Albert Drouart from Pagos joined PAYMENTS FM to talk about payments data, monitoring, benchmarks, AI, and how merchants can use payments data in day to day work.
Note: We are launching the State of Payments survey. It takes about four minutes to complete, and anonymous responses are welcome. We will publish the results at the end of the year.
Why this matters
Payment teams usually know when a provider is down. The harder question is what happens when the provider is up, checkout is live, and payment performance still hurts the business.
Good customers can get declined. Fraud rules can block too much volume. Retries can add cost. Chargebacks can move in one market. Fees can change in ways finance needs to explain.
This is why payments data needs a business context. Networks change. Issuers change. Customer behavior changes. Internal teams ship product changes. Revenue can leak quietly if nobody reviews the data with the right context.
What to watch
Payment teams should watch the signals that connect payments to revenue, cost, customer experience, and risk.
Approval rate by payment method and other parameters
Technical declines by provider, integration, and setup
Decline codes that affect retries and customer messaging
Fraud rules that block good customers
Chargebacks by segment and market
Payment fees and avoidable retry cost
Retry performance and recovery rate
Subscription payment failures after internal changes
Wallets, BNPL, ACH, and pay by bank performance
Market changes that affect authorization rates
What it means for your team
Payments data is useful for many teams.
Product needs it for checkout conversion and customer experience. Engineering needs it for integrations and releases. Finance needs it for cost and reconciliation. Risk and fraud teams need it for exposure and false positives. Operations needs it for incidents. Leadership needs it for revenue.
Albert explains why merchants need clean data, useful alerts, benchmarks, and enough context to decide what to do next.
This also applies to single PSP merchants. One provider still leaves many questions: approvals, declines, cost, chargebacks, fraud rules, issuers, payment methods, markets, and customer behavior.
What to do next
Start with the places where payment performance can quietly leak money.
Review technical declines every week
Compare approval rate by payment method and other parameters
Connect payments to customer, order, subscription, and revenue data
Check if retries recover revenue or add cost
Review fraud rules for good customers blocked
Track chargebacks and fraud by segment
Monitor payment fees with finance
Give product, finance, risk, fraud, operations, and engineering one shared view
Use benchmarks before assuming the issue is internal
Clean PSP data before adding more dashboards or AI workflows
Questions to ask internally
Where do we see payment performance drop before revenue notices it?
Can we tell if a decline issue comes from us, the issuer, or the market?
Do product, finance, risk, fraud, operations, and engineering use the same payment data?
Which retries recover money, and which retries add cost?
Which declines can we actually fix?
Which fraud rules block good customers?
Can finance explain payment cost changes quickly?
Do benchmarks show if the issue is internal or market wide?
Is the data clean enough for useful AI work?
Guest perspective
Payment monitoring should cover more than provider uptime. A provider can be online while approval rates, fees, fraud rules, or chargebacks move in the wrong direction.
Raw PSP data is useful, but merchants still need cleanup. The work often includes normalized fields, business context, duplicate removal, and links to customer or order data.
Benchmarks help teams avoid guessing. If approval rates fall, the issue may come from an internal change, issuer behavior, card network changes, or a broader market pattern.
AI is useful when the data is ready. Machine learning can help with detection and anomaly analysis. Generative AI can help summarize changes and explain likely causes.
The real work is turning payments data into operating information that teams can use.
Listen or watch
Resources
Related episodes
Open Banking and Pay by Bank with Anubhav Pradhan, ShiftMate
Benefits of Payment Orchestration with Zubin Vandrevala, Gr4vy
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