Roundup of the Latest Product Innovations: Payments Edition

CFOs feel a surge of relief with each successful payment and lose precious sleep over chargeback requests. Smooth payment workflows are key during subscription setup or renewal to ensure top-notch customer experiences. Any hitches in payments, such as failures, steep fees, global transaction demands, limited payment options, or delays, can inflate operational costs, affecting timely shipments or providing promised services.

Being the backbone of revenue cycles, Chargebee and our trusted gateway partners strive to offer a top-notch payment solution. Our focus is on high approval rates, diverse payment choices, and minimized revenue loss to support your business growth effectively.

We’re excited to announce the latest set of product innovations, which focus on upgrading your payment capabilities.

Widening the subscription base to the LatAm region

Over the past decade, Chargebee has built an extensive network of 30+ gateway partners across the US, UK, EU, and ANZ markets. We are now excited to help our customers unlock the Latin American (LatAm) markets. 

Why LatAm is important for growing subscription businesses

LatAm is one of the fastest-growing subscription revenue markets in the world, with a market value of ~$30B. Often, entering new markets requires registering as a local entity, which comes with high operational costs and administrative hassles. Customers will also expect you to offer locally preferred payment methods and are not prone to quickly shifting their payment choices.

How is Chargebee helping customers expand into LatAm?

We are launching two new payment gateway integrations for the LatAm region – EBANX and dLocal. We are also adding a local payment method, Boleto, which we support via Stripe. Now you can:

• Start processing payments locally without a local business entity, by integrating with eBanx or dLocal payment gateways in LatAm
• Accept payments through local card schemes like Elo and Hipercard and boost authorization rates
• Accept Boleto payments via Stripe, Brazil’s commonly used cash/voucher-based payment method. 

Must read: 

Maximize Revenue: Mastering Subscription Payments in Latin America

3 Compelling Reasons to Target Latin America for Subscription Expansion Opportunities

Introducing instant payments in A2A transactions

As a global revenue growth management platform, we’ve observed that subscribers in regions such as the UK, EU, and Australia strongly prefer Account-to-Account (A2A) payments. You can now offer your customers the bank transfer payment mode with instant payment confirmation, thanks to open banking.

Why instant bank payments are important 

While A2A payments offer lower processing fees, companies prefer to avoid offering them to customers due to the delay in payment confirmation. The ubiquitous bank transfer payment mode remained underutilized and under-marketed. 

Instant bank payments, powered by open banking, combine the best of both worlds—speed comparable to card payments and the cost-efficiency of direct debits. We anticipate that you will accelerate conversions for new subscriptions and experience a decrease in chargeback requests.

How is Chargebee providing instant bank payments?

Our partnership with GoCardless allows us to offer instant bank payments to our customers. These Open Banking-powered A2A payments provide real-time confirmation for your customers’ first subscription payment and other one-time fees, enabling you to deliver value more swiftly and accelerate downstream processes dependent on payment status—whether licensing and feature provisioning for SaaS or expediting shipments for eCommerce and D2C businesses. The subsequent recurring transactions will automatically happen via the existing direct debit channels such as SEPA (EU), BACS (UK), and BECS (AU).

Learn more and get access to these instant payment methods here.

Expanding your market coverage with new payment methods

Chargebee offers over 20 payment methods to assist you in running a global operation while providing your customers with their preferred local payment options. By leveraging our diverse range of payment methods, you can streamline your checkout process and minimize any unnecessary friction.

This year, we have added a few more payment methods to help you achieve your international expansion goals.

Why payment methods are important

With innovations such as open banking, the Fintech market is evolving rapidly, leading to new and more convenient payment methods for consumers, such as iDEAL in the Netherlands, BACS in the UK, and UPI in India. While cards remain a standard payment option, businesses must recognize the rise of alternative payment methods (APMs). Unsurprisingly, 85% of large US merchants plan to adopt APMs in the next 1-3 years.

What new payment methods does Chargebee support?

Chargebee has started supporting the new payment methods below across different payment gateways in the past year. Visit our docs for a full list of supported payment gateways and methods.

Payment method	Markets supported	Payment type	Supported payment gateway(s)
Boleto	Brazil	Cash/ voucher-based	Stripe
PayPal	Global	Wallet-based	Adyen
Venmo	US	Wallet-based	Braintree
ACH	US	Direct Debit	Adyen, Braintree
BACS	UK	Direct Debit	Adyen
Klarna Pay Now	Austria, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands	A2A (Bank-based)	Adyen
Faster Payments	UK	A2A (Bank-based)	GoCardless
SEPA Instant Transfer	Germany	A2A (Bank-based)	GoCardless
PayTo	Australia	A2A (Bank-based)	GoCardless

Must read:

Maximizing Global Growth: The Advantages of Multiple Payment Gateway Partnerships

Better FinOps for your offline payments

Offline payments will always coexist with their online counterparts, especially as businesses move upmarket or operate in markets where customers prefer to pay via checks or async bank transfers. Currently, many finance teams tend to input and manage their offline payments in a completely manual manner. As companies look to scale their processes and be more efficient, an upgrade to their offline payment workflows is a must. 

Why better FinOps for offline payments is important

Businesses with high volumes [1000s] of offline transactions typically require two or three dedicated full-time employees for reconciliation. Compare this to businesses transacting hundreds of millions of dollars of online payments on Chargebee and managing their billing operations with two full-time employees. Manual workflows also increase the chances of errors and security risks. 

How does Chargebee facilitate offline payments?

Instant reconciliations via Stripe Bank Transfer: In offline bank transfers, when your customers transfer money, the final amount can vary because of FX conversions, processing fees, etc. With Stripe Bank Transfers, this gets confirmed instantaneously, and the amount can be attributed to the invoice/customer in an automated manner (decreases an entire week’s effort of finance teams). Stripe helps you create virtual bank accounts that you can share with customers instead of exposing your account details. This feature is available if you operate in the US, UK, EU, Japan, and Mexico markets.

Learn more

Custom payment methods

Up to now while recording payments, you haven’t been able to record custom payment methods like vouchers or other local payment methods in your Chargebee account. Now, you can record and track these payment methods in Chargebee for accurate reporting. 

You can request access to these latest features here.

Conclusion

As we conclude our latest round of payments-related innovations, our teams are diligently working on introducing the next wave of enhancements, focusing on hosted/online subscriber experiences, feature provisioning, and entity management capabilities.

Stay tuned as we add more gateways and payment methods to enhance your capacity to grow both locally and globally.