Mastercard today unveiled a new service, the Payment Optimization Platform (POP), which is designed to improve approval rates for merchants using data to make intelligent decisions about transactions. Early pilot results show a 9% to 15% increase in conversions.

Mastercard has developed POP—a network-based service leveraging Mastercard data to enrich authorization messages and boost merchant approval rates—with cutting-edge AI capabilities to be integrated shortly after pilot.

Mastercard continues to roll-out POP with Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments and Worldpay, who will use the service to provide an optimal payment experience, drive service continuity and gain incremental revenue.

The acceptance community is deeply committed to delivering a seamless payment experience and maximizing transaction approvals. Yet, securing approvals is no easy feat. Acquirers and merchants are limited to the information and data within their own ecosystems, they rely on multiple stakeholders and may lack the specialized expertise needed to optimize conversion rates.

Merchants often experiment with various strategies to improve transaction success rates, but their efforts are limited by the scope of their own data. Mastercard is uniquely positioned through its real-time access to data points from billions of transactions. This allows POP to determine areas of improvement and to spot other potential issues.

To provide the best results for merchants, the Payment Optimization Platform evaluates over a trillion combinations of various data elements to create the most optimal authorization in near real-time and delivers insights to help increase approvals. Models are constantly learning and trained on the latest transaction attributes and authorization trends to continuously optimize payments. This leads to a frictionless consumer experience and helps drives incremental conversions for merchants.

Sumeet Bhatt, SVP, Payment Optimization, Mastercard said, “The Payment Optimization Platform is a game-changer – it provides our acceptance community partners with tools and intelligence to deliver the best payment experience and drive higher conversions. We are excited to continue our pilot program to enable more successful transactions.”

A more widespread roll-out of POP will take place later in the year with additional acceptance partners.  

Learn more about POP, Mastercard’s latest approval enhancing technology, here.