Mastercard has announced the launch of a new service, the Payment Optimization Platform (POP), developed to improve approval rates for merchants.
With this new tool, Mastercard aims to enhance approval rates for merchants utilising data to make intelligent decisions about transactions. According to the company, early pilot results showcase a 9% to 15% boost in conversions.
As a network-based service, Mastercard’s POP solution uses the company’s data to improve authorisation messages and increase merchant approval rates. Mastercard plans to include advanced AI capabilities shortly after finalising the pilot phase. Additionally, the company intends to continue to launch POP with Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments, and Worldpay, who will leverage the service to deliver an optimal payment experience, support service continuity, and expand revenue.
Mastercard aims for a widespread launch of POP later in 2025 with additional acceptance partners.
Mitigating issues through intelligence
Even if the acceptance community focuses on offering a simplified payment experience and maximising transaction approvals, obtaining them can pose difficulties. Acquirers and merchants are limited to the data within their own ecosystems, with them relying on multiple stakeholders and may lack the resources required to enhance conversion rates. Additionally, merchants go through various strategies to optimise transaction success rates, but most of their efforts are limited by the scope of their data. Currently, Mastercard is positioned to support them through its real-time access to data points from a large number of transactions. This is set to enable POP to determine areas of improvement and spot other potential problems.
To facilitate positive results for merchants, Mastercard’s POP service evaluates over a trillion combinations of various data elements to create optimal authorisation in near real-time and provides insights to scale approvals. Models are continuously learning and trained on the latest transaction attributes and authorisation trends to improve payments. Through this, Mastercard aims to deliver an augmented consumer experience and assist in driving conversions for merchants.
