Powering Platforms with Pagos: How We're Revolutionizing Card Brand Services

When a merchant’s vault is full of stale card credentials, they’re bound to see declines. In fact, outdated payments data is one of the biggest drivers of declines for any business processing payments today. This isn’t that surprising when you consider a report out of Stripe from Payments Ed in May 2023 that stated approximately 40% of cards expire or are re-issued every year—a stat that doesn’t even take into account the number of customers upgrading or simply replacing an old card of their own volition.

To address these types of declines, card networks offer services like network tokenization and account updater. When merchants employ these services, they can drive meaningful authorization rate improvements (around 2-7%), reduce churn, improve customer experiences, and even reduce interchange costs. In MasterCard’s latest Automatic Billing Updater Merchant Summary, they highlighted that their account updater product can address 33% of card-not-present (CNP) declines! With that kind of return, any business processing cards online that hasn’t employed these services is absolutely leaving money on the table.

In today’s post, we’ll highlight how platform providers (e.g. marketplaces, vertical SaaS enablers, payment orchestrators, gateways, ISOs, and payment service providers) can quickly and easily provide their merchants with access to network tokenization and account updater, and all the benefits these services afford.

Previous Limitations to Offering Card Brand Services

Card brand services like network tokenization and account updater have typically only been offered bundled in with payment process services. This means the functionality has been an add-on to transaction processing and not the core focus. As such, the degree of functionality and support for these card brand services varies greatly across individual providers—which can be problematic if you’re a platform provider that wants to make such services available to all your merchants a la carte, unbundled, and composable with a flexible payment service offering. 

Up until now, you could only provide the same card brand services to everyone by going directly to each of the individual card brands (which is very time-consuming and costly) or turning to another vendor or platform—oftentimes a direct competitor—for access. Additionally, you’d be responsible for keeping up-to-date on the latest version of these services to ensure your merchants receive the greatest benefit from their implementation.

Pagos has built better solutions for allowing platform providers easy and direct access to network tokenization and account updater services that are:

• Unbundled from transaction processing

• Network and processor-agnostic 

• Data-driven

• Observably impactful in real-time

Sound like something you might be interested in?

Introducing Toucan and Loon by Pagos

Toucan and Loon from Pagos are your keys to unlocking card network services for your merchants. 

• Toucan by Pagos is a one-stop-shop for all your merchant’s network tokenization needs. Tokenize primary account numbers (PANs), fetch cryptograms, and manage tokens via one API. We currently support Visa and Mastercard, with Discover coming in Q3 and Amex in Q4.

• Loon is an independent account updater service that supports Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex. With Loon, your merchants can manage one PAN list to receive account updates from any network

Both products enable users to employ an easy-to-use API that is card brand and PSP agnostic. This means that as soon as your merchants have access to Toucan or Loon, they can quickly start using these tools to optimise their payment strategy and add value to their payment stack—all without making any changes to yours or their current setup. Even more, the response codes and credentials (PAN or network token) Toucan and Loon provide come straight from the most reliable source and are usable on the most appropriate local or global payment processing route you choose for yourself or your merchants. We’re always focused on doing what’s best for cardholders and businesses so that they can transact.

Toucan and Loon also give providers the flexibility that you would expect from working directly with the card brands for these services, but without any short-term or long-term complexities. In other words, you can provide your merchants with network tokens or account updater services for multiple different card brands today without maintaining relationships with or requesting Token Requestor IDs (TRIDs) from each card brand individually. That also means avoiding the time and money spent integrating directly with each or staying up-to-date on integration changes.

Get Started Today! 

If you’re a platform provider, you know what your merchants need: ways to improve payments performance and increase revenue without too much heavy lifting. This need doesn’t stray too far from your own; you, too, want to give merchants what they want without breaking the bank or drowning in new workflows. Toucan and Loon are the solution for delivering high-impact, value-add card services to your portfolio of merchants. By managing a single relationship with Pagos, you—and your merchants—can seamlessly integrate these services into your payments stack. Our team would be happy to collaborate with you; contact us today to get started!

This post was written in conjunction with Chase Foster, the Enterprise Sales Lead at Pagos.