Driving growth through optimised payments 

What's the cost of a failed payment?

For global merchants, it's often more than just a lost sale. It's also a missed customer, diminished trust, and operational overhead. Payments, often viewed as a technical afterthought, are now a strategic lever for business growth.

Optimised payments are not about changing providers. They're about changing results. According to Baymard Institute, reducing checkout friction can significantly boost conversion. That makes your payment experience one of the most underused growth levers in e-commerce today.

Antom works with merchants globally to uncover this growth potential. Whether you're scaling into new regions or tightening margins, payments can support—not slow—your momentum.

What are optimised payments?

Optimised payments are a strategic refinement of every step in your transaction process, aimed at turning payments into a performance asset.

This includes:

• Faster, cleaner checkouts
• Support for local currencies and payment methods
• Built-in fraud protection that doesn't frustrate buyers
• Analytics tools to unlock patterns in customer behaviour

Instead of treating payments as the endpoint of a transaction, optimisation puts them at the heart of business operations. Done right, it leads to smoother customer journeys, fewer failures, and higher revenue capture.

Traditional vs. Optimised Payments

Strategies to optimise payments and drive business growth

1. Reduce cart abandonment with frictionless checkout

Abandoned carts are a silent revenue killer. Most visitors leave before completing their purchase, often due to checkout friction. Slow loading, too many steps, or clunky mobile design are frequent culprits.

Fast, user-friendly checkout options like auto-filled fields, password-free logins, and localised pages reduce that friction. Companies using optimised mobile gateways often see their checkout conversion rate climb by double digits.

2. Enable cross-border commerce with multi-currency payments

Global customers don't want to do currency math. They want clarity.

Offering pricing in a buyer's local currency, with local acquiring where possible, builds trust and reduces transaction declines. For example, a UK retailer selling in Southeast Asia may see far fewer failed payments just by processing locally instead of through a UK acquirer.

Partners like Antom can help handle exchange and settlement complexity behind the scenes.

3. Offer flexible payment methods

Not all markets are card-first. In fact, many aren't.

Offering a mix of local wallets, real-time bank transfers, BNPL options, and even cash-based digital payments ensures you're not excluding buyers. In Asia, wallets like GrabPay, GCash, Alipay, and Paytm are often preferred over cards.

List: Popular APMs by Region

Southeast Asia

• GCash (Philippines)
• GrabPay (Singapore, Malaysia)
• Dana, OVO (Indonesia)

East Asia

• Alipay, WeChat Pay (China)
• KakaoPay, Toss (South Korea)
• PayPay (Japan)

Latin America

• Mercado Pago (Mexico, Brazil, Chile)

4. Leverage data for smarter decisions

Payment platforms often hold overlooked insights: where users drop off, what payment methods they prefer, and which regions underperform.

Smart analytics can help you:

• Spot high-potential markets
• Align promotions with spend patterns
• Adjust pricing based on real conversion behaviour

With the right tools, this data becomes a decision-making edge, not just an operational report.

5. Prioritise security without sacrificing convenience

Security can't be optional. But it also can't come at the cost of usability.

Modern fraud protection tools use AI to monitor anomalies in real time, verify users silently, and flag only the highest-risk actions. Features like tokenisation, 3-D Secure, and biometric-ready flows protect both you and the customer.

Payment fraud is projected to exceed US$362 billion globally between 2023 and 2028. Striking the right balance is more than a technical requirement. It's a business necessity.

The hidden cost of poor payment setup

While failed payments are easy to measure, the secondary effects often go unnoticed:

• Manual reconciliation overhead: Multiple gateways mean more staff hours.
• Higher support volumes: Payment failures lead to more customer service tickets.
• Chargeback losses: Poor fraud protection increases refund liability.
• Abandoned international growth: Complex FX or compliance hurdles can stall expansion plans.

Each of these quietly erodes profitability and growth.

Optimised payments in action

One global e-commerce brand, after shifting to a more refined payment setup, reported:

• 23% reduction in checkout abandonment
• 15% growth in international orders
• Improved fraud detection without additional customer friction

These aren't outlier results. With the right strategy, even small businesses can see measurable gains.

Why work with Antom?

While this article is for general guidance, we do want to mention that Antom helps businesses reimagine payments to better support growth.

Our capabilities include:

• Global acceptance: Over 300 payment methods and 100 currencies
• Flexible tools: APIs and SDKs for every business size
• Fraud prevention: Integrated security without added steps
• Real-time insights: Unified dashboards and analytics

From retailers expanding into Asia to SaaS companies navigating multi-currency billing, we work alongside merchants to turn payments from a bottleneck into a strategic asset.

Get started with optimised payments

Payments can do more than process transactions. They can win back lost customers, reduce costs, and make global expansion viable.

If you're thinking about how your payment stack could do more, now's the time to ask the hard questions:

• Where are we losing transactions?
• What methods do our customers prefer but can't use?
• How much are currency conversions costing us?

And if you want a partner who knows the answers, we're happy to help.