefit is that you can utilize processors that have the best relationships with local acquirers. One of our clients increased their authorization rates by two to three percentage points in developing markets by using a processor that specialized in that region. Similarly, larger companies are able to take advantage of establishing relationships with local acquirers in developed countries where they have a physical presence. This improved their authorization rates in these countries by one percentage point. 

A few percentage points don’t seem like much, but it does when considering this against your annual revenue. For example, consider a business with a yearly revenue of $300 million. With a one percentage point increase in authorization rates, it could receive an extra $3 million in annual revenue. This is the financial impact the right payment solution can have on your bottom line. 

Better User Experience

While you may be well accustomed to accepting payments locally and nationally, entering international markets is a different ballgame. It’s essential for your business to fully understand the needs of your new customer base. These needs may include their payment preferences, shopping habits, and the different currencies they use. The average cart abandonment rate is just under 70 percent in 2023. With such a high abandonment rate, it’s critical to provide a positive checkout experience for customers. A better user experience will help reduce this abandonment rate and increase profits. How can you accomplish this? By using multiple PSPs to remove friction from the checkout process.

Utilizing multiple PSPs allows you to maximize the chances that a transaction will be approved. This is because you can route it to the ideal processor for a particular country. You also have additional processors that you can try if your primary PSP is down or rejects the transaction. The last thing that you want is to deny a customer who is trying to purchase from you. That’s lost revenue at the moment, and potentially a lost customer in the long run. 

Reduce PCI Scope

PCI DSS compliance is a top priority for businesses that accept, handle, or process cardholder data. Not being compliant can lead to legal, reputational, and financial harm for your company. Your business can reduce PCI scope by partnering with a cloud tokenization platform that stores sensitive payment information outside your internal systems. Not worrying about compliance means your company can focus on reaching new markets and driving sales. This also keeps you compliant as you add or change PSPs for the various countries in which you do business in.  

Discover how a sporting goods retailer reduced PCI scope by over 90 percent.
How TokenEx Can Help You Accept Payments in New Countries
How to choose a tokenization solution resource.