Blog Recurring Revenue

Digital Businesses Need Enhanced Payment Processing and Recovery Capabilities to Reduce Churn and Lost Revenue from Failed Payments

Ruth Bennett

15 December 2022

As enterprises of all kinds continue to migrate towards digital business models and usage-based subscription service offerings, the need for a modern and robust payment processing capability becomes even more pronounced.

Online payments for subscription services were once limited to a handful of credit or debit cards. Today, the explosion of digital and peer-to-peer payment services means consumers have a seemingly endless number of options. According to the Federal Reserve, the average consumer uses 3.6 different payment methods each month. To compete for and retain subscribers, merchants must make it as easy as possible for their customers to make transactions using their payment method of choice.

At the same time, merchants must be able to protect their businesses from failed payments, which can lead to involuntary churn and lost revenue. In 2021, subscription companies lost 5% of their customers to involuntary churn, totaling a whopping $440 billion in lost revenue. That’s more than 10 times the amount of revenue lost to fraud. To mitigate the potential for losses, merchants must have a payments engine that can capture and activate the recovery of failed payments as quickly as possible.

Through partnerships with some of the leading payment processing companies in the world, Aria has long offered users of its Aria Billing Cloud a wide range of payment processing capabilities integrated directly into the platform. In response to the emerging need for enhanced and robust payment and recovery solutions, Aria is preparing to unveil its next-generation payments solution that will enable customers to optimize payment processing, minimize involuntary churn, automate failed payment retries, increase transaction approval rates, and offer subscribers the latest and greatest in payment options and features.

Customers using Aria’s enhanced payments solutions will be able to add new features and introduce additional payment options in response to industry changes and customer demand with greater speed and ease. Merchants will be able to automatically route payments to selected and specified providers as dictated by a series of predefined rules. The solution will also feature new payment optimization and recovery features that use artificial intelligence to determine the right time to reattempt a failed transaction.

The enhanced Aria payments solution will initially roll out with Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses and existing Aria payments partner. In addition to the core features and capabilities outlined above, Aria customers using Adyen will also have access to Adyen’s Real Time Account Updater. Upon failed payments, Real Time Account Updater automatically checks for credit card updates or changes to the card number or expiration date and reattempts payment using the updated data. The new and correct data is then fed into Aria to ensure future payments are transacted successfully.

The new Aria payments solutions will debut in early 2023.

Learn more about Aria Billing Cloud

Ruth Bennett

Director of Content and Digital Marketing, Aria Systems. Ruth leads Aria’s content strategy and oversees the distribution of content via various digital channels. Ruth has 8 years of experience in the billing and monetization space, and previously spent several years in the publishing and education industries.