Why eCommerce Executives & CFOs Need to Consider Payment & Fraud Solutions During 2024 Budget Planning 

By Yvan Gilliard, SVP, Payment Solutions & Omnichannel, Radial

During the fall, the corporate eCommerce world is busy preparing, revising, and submitting 2024 budgets. Most retailers are focused on cost savings and looking for ways to trim budgets without sacrificing customer experience or competitive edge. Many are looking at streamlining operations, staffing levels, vendors and suppliers to trim excess and get the best value at the best cost. However, while management tends to look at the supply chain and headcounts, few take a hard look at their payment and fraud solutions.

It’s true that in a cloud-centric, eCommerce world, we have not always challenged our vendor ecosystem, especially because that cloud ecosystem is still young and many applications and systems are fairly recent additions to the business. Challenging our tech stack, our vendors, our team structures may not seem apparent, but it’s necessary.

CFOs and executives responsible for Finance, Digital, or eCommerce need to understand the total cost of ownership of their payments and eCommerce fraud protection processes; then examine where these solutions and teams can be optimized for value and cost.

To do so, we recommend executives take the following steps:   

How many payment methods (traditional tenders, wallets, buy now pay later, and ACH) are in place and are they contracted directly or through a processor? What is the total cost of all payment methods? In our work consulting with eCommerce retailers, we often see them providing too many payment methods and options to customers. This not only creates overwhelm in the checkout process, but it costs the business with each payment providers’ fees and rates. We advise retailers to reduce the number of methods and use data to determine which payment options customers use most in their category and focus on providing those.

Likewise, contracting directly with each payment provider is expensive without economies of scale and creates administrative complexity. Streamlining payment methods through a consolidated payment processor cuts through the chaos and saves money.

How many point solutions are contracted for pre- and post- authorization, fraud detection, identity protection, device indemnification, and chargeback management? What is the total cost of these solutions? Like payment solutions, having multiple point fraud solutions creates complexity and requires individual licensing costs, fees, and contracts. Streamlining these solutions with vendors that can offer consolidated, comprehensive fraud detection, prevention, chargeback, and reporting services simplifies administrative effort and reduces cost.

How big is the payments and fraud team and how many teams must be stood up to manage the ecosystem for:

Headcount is costly. Where could team size be optimized by consolidating vendors, leveraging automation, or outsourcing to a single source solution provider?

How is the vendor ecosystem liaised to make sure it works hand-in-hand and with operations? Disconnected systems that cannot share data cost time, repeated labor, and resources. They also tend to increase the risk of errors. Not only do applications and systems need to be integrated to work from the same data, but these integrations need to be monitored and updated whenever one vendor makes a change. IT is notoriously slow at manual integration and maintenance. One solution is to pay to automate the integration process with the IT team, but another is to partner with an experienced payment and fraud solution provider that offers managed services, like Radial.

Finally, how easily can the company react and add new payment methods, implement and comply with new regulations, or get the latest technology cascaded through the ecosystem? Speed is essential to compete in today’s market. But introducing new technologies or complying with new regulations is often challenging in complex, multi-solution ecosystems.

Radial Payment Solutions has been providing single-source services to eCommerce brands for 25 years. We manage the end-to-end payments and fraud prevention ecosystem on behalf of a portfolio of global brands and retailers. Our zero fraud indemnification policy ensures that our clients have zero liability for any fraud cost.

It’s our mission to help brands deliver the best customer experience with the latest technologies, while enabling them to use their resources wisely and strategically, optimizing the total cost of ownership for payments and fraud. Solutions like Radial can be a strategic way to streamline, contain or lower costs, and truly partner with experts in the eCommerce payment and fraud industry.

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