Introducing: Smart payment routing for SaaS

SaaS businesses are losing revenue to failed payments. 

When an online payment is attempted, it passes a request from a seller’s acquiring bank to their customer’s issuing bank, who ensure authorization and then send the funds back along the chain. 

Along the way, there are a number of barriers and checks for the payment to pass through. From multi-factor authentication to currency conversion, to fraud checks - if one of these fails, you don’t receive the payment. 

To overcome at least some of these barriers, most businesses set up a single acquirer (or payment provider) to route payments through and well, hope for the best – moving to another provider if failed payments become a notable issue. Others build a solution in-house which, to be successful, requires integrating with multiple providers and setting up local merchant accounts around the world. Here, the work is constant, with resources needed to constantly maintain and optimize this setup. 

Neither of these solutions actually target the problem, and so revenue delivery systems remain fragmented and perfectly legitimate payments fail.

Introducing Paddle Pilot

Paddle Pilot takes a different approach. 

Using the Paddle Managed Payments infrastructure, Pilot returns the best possible payment acceptance for SaaS companies through: 

• Smart routing – Paddle Pilot intelligently routes all payments between multiple acquiring banks around the world, using A/B tests from millions of payments to find patterns of successful payments and select the acquirer with the best track record.
• Cascaded payments – If that payment initially fails, Pilot cascades the payment to the next best acquirer to retry the payment and increase the likelihood of capturing that revenue. 

Whether a checkout payment or an ongoing subscription, Paddle Pilot routes and retries payments in the background for Paddle sellers without any action required for you or your customer. 

It’s readily available (at no additional cost) for anyone selling through Paddle, with no action required to activate the service. 

Pilot has already increased payment acceptance for some software sellers by up to 4%.

How does it work?

Pilot has been built by SaaS, finance, and payment experts, utilizing our experience working with over 2000 software businesses to develop:

• A multi-acquirer model: By connecting to multiple acquirers, Pilot has more payment routes than any single provider can offer. 
• Smart routing based on payment data : Millions of payments from thousands of software sellers means Paddle Pilot can continuously test and optimize selected routes. 
• A trusted payment source : A high volume of transactions running through each acquirer means banks are more likely to trust payment attempts from Pilot than they are from an individual seller. 
• Ongoing optimization : Our dedicated Finance and Payment teams (including product managers, engineers, and data analysts) continuously optimize Pilot to ensure the best results. 

Paddle sellers are already seeing great results with Pilot. In January, Resume.io saw an increase in successful payments that totaled an additional $47,000 in revenue. Over the course of the year, this means capturing at least $567,000 in new subscriptions and recurring payments.

Paddle Managed Payments

Paddle Managed Payments, part of the Paddle Revenue Delivery Platform, provides instant access to the global multi-acquirer infrastructure, fraud protection, and automatic payment reconciliation.  

Turn on dozens of currencies with the click of a button, offer multiple payment methods and update your pricing all through one unified system – giving you a single source of accurate revenue data. 

Find out more about Paddle Managed Payments.