No matter what your current payment functionality is, adding cross-border payment APIs to your repertoire can help improve your payment functionality, user experience, ROI and future growth opportunities. We’ve laid out six benefits of leveraging cross-border APIs as part of your payment solution.
Offering customers more payment options ultimately translates into recognition of their needs. Cross-border payment APIs can help you offer customers greater flexibility with regards to payment methods and lessen the FX transaction fees and responsibilities you ask them to shoulder.
If you’re a US-based company with EU customers and your payment solution only allows you to receive US dollars, then you’re placing the entire burden of FX conversion onto your end customer — a burden that’s both financially and operationally taxing. Asking your customer to own the financial risk and complexity of cross-border payments adds unnecessary friction to your relationship and undervalues their trust and overall experience with your brand.
A payment solution like our Global Collections will allow you to customize payment options and collect funds in your customer’s local currency. By taking advantage of Currencycloud’s established international payment ecosystem, you can provide this added convenience and control international cash flow without increasing your development or overhead expenses.
Even if you have a payment solution in place, it’s possible to optimize your payment process by leveraging a single API to lend functionality in a specific area. With regard to FX payments, integrating a conversion rate API or validation API could revolutionize your payment process by providing real-time insight into exchange fees and validating payments before initiation. Leveraging key payment APIs in your solution will help reduce your failed payment rate, help build trust by offering greater FX transparency and allow you to offer your international customers more competitive FX rates.
The operational impact of adding a validation API to your payment process can be significant. If account information is verified in real time, users can preemptively correct any miskeyed or inaccurate information before a payment is sent. Most modern customers take this ability for granted, so neglecting this simple payment functionality can negatively impact your overall customer experience and operational productivity. By leveraging existing APIs rather than building them from scratch, you’ll be tapping into a third-party provider’s existing payment ecosystem, saving development costs and gaining international dexterity in the process.
In addition to freeing international customers from the burden of FX fees and responsibilities, maintaining FX control (via conversion API integration) can help save you and your customers money. Payment providers like Currencycloud give businesses the ability to maintain multi-currency accounts and make conversions when FX rates are optimal. In this way, you can offer customers a low, flat-rate exchange fee and pocket the profit margin (rather than relinquishing control and money to larger banking institutions).
Integrating with cross-border payments APIs can be impactful to your business by providing enhanced security. Payment security can make or break customer trust in your brand. By integrating with a third-party payment provider, you’ll reap the benefits of multi-factor security and increased financial regulation. You can be sure that customer data is properly maintained and protected without internally shouldering the burden of security updates.
In terms of optimizing your user experience and process, the ability to pull and interpret historical data is crucial. By integrating with a reporting API, you’ll streamline financial reporting, gain valuable insight into customer behavior and use data to optimize your internal payment process, improving your product. Rather than attempting to draw conclusions from a bank statement, you can leverage more sophisticated reporting features to accurately evaluate your financial decisions. How much did you pay in exchange fees in a given period? What currencies or payment methods did your customers favor? More transparency into financial metrics will enable you and your customers to make smarter business decisions.
Increasing your cross-border payment functionality can help you deliver a more competitive product, process and user experience. Learn more about Currencycloud’s array of payment integrations by contacting us.