BridgerPay Is a Success. But What’s the Story Behind It?
CEO Ran Cohen Speaks to FastForward About Redefining Payment Processing, the Biggest Challenges So Far, and What Lies Ahead
As the world’s first Payment Operations Platform, BridgerPay has revolutionized the way businesses worldwide handle payments. By offering a unique drag-and-drop interface that integrates any payment method through a single API, the platform enables businesses to expand into new markets and streamline their payment processes. Not only does it enhance revenue and reduce processing fees, but it also improves overall operational efficiency and customer satisfaction with features like its proprietary Retry AI model.
To delve deeper into the origins and success of BridgerPay, we sat down with its CEO and co-founder, Ran Cohen. With over 20 years of experience in the B2B industry, Cohen's entrepreneurial journey was sparked by the payment challenges he encountered in his previous ventures, which led to the creation of BridgerPay. During our conversation, Cohen shared insights on how BridgerPay differentiates itself in the competitive payment solutions market, the impact of their inclusion in the Visa Innovation Program Europe 2024, and the technological advances driving the future of payment processing.
In my previous startup, we developed the next generation of e-learning software and consistently encountered payment challenges. Our product was available in 40 languages, but we only supported payments in six languages. Additionally, the checkout experience did not align with our product's look and feel. Operating in multiple countries meant we needed to integrate multiple local payment methods, posing a significant challenge for an e-learning company. This experience led me to realize the widespread pain points in the payments industry, similar to those we faced, and motivated me to create an agnostic solution to address these challenges.
Our approach in developing the BridgerPay platform differed significantly from existing payment solutions in the market.
BridgerPay was designed with a modern, self-serve operational platform in mind
Unlike traditional solutions characterized by multiple screens, actions, and currency separations, BridgerPay was designed with a modern, self-serve operational platform in mind. Our goal was to empower businesses to create their own BridgerPay environment, seamlessly connected to their preferred providers, and customize their payment logic independently. This includes integrating additional services related to payments, such as fraud detection, accounting data management, and communication tools.
Declined transactions constitute a world of their own. Soon after our launch, we saw numerous declines that we couldn’t explain to our clients. After extensive research, we developed a decline engine that seamlessly categorizes each decline in a session as either a soft or hard decline and retries soft declines behind the scenes across connected payment providers. Each payment service provider (PSP) typically has around 1,000 different decline reasons, with most falling into the category of hard declines (such as non-sufficient funds). However, there are hundreds of soft declines caused by risk factors, communication errors, 3D issues, and more, which can be retried successfully across fallback providers. With BridgerPay, we've observed a roughly 10% increase in the processed volume of our merchants using Bridger Retry™, translating to 25% in rescued transactions from their declines.
We have ambitious plans for our partnership with Visa, which include implementing various Visa products in BridgerPay, such as network tokenization and the account updater, as well as leveraging their fraud and risk tools. Additionally, we look forward to building closer relationships with Cybersource and Visa's acquiring arm.
We have ambitious plans for our partnership with Visa, which include implementing various Visa products in BridgerPay
Furthermore, we are excited about connecting with Visa's partners and clients, with whom we have already begun discussions, and we are eager to explore opportunities for collaboration.
Some of the biggest challenges that payment processors face today are primarily technological. These challenges include managing multiple processing interfaces through APIs, such as recurring payments, pre-authorization, and capture. Additionally, payment processors must navigate network tokenization, external 3D authentication, fraud and risk mitigation tools, and ensure the general stability of their platform and software. They also need to continuously expand their range of acquiring services to enhance their base approval ratio.
Payment processors must navigate network tokenization, external 3D authentication, fraud and risk mitigation tools, and ensure the general stability of their platform and software
In terms of trends, we observe a shift towards wallet processing solutions like Google Pay and Apple Pay. There's also a noticeable increase in the adoption of alternative payment methods (APMs) in developing countries. Moreover, the move towards an omnichannel operational approach is gaining momentum, empowering businesses with the ability to manage and optimize payments across all sections of their operations, both offline and online. Looking further into the future, we anticipate the continued growth of cardless payment technologies, which will drive up merchants' processing volumes while reducing processing costs, fraud, and queues.
For us, success is to become the basic layer of every tech stack of all enterprises that are accepting payments, and to keep the agnostic approach of the company, through its scale, which allows us to work with any verticals, payment providers and acquiring banks.
