The Holy Grail

Real-Time Decisioning Systems

Our bolt-on Custom Payment Processing components attach to your existing payment systems, providing real-time payment decisioning to optimize the transaction outcomes that matter to you.

Application

Keep your payment system. Our components bolt on.

Suitable for payment processors, PSPs, gateways and large sophisticated merchants. Custom tailored to the way you do business — dynamically routing each transaction through the bank, region, or merchant account that delivers the optimal outcome inside the live transaction loop.

If you’re processing significant payments volume, the last thing you want is to shift to a new payments system. Our Bolt-On components sit alongside your existing stack, and make routing decisions, leaving your existing system to handle the transaction — you gain the upside without the expense and risk of a platform swap.

Optimization Is a Real-Time Game

With decades of experience we’ve established some fundamental truths. These become core beliefs, and they form the foundation of how we approach our work.

Rulesets

Payment systems are rigid. Payment optimization is dynamic.

Your off-the-shelf payment system is set up with fixed rules. It predictably processes payments, and by design that’s good. A payment optimization system is fully dynamic: it steps ahead of each individual transaction and determines the optimal path for the payment system to take.

Measurement

Every business defines ‘optimal’ differently — and it changes day to day.

Optimal is multivariate: approval rates, transaction fees, exchange rates, VAT considerations, fraud ratios, remediation cost, chargeback ratios, and the list goes on. At any given moment, optimal for a given transaction is where the consumer’s details and the likely outcome intersect with the business’s target parameters.

Context

Optimization takes real-time systems, with smart people at the wheel.

The details of an individual transaction — the cardholder, location, risk indicators and purchase details — materially affect the outcome. To achieve the optimal result, decisioning must be real-time. And smart, responsible people must manage the guardrails and levers that define optimal, day to day.

The Moment

In volume payments real-time matters. Typically, less than a second to work with. The lion’s share of optimization opportunity is in that moment. Once the transaction is on its way, the margin is history.

GrayWire

Our Bolt-On Toolkit

Real-Time Intelligent Routing Bolt-on optimization systems customized to work with your existing payment systems. Dynamically route each transaction through the bank, region, or merchant account that delivers the optimal outcome inside the live transaction loop.
Real-Time Risk Management Dynamic transaction-level decisioning for managing in-month risk. 3D Secure, ThreatMetrix, fingerprinting and risk scores at the front end — weighed against daily and in-month back-office risk: VAMP, chargebacks, disputes and more.

Applications

Core areas of value-add components, ready to build onto the systems you already run.

Smart Payments Routing

Your business moves payment flow across multiple countries, processors, gateways, banks and merchants. Our solutions deliver custom, next-level, real-time routing optimization — tailored to payment processors, PSPs, gateways and large sophisticated merchants.

Dynamic Risk Routing

Solutions that dynamically optimize your real-time transaction flow based on in-month fraud and risk levels. The most common application is adjusting risk appetite in proportion to daily fraud and VAMP counts — risk-on early in the month, risk-off at the end, or as necessary. Our fine-grained approach considers the inherent risk in each live transaction and focuses de-risking on the high-risk ones, with minimal impact on the rest.

The GrayWire Process

How It Works: Bolt-On to Bottom Line

01 Map Your Payment Surface.A comprehensive view of inputs, outputs and control levers: your incoming transaction flow — consumer, product and risk information; your outbound routing map — processors, gateways, merchants and geographies; and the parameters you use to control and measure outcomes.
02 Assess Your Payment Systems.Our solutions work in coordination with the payment systems you have. So we comprehensively investigate the functionality your systems provide, how they’re currently configured, and your processing rules.
03 Learn Your Management Approach.Your teams have established optimization processes and tools in place. We learn what they are, how they work, and collect historical data on the results they deliver. This is essential for identifying the low-hanging fruit later in the process.
04 Apply the GrayWire Toolkit.An exhaustive analysis using our toolkit, built on years of experience, assessing each option one by one. This is analytical modeling: your transaction flow, baseline versus potential performance. Each tool is quantified in isolation, then in combination — producing a ranked list of optimizations, each with a model-based measurement of optimization value.
05 Assess Business Application.We engage your management to identify which optimizations actually make sense. Typically dozens are pruned down to a handful, usually ten or fewer. The nuances of your business are pivotal. It’s the most difficult part by far, and experience matters. Getting this pruning right is the lynchpin to success.
06 Design and Develop the Solution.We design the software and deliver optimizations through a pipeline, so you realize the benefit of each as it comes off the line. Our engineering is agnostic to tech stack, and our architecture favors smaller components, each limited to one optimization. We avoid building yet another large complex system — you already have those, and they’re hard to maintain in payments, where change is the norm.
07 Deploy and Employ. Carefully.As each optimization is delivered we help your staff roll out, validate and begin using it. These are powerful tools — control levers you’ve never had — and many deliver instantly. There’s a tendency to go full throttle, and they can be dangerous in the wrong hands. It’s your business, your payment flow, your team on the levers. You’ll need smart, responsible people who understand both. It takes time to acclimate. We’re there to support you.

4-8%

Client Baseline Improvement

That’s measured baseline shift across payment flow — it is unique to each client, because ‘optimization’ is nuanced. Just about everything we do is multivariate, where multiple Bolt-Ons are working in coordination to manage to a given set of business parameters. It is quite common for our bolt-ons to be decisioning something that isn’t directly tied to sales volume.

Also in Payment Processing

Payment Analytics Because insights without action are useless. Payment Processing A general offering overview.

Let’s Connect

You Show Us Yours. We’ll Show You Ours.

Confidentially share a month of transaction flow. We’ll tell you how much you’re leaving on the table, and what we can do about it.

GrayWire

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