With the summer season in full swing, our payment team at MOST has been working to maximize our authorization rate for airline clients especially across Europe.

The ability to take offline payments onboard an aircraft is essential. For low-value items, such as inflight drinks and food, offline transactions are often the only way to go. They're faster, more reliable, and ensure that you can take payment even if the internet is slow or not available. And let's be honest, in the cabin or anywhere where internet connectivity is unstable, online transactions can be a major pain. Deferred authorizations are the solution to this problem.

However, offline payments carry the risk of declined transactions, which can be particularly costly for merchants if the payment process isn't optimized for handling deferred authorizations.

Since June, our goal has been to reduce the decline rate for offline transactions to below 1% across the board. We’ve successfully achieved this mission, with decline rates now ranging from just 0.2% to 0.65% in the last two months.

Below are some key practices that enable us to process offline transactions effectively:

1. Constant Monitoring and Communication

We view every declined transaction as an opportunity for improvement. By treating each decline as a bug, we engage in continuous dialogue with acquirers and card schemes to understand the reasons behind transaction failures. This collaborative approach allows us to find tailored solutions, even working with individual banks when necessary, to process payments successfully. Our proactive stance ensures that we’re always seeking ways to enhance transaction efficiency.

2. Expertise in Deferred Transactions

Our specialization in offline payment processing provides us with invaluable insights into handling deferred transactions across various acquirers, regions, and merchants. Our experience managing millions of transactions daily enables us to apply effective solutions globally. While each acquirer has unique requirements, the knowledge we gain in one region often proves beneficial in others, allowing us to leverage our expertise for maximum impact.

3. Adopting new technical requirements and regulations ahead of the curve

We anticipate every new technical recommendation and regulation ahead of their deployment. For example, we were among the first to adopt PCI 4.0 in 2023. Additionally, by being pioneers in supporting 8-digit bank identifiers, we can precisely target individual banks, significantly improving transaction success rates and ensuring greater accuracy in our processes.

4. Advanced System Architecture & AI

Our architecture utilizes AWS and advanced machine learning tools to monitor, report, and analyze transaction patterns processed by MOST payment gateway. This approach provides significant benefits to each client by generating exception reports that enable our payment team to act swiftly and make informed recommendations. By anticipating challenges, we deliver tailored solutions that meet our clients’ needs, empowering them to achieve their goals and enhance their bottom line.

5. Managing the Intricacies of Digital Payments

In a world dominated by digital wallets, transactions often involve virtual cards, which can complicate the process of identifying transactions for customer support. This complexity arises because virtual cards issued by digital wallets could come with different BIN ranges. We are always attentive to these challenges and have developed systems that make it incredibly easy to locate any transaction, whether it originates from a physical card or a virtual wallet. This attention to detail ensures smooth and efficient customer support.

6. Resubmission Process

We pay special attention to our resubmission process, viewing it as a second chance to turn a declined transaction into a successful one. We ensure that every retry counts by using the maximum allowed time period for retries and leveraging historical data to optimize the timing of each retry. This meticulous approach maximizes the chances of transaction approval on subsequent attempts.

The future of payments is all about speed, efficiency, and reliability. With a commitment to constant improvement and proactive problem-solving we're building a platform that is changing the way transactions are done.

John Vaughan, MOST CTO at the Future Travel Experience’s Digital and Innovation Hub event hosted by AWS, Dublin, Ireland. June 24.