Mastercard (NYSE: MA) has introduced a new service, the Payment Optimization Platform (POP), which is designed to enhance approval rates for merchants that are using data to make more “intelligent” decisions about transactions. Early pilot results indicate a 9% to 15% increase in conversions. Mastercard developed POP—a network-based service leveraging Mastercard data to enhance authorization messages and increase merchant approval rates—with AI capabilities to be integrated after pilot.
Mastercard said that it continues to roll-out POP with Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments and Worldpay, who will reportedly use the service in order to offer an optimal payment experience, enable service continuity and “gain incremental revenue.”
The acceptance community is committed to delivering a better payment experience and “maximizing transaction approvals.”
But securing approvals is no easy task.
Acquirers and merchants are limited to the information and data within their own ecosystems, they rely “on multiple stakeholders and may lack the specialized expertise needed to optimize conversion rates.”
Merchants tend to experiment with different strategies to boost transaction success rates, however, their efforts are limited by the overall scope of their data.
Mastercard claims that it is positioned via its real-time access to data points from billions of transactions. This allows POP to determine “areas of improvement and to spot other potential issues.”
To offer the best possible results for merchants, the Payment Optimization Platform evaluates over “a trillion combinations of various data elements to create the most optimal authorization in near real-time and delivers insights to help increase approvals.”
Models are said to be constantly learning and trained on the latest transaction attributes and authorization trends”to continuously optimize payments.”
This leads to a more frictionless consumer experience and also helps with driving incremental conversions for merchants.
Sumeet Bhatt, SVP, Payment Optimization, Mastercard said,
“The Payment Optimization Platform … provides our acceptance community partners with tools and intelligence to deliver the best payment experience and drive higher conversions.”
A more widespread roll-out of POP is to take place later in 2025 with additional acceptance partners.
