To better serve clients and help make their businesses run smoother and more efficiently, FinTech startups are tackling an array of challenges, from data security to card declines to clunky customer experiences.
Last month, Modo helped merchants find ways to reduce card declines, DadeSystems sought to make data more secure through a “security by design” approach to development and AvidXchange looked to improve the customer experience by listening to suppliers. Here is the latest October news out of Startup Land.
Modo
For merchants, card declines pose a sizeable problem, stubbornly averaging around 15 percent. That challenge is not lost on FinTech startups.
“Merchants are now getting swamped with declines,” Modo Chief Executive Bruce Parker told PYMNTS in a recent interview.
Yet around 12 or 13 percent of them fall into a general bucket of declines provided by issuers. As a result, merchants can’t always discern why exactly a decline occurred based on the transaction codes they receive. At the same time, merchants are learning a decline is not the end-all be-all, and the merchant is left on the hook to figure out if it should reprocess a transaction.
Why? The merchant is concerned about how reprocessing a transaction might impact its relationship to the card network and to its processing partner. That’s where FinTech startups like Modo come in. The company knows why declines happen, and so is able to help merchants find out “when is a decline really a decline and when is a decline an opportunity to ask in another way,” according to Parker, indicating that FinTech startups can find new solutions to those customers’ pain points that just won’t go away.