Affordability is the current buzz word and deservedly so! All the projections painted a rosy picture, but the pandemic made it a necessity as customers became more cautious with money. For businesses already reeling with lower demand owing to the uncertainties, affordability solutions offered a glimmer of hope as customers became wary of high-ticket purchases.

However, offering your customers affordability solutions bring another set of challenges. Direct partnerships with lenders are tricky to say the least and might not be possible between each lender and merchant. There are umpteen operational processes to add to the technological challenges. More so, EMIs in general don’t have standardized technology and processes, making the process quite different for Lender A as compared to Lender B.

At PayU, we give you access to the lenders while keeping the tech and operational integrations to a minimum. We have partnership with leading lenders to give merchants access to 13 credit card EMIs, 5 debit card EMIs, and 2 card-less EMIs, and are continuing to add more lenders to give our merchants the maximum benefit of our affordability suite.

Card networks don’t support EMI as a payment option in their protocol. This might change in future given the growing demand for credit in India (and there is concerted effort at NPCI end for the same). However, the truth of the moment is that issuers have their own ways of supporting EMIs using their existing rails, making it a bespoke integration every time!

So, you have decided to offer your customers the benefit of EMI and other affordability options. Do seek the answer to the following questions before deciding on the approach.

  • Does your service provider offer EMI conversion confirmation? Since the EMI conversion is done post transaction completion, one can’t be sure of whether the transaction has been converted to EMI or if there was some error.
    • PayU has set up regular EMI conversion processes with all the banks and makes the information available to the merchants through dashboard

  • Does your service provider offer post order handling (refunds and cancellations)?
    Since EMI conversion is not via card network what will happen to EMI if there is refund? Will the customer still be paying the interest on the loan amount?
    • Just like PayU sends a file for EMI conversion to the bank, it sends a file for EMI cancellation as well whenever there is refund so your customers don’t need to reach out to bank for EMI cancellation

  • Are your EMI rails redundant? Do you have a backup? For credit card processing you have multiple acquirers enabled to get the best conversion rates but what will happen if the only acquirer which supports EMI (we are talking about the issuers who use their own acquiring rails to support EMIs) is down? Transactions will fail and conversion will go for a toss until its back, up again
    • PayU has done direct integrations with HDFC to build alternate rails to process credit cards in case their primary switch, FSS, is underperforming, even on usual days we see 4-5% delta in performance of direct integration vs FSS route

  • Is your service provider giving you the user experience flexibilities, like OTP on your page? Can you provide your customers, a payment experience similar to how it is for credit cards? For example, merchants can capture OTP on their page to reduce the network drop-offs and control the user experience. 
    • PayU allows its clients to capture OTP on their page for EMI transactions as well

  • Does your service provider support auth + capture? Can you do an auth in real time and then capturing the transaction at a later stage for card transactions for EMIs transactions as well? We all know, how real buyer remorse is, and this feature could potentially save substantial amount in PG fees!
    • PayU has been the first in the market to add the support of auth + capture on EMIs transactions


Conclusion

Enabling affordability should be one of the top priorities for your business right now. Covid has led to far too many a disruption to sit on the fence and hope business would thrive. Enabling affordability options could help you acquire customers who may have dropped off because of the higher ticket size and his/her lower propensity to pay higher in current environment. All the evidence points towards affordability being one of the key drivers for buyers. With the new age products of card less credits, you can reach out to the customers in tier2/3 markets who have so far been credit underserved. With a partner like PayU, you can quickly enable these options and be confident of having one of the highest industry coverages with best success rates. So, what’s stopping you? Come, join us and be among the several hundred merchants already enjoying the benefits of PayU affordability products.

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