Pitney Bowes, the market leader in ecommerce shipping and logistics solutions, was looking for a credit card surcharging partner to reduce acceptance costs, especially around services that cost too much to offer when card acceptance fees were included. InterPayments was the only Managed Surcharge Provider able to provide Pitney Bowes with compliant, indemnified surcharging technology, including an auditable portal with deep transaction data. Using this data, the team at Pitney Bowes found multiple payment process improvements. Implementing them generated significant savings above and beyond the returns of the surcharging program.
Results
Following a one-time integration with InterPayments, Pitney Bowes rolled out a highly targeted surcharging program to recoup the credit card interchange fees.
By using the robust data InterPayments offers in its service portal, the company was also able to identify issues and inefficiencies in their transaction process, including charges associated with excess authorizations. The company expects that resolving these issues will result in additional annual savings, making InterPayments a strategic payments partner for Pitney Bowes.
About the Company
Industry: A technology-driven products and services company providing SaaS shipping solutions, mailing innovation, and financial services
Company Size: Enterprise (10,000+ employees)
Location: Stamford, CT
Background: Small businesses to large enterprises, and government entities rely on Pitney Bowes to reduce the complexity of sending mail and parcels. Pitney Bowes serves more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500.
Challenges
Reduce Payment Processing Costs – Pitney Bowes was looking to undertake a multi-part project to lower costs around payments. As a large organization, they knew that building a more efficient billing structure would result in significant returns at scale. Some parts of the organization needed selective surcharging to be included in this structure, to relieve cost pressure on certain, specific services. As a result, Pitney Bowes sought partners capable of helping across these multiple projects.
Full Compliance with Indemnification – Once the company had decided to include surcharging in its processes, compliance became essential. Pitney Bowes, a global enterprise, would take on significant risk with a non-compliant solution, with fines of $25K or more possible on each transaction. The potential consequences of surcharging without maximum protection in place were simply too high.
Make Transaction Data Transparent – “We have been doing credit card processing exactly the same way for a long time because we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” explained a senior client administrator at Pitney Bowes. Transparent data was critical to determine what efficiency efforts to pursue. But the company currently didn’t have access to this data, so any new partners needed to provide it.
The Solution
Pitney Bowes selected a new payment processor who quickly recommended InterPayments to become the company’s Managed Surcharge Provider. It turned out to be a perfect match. Only InterPayments offers full compliance with state, provincial, and federal regulations, as well as card network rules. But most importantly, InterPayments also indemnifies against any compliance risk, fully protecting Pitney Bowes. Selective surcharging, an essential component the company needed to limit surcharging to specific business units, was also able to be implemented.
But the most valuable part of the InterPayments solution to Pitney Bowes was the auditable transaction portal. According to Pitney Bowes, they “live in the InterPayments Portal.”
Analyzing the data provided by InterPayments provided a wealth of insights that could be acted upon by the Pitney Bowes team of payment experts: “It made everything actionable.” For example, excess authorizations on some transactions led to excess authorization costs. In other cases, transactions where fees should have been discounted weren’t always capturing that discount. And charges related to gateways and authorizations could now be fully explored. The resulting fixes and improvements are expected to deliver significant savings each year.
In this way, InterPayments goes beyond just providing surcharging. “InterPayments is a strategic partner on our payment processing,” according to a senior client administrator. “This is a core component of our business. And InterPayments helps with everything about it.”
Interested in learning how InterPayments can take your payment practices to the next level? Talk to us today.