The payments industry continues to be one of the most dynamic in 2020. Given a constantly evolving landscape, the ability to keep up with new client demands and regulations can be challenging.

Finance Magnates spoke with Ran Cohen, co-Founder & CEO, BridgerPay for his perspective on the company and where it fits into the payments ecosystem.

What role does BridgerPay play in the payments space and how does your service suite help PSPs and merchants?

BridgerPay built a bridge between payment providers and merchants to make payments easy.

We are PSP-agnostic, you can call it a payment infrastructure that enables us to fulfill our mission to deliver growth-ready payment infrastructure for merchants and PSPs simultaneously.

Our payment orchestration solves the toughest payment challenges online businesses face today.

Using the Bridger platform saves the merchants the tech resources required to manage multiple payment providers, saves failed transactions and payment page abandonment by utilising our proprietary retry model and improves the overall operation and customer service for online merchants.

What makes BridgerPay unique relative to the competition?

BridgerPay was created because I was experiencing serious pains with payments in my previous company, legacy technologies, bad UX/UI, downtimes of PSPs and lots of declines… so we built Bridger from the ground up according to real payment pains that businesses have. 

That allowed us to actually build a product the industry is craving for, a solution to payment pains while increasing approval rates meant to revolutionize the industry.

And that’s what we’ve built. A Real PSP-agnostic Supergate together with an AI-based Retry Engine that is able to seamlessly retry the credit cards with alternative payment processors to save failed transactions in any mode of transaction non-3D/3D/3D2S. 

2020 has seen a lot of changes to the industry. In what ways has BridgerPay adapted to challenges such as increased risks of fraud, etc?

We have implemented a unified method to all 3DS2 scenarios so that we are up-to-date with the latest requirements and have made sure that we will be able to add it to any PSPs that will adopt the 3d2s technology. 

Another major challenge merchants have today is allocation of volumes that they send their payment providers. We’ve created a smart and dynamic Rules Engine that will give them full control on their payments allocation, per country/PSP/currency.

Still today, with the major changes in the industry, the biggest challenges are finding solutions to increasing approval rates and lack of local payment methods, and this is where the BridgerPay solution really shines. 

How much of an issue are failed transactions and what does BridgerPay do to rescue these?

Failed transactions are definitely the biggest issue that the industry faces today, making it impossible for merchants to work without a payment infrastructure that they can scale with.

Many research stats show that 62% of customers who experienced a failed payment will not return to the website the failure occurred on. Moreover, if a visitor has a payment failure, their chance to convert drops by 70%.

Merchants suffer from failed transactions as a result of various reasons, including integration issues, downtime by payment providers, and potential fraud prevention. 

We built Bridger Retry technology which is capable of seamlessly retrying the card with alternative payment processors.

I can tell you that today the Bridger technology is saving an average of 15% of FX merchants’ declines, that’s a huge amount of money we are saving FX Brokerages today if you consider the high volumes this industry has and the fact that an average of 1 out of 3 transactions is declined in this vertical.

Through the Bridger Router merchants can easily set the order of their alternative payment processors and set custom retry rules to optimise processing and merchant fees. 

Where do you see the payments industry in 2021 and are there any developments at Bridgerpay in the pipeline?

Making payments easy for online businesses is now more important than ever before. 

COVID-19 has changed the way people relate to trading, you can feel it from the increase in processed volume in 2020, especially in emerging economies.

This means that online platforms are faced with the need to provide seamless, speedy transactions with a variety of payment methods, both local and global.

BridgerPay never stops developing and growing the product from what we learn from our merchants. In the coming year we intend to release a game-changer in the way merchants connect, manage and optimize their gateway. Taking the “easy” to a personalized level.