Interview

Turning payment challenges into revenue opportunities – upcoming developments and insights from FlexCharge

Thursday 13 July 2023 09:33 CET | Editor: Diana Lupuleac | Interview

Daniel Kornitzer, Advisory Board Member at FlexCharge, discusses the challenges payment managers face and presents FlexCharge's solution and upcoming developments.

Could you provide some insights into your background and experience in the payments industry?

I'm a technologist at heart, having started my career as a scientist. I've spent the best part of the last 20 years at Paysafe, as Chief Product and then Business Development Officer, during which time we grew the business to over USD 1.5 billion in revenue by developing multiple payment methods, including digital wallets, in over 100 markets. I'm also a former member of the NACHA Risk Management Task Force, part of the ETA Canadian Working Group, and sit on the advisory board of Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE). But what really excites me is innovation in the payments industry because it means creating value for consumers and businesses alike – value in the form of better services, more convenience, exceptional user experience, and improved conversion rates for merchants.

What are the most significant challenges that payment managers commonly face based on your observations?

I'd say that payment managers face a two-fold challenge. On one hand, their objective is to increase conversion rates, as well as to acquire and retain new customers – and on the other hand, their goal is to reduce processing costs and the incidence of fraud. What makes it interesting is that sometimes the two sets of objectives can be at odds with each other. For example, increasing acceptance rates could potentially come at the price of being willing to accept slightly higher fraud rates.

Could you tell us more about FlexCharge, the company you recently joined as a strategic advisor, and what motivated you to join their team?

FlexCharge leverages its deep expertise in data science, artificial intelligence, risk management, and embedded payments to solve an intractable problem: transaction declines. Declined transactions are disruptive for consumers and carry a significant and often underestimated cost for merchants, processors, acquirers, and the entire payments ecosystem. While the actual percentage of declines can vary widely by geography, type of product, and transaction amount, we've seen values as low as 4% and as high as 30 or even 40%, with the average being in the 10-15% range.

Having worked with ecommerce merchants and consumers for over 20 years, I’m thrilled to be part of such a talented team creating innovative, highly tangible, and relevant solutions for the market. My goal is to help accelerate the company’s rapid growth by unlocking new revenue opportunities for merchants, processors, gateways, acquirers, and even card schemes.


Can you please provide further details on the product offered by FlexCharge? How does it work, and what is the underlying business model of the company?

Declines occur for hundreds of different reasons but lead to a poor user experience and are often underestimated by merchants that do not realise the full extent of the revenue leakage. FlexCharge's solution can be seamlessly embedded in the transaction flow, so that declines are captured in real time and routed to the company's AI-powered AcceptIQ platform, which renders an instant decision as to whether the decline can be turned into an approval, to the consumer's benefit and with the funds guaranteed by FlexCharge to the merchant. AcceptIQ is the fruit of decades of research and field experience in the analysis of consumer credit and underwriting data to maximise approvals while minimising losses.

Ultimately, this technology delivers a (transaction decline) cure rate of between 30 and 55% and a merchant revenue uplift of 10-15% or more. It also gives consumers the opportunity to get the product they want, at no additional cost to them.

Looking ahead, what can we expect from FlexCharge in the next 12 months? Do you have any plans or developments in the pipeline that you could share with us?

The coming 12 months will be incredibly exciting for FlexCharge. Having received an unprecedented market response, the next step is to fully deploy our current merchant, processor, and gateway pipeline – and let the company's predictive models and decisioning analysis work their magic in terms of turning declines into merchant revenue and opportunities for customer-relationship building.

About Daniel Kornitzer

Daniel Kornitzer is a fintech industry leader and advisor. He was formerly Chief Business Development Officer for Paysafe, responsible for enterprise sales globally. He was also a stakeholder in Paysafe’s M&A, as Paysafe’s EVP/Chief Product Officer. Earlier, he was CEO of SiteSell.com.

In his more than 20 years in technology management, Daniel has pioneered groundbreaking initiatives. He’s an advisory board member of Merchant Payments Ecosystem, ETA Canadian Working Group, and Open Finance Network Canada. Daniel holds a B.Eng. from Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique, an M.Eng. from McGill University, and a diploma in network engineering from the University of Toronto. You can contact him at daniel.kornitzer@flex-charge.com.

About FlexCharge

FlexCharge is an AI-driven platform that partners with merchants and payment providers to instantly review and recover failed customer transactions at no risk to the merchant and at no cost to the consumer. The platform offers the widest coverage and least friction possible to a merchant. If FlexCharge believes a customer will pay, it takes the risk and pays the merchant, thus guaranteeing the transaction. The customer is subsequently charged at no additional cost. The company is based in the US with the product and R&D in Israel.


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Keywords: payments , digital wallet, artificial intelligence, Acquirer, risk management, merchants, embedded payments, payment gateway
Categories: Payments & Commerce
Companies: FlexCharge
Countries: World
This article is part of category

Payments & Commerce

FlexCharge

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