Payment Challenges Facing Businesses Today

The adoption of digital payments has been – and continues to be – incredibly rapid. With rapid growth, however, come a lot of challenges. Digital payments are fast and convenient but depend on stable, secure payment ecosystems. Security is not the only concern. Compatibility and regulatory compliance are other matters that cause confusion and occasional breakdowns in digital payments. Let’s place these payment challenges under the spotlight and see how the world of digital payments can deal with them.

Digital payments have certainly made it easier to make and receive payments, but like all technologies, they are not without challenges. It is a fairly new technology, and while people learn how to use it and the tools themselves are perfected, there are bound to be issues of adoption and implementation. These include:

We have already highlighted the importance of interoperability and integration when it comes to digital payments. Cashless commerce requires integration on both large and small scales. Within a business, the entire sales, financial management, inventory management and customer management ecosystem must be fully integrated. On a broader scale, businesses, banks and other role players all need to be integrated with one another. Despite the central importance of integration, there are still several common challenges impeding it.

These challenges include a lack of interoperability between different payment systems, and the different components and stakeholders involved in payment processing. As a result of this, businesses tend to rely on multiple payment platforms, all more or less independent of one another, leading to delays and additional costs. There is not enough standardization and interoperability, and APIs and SDKs are different across various systems, which makes integration almost impossible in some cases. 

These challenges can be solved through open APIs and SDKs, improved standardization and interoperability, efficient cross-border payment solutions and collaborative partnerships between platforms, perhaps even on the government level.

You may be able to keep your revenue and turnover high with your digital payment platform, but how much does it cost you? Unless you are keeping your costs low, your profit margins will start to suffer, and that will affect the future viability of your business. Every business needs to be able to take payments online, but there is no point in doing so if the costs are exorbitant. If businesses are paying too much for their digital payment facilities, this poses a serious challenge to the viability of these platforms. 

The costs of payment platforms differ, but they generally charge a percentage of each credit or debit card transaction plus a flat fee, typically 1.3% to 3.5%.

Network congestion, especially during busy periods, can lead to slow connections and failed transactions, which are frustrating for both merchants and customers. Congestion causes delays in authorization, longer processing times, potential transaction failures and higher fees. However, all of these problems are avoidable.

Fast, accessible networks are essential for successful digital payments. Although factors such as peak shopping seasons, large-scale events, and temporary network faults will all arise from time to time, their effects on network speed can be mitigated through measures such as:

Much of the infrastructure used for payments is outdated, and the development of new infrastructure doesn’t always manage to keep up with the rapid adoption of payment technology. This leads to increased risks of downtime and other inefficiencies. 

Upgraded POS systems can also help. Retailers should modernize their POS systems to handle higher transaction volumes. You can also develop cloud-based payment processing systems that provide more flexible and scalable infrastructure requirements. Advanced cybersecurity measures can be used to protect payment infrastructure against cyber attacks, which helps to keep systems both safe and efficient. Open banking standards promote interoperability and standardization, which makes infrastructure work more smoothly.

Many businesses want to trade across borders and when they do, they often find themselves facing problems with currency exchanges and international compatibility. Differences in currency and financial regulation can make it difficult to trade across borders. Standardization and collaboration are the keys to overcoming these challenges. Governments and global regulatory bodies need to reach new agreements that will make cross-border trade easier, and the tech sector will need to develop solutions that remove transnational barriers to digital trade. Collaboration between financial institutions, regulators, and technology providers is key to ensuring digital payment systems evolve to meet the needs of a global economy.

Access2Pay is a cloud-based POS solution ideally suited for your retail business – whether you operate a brick-and-mortar store, an e-commerce platform, or a combination of both. It integrates easily with any other tools you need to run your business, including accounting software, payment gateways, payment processors, and more. This means it can be used to set up and manage recurring payments, a central part of the business models used by a variety of businesses, such as gyms, software as a service (SaaS), and more. 

The benefits of our system include:

Track and manage your inventory accurately, from intake to sale. You can monitor your stock levels, and automate and streamline your ordering processes.

Access2Pay’s integration and customization abilities help to provide solutions to many of the payment challenges facing the business world today. We also provide payment software ongoing support to help our customers get the most from their payment solutions. If you would like to learn more about Access2Pay, its capabilities, and how it could work for your business, you are welcome to contact us for more information or a demo.