Payments edge cases are my love language.

One extra payment field saved a merchant $2 million.

I spent time with Daniel Linder and the @Checkout.com team to understand what happens after a customer presses “buy” and we went deep into the sheer number of random things that can go wrong. A perfectly good customer can still get declined because their bank wants a different message, a software update broke saved cards, or the issuer still distrusts the merchant after a fraud attack.

And fixing one metric can make another worse. It's like a pin cushion.

• You can pick a cheaper route and lose more sales.
• Tighten a fraud rule and block good customers.
• Retry more payments and pay to push through transactions you should have stopped.

If you save ten cents processing a payment and lose a sale that would have contributed $20 after the cost of the goods, you haven’t optimized anything useful.

Better information can improve fraud, acceptance and cost together. After that, the choices depend on what you sell, your margins and your customers.

Measure them separately and each team can hit its target while the business gets worse.
My new Brainfood deep dive gets into the messages, the trade-offs and the surprisingly human work of getting a bank to investigate.

Sweat the details.

Link to the full piece: https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/sweat-the-details

Paid partnership with http://Checkout.com.