What Radial’s Partnership with Adyen Means for Our Clients: Q&A with Dave Roessler, Director of Payments

Remember when people paid for groceries by check, painstakingly writing out the dollar amount in both numerals and letters while a line of customers stood in wait? Times have changed. Today’s customers expect transactions to happen quickly and effortlessly, with the click of a button or the tap of a card.

Radial’s goal is to provide brands and merchants an easy way to offer their customers the speed, ease, flexibility, and security they seek when making purchases. That’s why we recently partnered with Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, to enhance our payments platform. How will this new alliance benefit current and future clients? We sat down with Dave Roessler, Radial’s Director of Payments, to find out.

Let’s start with the basics. Why is it so important today for brands and merchants to offer customers leading-edge payment solutions?

As customers’ behaviors and expectations have evolved, payment types have too. And today, people want simplicity. Nobody wants to go to a website and manually enter their name, address, payment method, shipping method, and everything else every time. Instead, many are opting for digital wallets, from Apple Pay to Amazon Pay as well as Buy Now, Pay Later which has become more commonplace. These wallets and payment types allow for an optimized checkout experience thereby reducing the time it takes the shopper to checkout.

Consumers are going to dictate how they want to pay, so merchants need to offer a broader suite of payment options to stay competitive. Demographically, some customers might still prefer credit cards, but others might feel PayPal, with a two-factor authentication code, is easier and more secure. While other consumers might be fascinated by Buy Now, Pay Later, so they can pay on their terms.

Shoppers today are savvy and individualistic, and what they want will continue to evolve and grow. We make it easy for merchants to offer all these options seamlessly.

There are many payment solutions providers out there. What makes Adyen the right solution for Radial and its clients?

The simplicity and reliability of the Adyen solution further enables Radial to provide clients with a comprehensive Payments, Tax and Fraud solution. Incorporating Adyen’s features also allow Radial to further optimize its platform.

Other providers offer what you might call patchwork solutions, where a bunch of different smaller solutions are connected on the backend to work together. The problem with connecting different solutions together is that you are then left with multiple potential points of failure. One part of the system can stop working with another part during an update, for example. That can mean more downtime or more challenges for merchants.

That’s very different from what Adyen has built, which is a single unified platform. For example, all payment data feeds into the same system – no matter the channel, point-of-sale, eCommerce, etc., allowing for cross-channel experiences, simple reconciliation and valuable customer insights. Adyen’s reliability for a full suite of different payment types made it the right holistic solution for our clients.

Our partnership is flexible too. We will continue to explore integrations so we’re always offering the latest innovative solutions for our clients and offering a more complete solution.

Bottom line: What does this partnership mean for Radial’s current and future clients?

Our clients can expect to see, first of all, an authorization lift — meaning a higher percentage of their digital transactions will be approved because of intelligent routing, payment messaging, and auto retries. Partnered with Radial’s platform, our clients will be able to capture more sales and provide friction-free shopping experiences for their customers.

And of course, our clients will be able to support more payment types and enjoy the easy integration we offer. But this is just the start of our partnership with Adyen. From here, we’ll continue to work together to improve our clients’ experiences. 

What can we expect to see from Radial in the coming months?

We’ll be adding more and more timely features — features that will make a big difference for merchants today.

For example, we’re adding a feature to help ease the problems caused by shipping delays that have become commonplace these days. Delays create payment headaches for both customers and merchants: A customer might purchase a product online using a credit card, but the card’s payment authorization might expire before the product actually ships. When this happens, the customer can end up overspending their budget or going over their credit limit, and the merchant can ship a product that hasn’t actually been paid for or lose an otherwise good sale. We plan to help our clients avoid this problem altogether by offering the ability to extend payment authorizations, giving both them and their customers more flexibility.

We will also offer 3D Secure (3DS) 2.X. This technology is already popular in Europe because it makes transactions safer by letting the credit card issuer, the merchant, and the consumer exchange data before authorizing a transaction. Security has become a huge concern for consumers today, and I’m a big believer that early adoption of 3DS will give our clients an additional authorization lift as well as a reduction in fraud. Furthermore, our clients will be ahead of the curve in regard to online security. While 3DS is not a requirement in North America yet; however, we believe that it will soon become a mandate similar to EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa).

Radial takes a consultative approach with each of our clients. For us, it’s not a one-size-fits-all type deal. We deliver a distinctive customer experience through engineering tailored, personalized, and scalable solutions for leading retail brands growing their eCommerce business. 

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To learn more about Radial’s partnership with Adyen, read the full press release.