As a European acquirer, you face complex challenges. With the Visa Acceptance Platform, learn how to tackle payment tech, regulations, and innovation to thrive and exceed expectations in a competitive landscape.
As an acquirer in Europe, you're navigating a landscape that's as complex as it is competitive. The rapid evolution of payment technologies, tightening regulatory requirements, and the constant pressure to innovate while managing costs can feel like a high-wire act. But within these challenges lie opportunities to not only survive but thrive.
The Visa Acceptance Platform is a transformative payment offering designed to empower acquirers to meet and exceed these challenges head on. Let’s delve into the core issues acquirers face and explore how it can be your game-changer.
Challenge 1: De-risking your business and strengthening resilience
In an era where cybersecurity threats and operational risks loom large, maintaining the resilience of your critical services is paramount. Yet, modernizing IT solutions to mitigate these risks can be daunting.
Ensuring stability and compliance in today's fast-evolving payment landscape is a significant challenge. Leveraging cloud-based technology, the Visa Acceptance Platform offers a robust framework designed to enhance security and streamline integration processes. This reduces the operational risks that often accompany legacy systems. Moreover, the platform’s built-in compliance features provide automatic updates, helping you stay ahead of regulatory changes and fortifying your business's resilience.
Challenge 2: Reducing compliance efforts and staying ahead of regulations
Keeping up with ever-changing regulations can be a complex, burdensome task that drains resources and diverts focus from your core business activities.
Navigating the complexities of regulatory requirements can be taxing. The Visa Acceptance Platform simplifies this process with its compliance-by-design approach. It automatically incorporates new standard solutions and regulatory updates, ensuring your operations align with the latest compliance mandates. This proactive feature reduces the burden of staying compliant, allowing your team to focus on growth.
Challenge 3: Maintaining cost efficiency in a thin-margin business
The acquiring business operates on thin margins, making cost efficiency crucial. Competing with modern Payment Service Providers (PSPs) like PayFacs, which benefit from lightweight and agile architectures, can be challenging.
Managing costs is crucial in the competitive acquiring business. The Visa Acceptance Platform enables economies of scale through shared processing and development costs. By utilizing a common standard solution for payment services and acquiring, you can maintain low operational expenses while enhancing your ability to adapt to changes efficiently. This approach helps ensure that your business remains profitable and competitive.
Challenge 4: Shrinking innovation budgets
Innovation is vital for growth, but tightening budgets can stifle your ability to stay ahead of the curve.
The Visa Acceptance Platform facilitates continuous innovation with its modular services, providing on-demand access to a wide range of Visa solutions. With pre-integrated connectivity to an extensive ecosystem of PSPs and partners, you can accelerate collaboration and innovation. This allows you to bring new features and products to market more quickly, even when resources are limited.
Challenge 5: Automating business processes for better customer experience
Manual processes such as merchant onboarding and dispute handling can be time-consuming and error-prone, hampering your ability to deliver a superior customer experience. Two-thirds of acquirers report that it takes more than a week to get businesses up and running,1 so the speed of merchant onboarding is critical for acquirers to win new business.
Efficiency and customer satisfaction are key to success. The Visa Acceptance Platform helps automate business processes so you can reduce operational costs and improve service delivery. By streamlining workflows and integrating seamlessly with existing systems, the platform ensures smooth and efficient operations, benefitting both merchants and consumers alike.
Challenge 6: Reducing time to market for new offerings
Legacy systems can lack essential business functionality and make changes time-consuming.
Adapting to market changes quickly is essential for staying competitive. The Visa Acceptance Platform is built on flexible, modern technology that supports the rapid deployment of new features and products. Its highly configurable architecture allows you to customize workflows, pricing, and billing options to meet diverse market demands, ensuring your business remains ahead of the competition.
Lean on a strategic ally
The Visa Acceptance Platform is not just a tool but a strategic ally in your journey. By embracing a state-of-the-art payment platform, you can support all the essential services required to run a card acquiring business efficiently. Whether it’s pricing alternative payment methods, supporting multi-tenants, or consolidating merchant billing and settlement, the platform offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability. Here are some key benefits to get you started:
- Interconnectivity: Facilitate seamless collaboration across global partners and PSPs.
- API management: Accelerate innovation with a comprehensive API management platform.
- Merchant onboarding: Enhance your differentiation with effective merchant application, validation, and underwriting practices.
- Compliance and security: Utilize Visa Secure Acceptance and Token Management Service to reduce PCI compliance scope.
In a rapidly evolving landscape, staying ahead requires more than just keeping up—it demands a proactive, innovative approach.
The Visa Acceptance Platform offers the tools and capabilities to not only meet today’s challenges but to anticipate and prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities. Check out our latest acquirer resources, and embrace the future with confidence, knowing you have a robust, flexible, and resilient platform powering your success.
1 Bridging the Gap: Helping acquirers meet evolving merchant demands, Visa & PYMNTS, March 2025.
Disclaimer: Case studies, comparisons, statistics, research, and recommendations are provided “AS IS” and intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for operational, marketing, legal, technical, tax, financial, or other advice. Visa neither makes any warranty or representation as to the completeness or accuracy of the information within this document, nor assumes any liability or responsibility that may result from reliance on such information. The information contained herein is not intended as investment or legal advice, and readers are encouraged to seek the advice of a competent professional where such advice is required.