Smart payment processing is the act of simplifying the payment experience for the end user. Trustly has built its position within the A2A payments industry by consistently – and for 15 years – providing merchants with the ability to accept payments for goods and services directly from their customers’ bank accounts. We focus on the payer and merchant experiences while cutting out traditional intermediary costs, like card networks.
In our bid to change how the world pays, we enable consumers to select Trustly at the checkout and use our flow to complete a payment instantly. Our technology and bank connectivity increase conversion and reduce fraud. It is a quick and financially sustainable option for consumers to pay from their bank and easily track their spending. Being an end-to-end solution, the payment is processed through our collection, reconciliation, and settlement platform, helping reduce operational costs and complexity.
By innovating across the Open Banking spectrum and augmenting payments with data, we can offer a solution beyond generic payments. Thanks to our Azura data engine, we offer a user journey that is as straightforward as possible, while still leaving the payer in control of the payment. Furthermore, we can provide our merchants with additional data points, such as the verified identity of the payer. Another use case we support is the verified linking of a bank account with a specific individual, which helps mitigate fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) risks.
We also add value to the merchant in the area of fraud prevention. Reducing false declines and chargebacks is a crucial step in protecting businesses from revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction. Trustly’s Risk Engine differentiates between legitimate and fraudulent transactions, lowering incorrect declines while improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
If required, we also enable merchants to verify their customers’ bank details in a user-friendly way, mitigating fraud and other financial crime risks that come with customer refunds and payouts.
We aim to address our merchants’ needs and requirements further and do everything we can to solve them.
Trustly skips unnecessary payment intermediaries by moving money directly, allowing shoppers to buy things straight from their bank account. With Trustly’s proprietary data engine Azura – our brand-new checkout technology – we have enabled customer recognition at the checkout. As a result, conversion increases and payments are personalised to the user. These capabilities create a network effect, enabling consumers who opt-in with one merchant to be recognised across other merchants offering Trustly’s payment solution, as well as across all their devices. This integration operates with the highest levels of security, ensuring consumer data protection while enhancing the user experience.
We also work on a range of data uses when it comes to improving transparency in payments without adding user friction. For example, Trustly Pay N’ Play has been one such pioneering solution, combining customer ID verification with a payment in a single onboarding flow. This drastically reduces the time until a user can have their account activated. Additional KYC uses include helping verify accounts, income and funding sources, strengthening AML measures, and helping combat fraud in the public sector. These use cases bring benefits both to users, through a smooth and convenient payment experience, and to merchants, limiting their need to handle suspicious transactions manually and in general improving their AML and CTF work. In the future, we foresee a standard reusable digital identity across platforms that includes payment preferences and KYC data.
We combat fraud across a couple of different dimensions. Firstly, Trustly’s payments are subject to strong customer authentication, performed by the user vis-a-vis their bank. Secondly, fraud prevention technology is a key module of our payments platform, so all payments are monitored considering the specifics of A2A transactions. Thirdly, as we can link bank accounts to their verified owners, we can often help our merchants reduce fraud on their side.
In general, fraudsters are working harder and harder to circumvent the fraud protections in place. Our priority will always be using more data in a smarter way to stay ahead of fraud attacks. Currently, we are especially seeing an increase in account takeover frauds. This typically occurs when fraudsters target potentially vulnerable individuals to gain their trust and access to their banking information. This is done through phishing, vishing, and smishing. These types of fraud are not always easy to spot as the fraudster gains access to the account and poses as the account holder. Utilising data points gathered in the payment journey can help combat these types of fraud, such as geolocation data.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Unlocking the Potential of A2A Payments Report 2024 – Changing the Way We Pay and Get Paid, which taps into the fast, ever-expanding A2A payments industry, being the ultimate source of information for businesses looking to grow their consumer base.
Jussi Lindberg, Chief Revenue Officer at Trustly, joined the company in 2023 with over a decade of experience in the payment and ecommerce industries. He’s worked in executive roles at companies like PayPal and eBay. Jussi has also held pivotal roles at Adyen, contributing to its ascent as a global payment powerhouse, catering to giants like H&M, Uber, and Netflix, among others.
Trustly was launched in 2008 and has grown rapidly over the past 16 years, becoming a global leader in Open Banking payment solutions. With a mission to make online payments as seamless as possible, Trustly offers an innovative payment platform, bridging the gap between consumers and merchants. Its technology ensures that transactions are processed in real-time, providing both speed and security for all parties involved.
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