Pair It With Parrot: Taking Action To Drive Efficient Payment Strategies

We categorize the Pagos products of Parrot, Loon, and Toucan as “action birds.” These action-oriented services do exactly as the name would imply: provide payments-savvy merchants with intelligent ways to take informed actions that optimize their payments stack. Such optimization includes increasing acceptance rates, retaining valuable customers long term, reducing fraud and total cost of payment acceptance, and gaining an overall understanding of trends relating to customers and purchasing behavior. All of this and more is possible when you can easily integrate with the Pagos APIs to take action using payments processing technologies such as BIN services (Parrot), account updater (Loon), and network tokens (Toucan).

In a blog post from September of this year, we discussed the complementary ways network tokenization and account updater can work together, and the benefits of using Toucan and Loon as network and processor-agnostic tools to optimize acceptance rates and reduce fraud. Now we felt it was time to re-introduce Parrot, Pagos’ powerful and direct-to-network BIN service. With this impressive tool in your back pocket, you can not only gain a greater understanding of your customer base, but also pair that insight with our other action birds to optimize your payments stack. Pair it with Parrot! ….see what we did there?

Quick Parrot Refresher

Parrot is a standalone product that provides detailed bank and market data for the payment cards your customers transact with. At this time, you can request BIN data through the Parrot API or via our file-based service, Parrot Batch. With Parrot Batch, you’ll receive a weekly file that can provide over 30 different data attributes belonging to each BIN in our database. This BIN data is then yours to seamlessly integrate into your internal systems of analysis or payment processing decision making.

Ultimately, Parrot helps you get to know your customer base a lot better, including where they’re located, what types of cards they use, what currency they transact in, who issued their card, and so much more. The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you are to:

• Mitigate fraudulent activity

• Reduce and understand declines

• Combat involuntary churn

• Route transactions to the most appropriate issuers

• Build effective marketing strategies

If you’re not already using Parrot by Pagos, reach out to us today to get started! If you’re using Parrot already, make sure you’re keeping up with the recent surge in eight-digit BINs so you always have the most accurate BIN data to work with.

Pairing With Parrot to Improve Efficiency

Toucan by Pagos offers quick and easy access to global network tokenization across all four major card brands with a single integration. Loon is an account lifecycle management service for keeping card-on-file account information up-to-date for all major card brands.These products are impressive all on their own, but now consider the possibilities of combining Toucan’s tokenization capabilities and Loon’s account updater services with the information available in Parrot. If your wings aren’t flapping with excitement yet, give us a second to explain.

Parrot provides BIN data attributes which help you better understand your customers’ PANs, so you can make better decisions around how to process and store them. If you’re using Toucan and Loon, you can also use that data to create and manage rules around how, when, or if certain PANs should be sent for tokenization or account updates. In other words, you can use the identified attributes about individual cards to determine which ones you spend the time and money attempting to tokenize or update. Knowledge is power, or in this case, knowledge improves process efficiency and saves you money!

Here are just a few examples of the BIN data attributes you can integrate into your network tokenization and account updater strategies to make them more efficient or optimize for cost savings:

• Card Type – When you know the type of cards your customers transact with, you can build rules around which cards you tell Toucan to tokenize or Loon to update. If your historical processing data shows that non-reloadable prepaid cards have low approval rates or aren’t typically used for repeat purchases, you could sort out this card type from the PANs you send for tokenization. Similarly, non-reloadable prepaid cards aren’t eligible for updates through Loon; when you know which cards aren’t eligible for account updater, you can avoid even attempting such updates and the costs associated with the attempt.

• Issuing Country – Certain regions have a higher issuer adoption rate for network tokenization and account updater than others. When you know what country a card is issued in, you can make decisions on a card-by-card basis as to which ones you want to tokenize or request updates on. Doing so ensures you only tokenize those cards for which you have the highest likelihood of success.

• Token Ranges – Some card brands identify a BIN range as being a token range instead of a PAN range with a pan_or_token identifier. With this information, you can proactively exclude token ranges from those sent off for tokenization, since there’s no reason to tokenize a payment method that’s already a token.

• BIN Ranges – Card brands identify the BIN ranges that aren’t eligible for account updater. You can then exclude any cards in these minimum/maximum ranges from your update requests.

Pairing With Parrot to Collect Better Data

As mentioned in the section above, Parrot’s biggest value add is in helping you get to know your customer base better. When you can assign data attributes to individual BINs, you can then use those attributes to sort, analyze, and spot trends in your customer and transaction data. The same is true of your network token and account updater data!

With Parrot, you can use eight and nine-digit BINs to start identifying the attributes of different BIN ranges associated with successful network tokenization or account update attempts, and adapt your processes accordingly. This analytic capability is especially important in the long run, as issuer adoption of network tokenization and account updater evolves. When you know what issuing banks or issuing countries have changed their stance on these services, for example, you can immediately adapt your network tokenization and account updater strategies to leverage the right service at the right time to optimize payment performance..

Pair Parrot Today!

Parrot by Pagos is a powerful tool when utilized for many purposes: understanding customer segments, identifying fraud, mitigating risk, and creating personalized payment experiences for your customers. Now we’ve put another feather in ol’ Parrot’s cap by showcasing the benefits or combining BIN data with Toucan and Loon. By subscribing to all three Pagos action birds, you can optimize your account updater and network tokenization cohorts to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. Ready to take action?