Choosing the right payments partner for recurring payments

Choosing a payments partner is one of the most critical decisions for a business to make. The right partner can transform payments from a cost centre into a revenue enabler by reducing churn, improving cash flow, and increasing operational efficiency. 

But what does a scorecard for choosing a partner look like? While technical capabilities are crucial, it is equally important to consider the operational and advisory aspects of the partnership. 

In this article, we break down how to create a nuanced scorecard to assess recurring payments partners and ensure they’re aligned with your business goals. 

Creating your scorecard 

There are three main areas of assessment when it comes to choosing a payments partner: platform, operations, and advisory. 

1. Platform: Can this partner offer the latest technology to streamline and optimise payment processing? 
2. Operations: Can this partner simplify and automate financial operations, including reconciliation and chargebacks? 
3. Advisory: Can this partner provide strategic direction and help you stay ahead of industry trends? 

A strong payments partner can provide value in all three areas to deliver long-term value. Here are examples of questions to ask in your discovery phase. 

Platform: Ensuring your payment stack is optimised

When evaluating the platform capabilities of a payments partner, it’s important to look beyond basic transaction processing. Merchants should consider factors like payment success rates, tokenization types, and support for diverse payment methods.

• How can failed payments be minimised? 

Why it matters
‍Payment failures are a major cause of involuntary and voluntary churn. Up to 50% of subscription payment failures result from expired or lost cards, and 30% from insufficient funds.

What to look for
‍Solutions like network tokenization, smart retries, and intelligent payment routing can dramatically improve success rates. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium’s platform includes network tokenization, multi-acquiring, end-to-end redundancy, and smart routing capabilities to help businesses achieve higher success rates and minimise involuntary churn. 
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• Which payment methods does the platform support?

Why it matters
‍Offering the right mix of payment methods is crucial for customer acquisition and retention. However, too many options can overwhelm customers.

What to look for
‍A partner that supports a wide range of methods and provides guidance on tailoring the mix to your customer base.  

How Precium can help
‍Precium supports card, EFT debit order, DebiCheck, and Capitec Pay  for recurring payments.
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• How easy is it to integrate with your existing systems?

Why it matters
Switching payment providers can be a complex and risky process; payments are a critical capability that interact with many systems and business processes. Integration ease and interoperability are critical.

What to look for
API integration options that are well-documented and robust support during the onboarding process.

How Precium can help
Precium provides a single API integration for enterprise online payments across South Africa with integration recipes, guides, and tailored onboarded support.
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• Does the platform provide real-time comprehensive reporting?

Why it matters
‍Having real-time data insights helps you optimise your payment performance and identify issues early.

What to look for
‍Real-time monitoring and alerting, configurable webhooks, and a real-time transaction feed. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium offers a real-time transaction feed with payment statuses and enriched error codes, as well as real-time observability tools to support proactive issue identification and resolution. 
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Operations: Streamlining your financial processes 

• Can reconciliation be automated? 

Why it matters
‍Manual reconciliation is time-consuming and prone to error, which can create bottlenecks in financial reporting and impact customer experience. 

What to look for
‍Automated multi-method reconciliation that integrates with your financial systems and provides a unified dashboard for all payment methods.

How Precium can help
‍Precium offers automated reconciliation solutions across payment methods, including a single mark-off file and automated bank statement reconciliation, that streamline financial operations and enhance customer support. 
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• What level of customer support does the partner provide? How does the processor handle downtime from a support perspective? 

Why it matters
‍Payments are a mission-critical function: downtime can cost businesses significant revenue and impact customer trust. Merchants need a partner who provides fast, reliable support when issues arise. 

What to look for
‍24/7 support, SLA monitoring and reporting, dedicated account managers, real-time incident reporting and alerting, and proactive issue resolution. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium offers 24/7 enterprise-level support, including dedicated account managers who deeply understand your business. Our platform includes real-time observability tools that detect issues early and trigger automated failover mechanisms to minimise disruption. 
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• How does the processor handle disputes and chargebacks?

Why it matters
‍Effective dispute and chargeback management protects revenue, reduces operating costs, and ensures positive customer interactions.

What to look for
‍Automated chargeback alerts, clear workflows for dispute resolution, support for managing complex cases, and insights on dispute causes to reduce future chargebacks.

How Precium can help
‍Precium provides automated chargeback alerts, detailed reporting on dispute causes, and support to identify patterns, reduce dispute rates, and manage the full lifecycle of disputes from submission to resolution. 
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• Is the processor PCI DSS compliant and how does it ensure transaction security?

Why it matters
‍Security and compliance are non-negotiable. Recurring transactions require storage of sensitive customer and payment details that present a potential security and data breach risk.‍

What to look for
‍PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, secure tokenization and end-to-end encryption, and robust information security and data protection practices. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium is a PCI DSS Level 1 payments provider and compliant with POPIA, GDPR and CCPA, ensuring the highest standard of compliance and security for enterprise merchants. Our security architecture protects user data through end-to-end encryption, tokenization of sensitive payment information, multi-factor authentication, and data minimisation and anonymisation.
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Advisory: Keeping pace with payments

• How does the partner remain ahead of industry trends? 

Why it matters
The payments landscape is evolving rapidly. A good partner will keep you informed and help you stay ahead of trends across new payment methods, consumer behaviour, fraud and risk management, and changing regulations. 

What to look for
Proactive updates on new technologies and regulatory changes, regular industry reports and thought leadership, an established R&D function, and recommendations on future-proofing your payments stack. 

How Precium can help
Precium collaborates with our merchants on payments advisory and strategy, including trend reports, regulatory guidance, and actionable insights on the latest industry shifts. Dedicated account managers report on performance data, making recommendations for optimising your payment processes and customer experience.
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• How does the partner approach new product development and feature release cycles? 

Why it matters
‍A payments partner’s innovation velocity will directly impact your ability to improve customer experience and remain competitive. Businesses need partners that are committed to continuous improvement and collaborative product development. 

What to look for
‍Regular feature releases and updates, collaborative input processes for customers to influence the product roadmap, and a transparent development pipeline with clear timelines. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium follows an agile development approach, releasing new features on a rolling basis. We engage merchants in product feedback sessions, allowing our customers to shape the roadmap and ensure our solutions meet evolving business needs.
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• What level of strategic advisory and collaboration do you expect from your payments partner? 

Why it matters
The best partnerships are those where the payments provider becomes an extension of your team, invested in your long-term success. A partner who actively collaborates on strategy can help you reduce churn, improve success rates, and boost revenue.

What to look for
Dedicated account managers that provide ongoing strategic guidance, regular performance reviews with actionable insights, access to benchmarking data and best practices, and case studies that collaboration on growth strategies.

How Precium can help
‍Precium acts as a true partner, offering bespoke advisory services for each merchant. Our dedicated account managers provide monthly performance reviews, benchmarking insights, and tailored recommendations to help you achieve your payments goals.
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• Is the partnership scalable and able to support future business objectives? 

Why it matters
‍As your business grows, your payments infrastructure must grow with it. Your payments partner should be able to handle increasing transaction volumes, new payment methods, and new business models, without compromising performance.

What to look for
‍Scalable infrastructure to handle growth, flexible implementation options that allow for increasing customisation and control, experienced team who has supported businesses at scale. 

How Precium can help
‍Precium’s platform is built for scale, offering modular infrastructure that ensures merchants can add new capabilities as they scale, without needing to rebuild their payments stack. We offer end-to-end redundancy with multiple acquiring banks, 3DS MPIs, and processor links, with flexible implementation options that allow increasing levels of customisation for merchants. Our merchants own their own tokens, reducing gateway lock-in and ensuring payment flexibility, and our team has experience supporting some of the largest global and local brands to process recurring payments at scale.
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Thinking beyond features 

While platform capabilities are important, merchants should consider the relationship with their payments partner. Payments aren’t just a technical function – they’re a critical part of customer experience and business performance. To support a world-class recurring payments capability, businesses should:   

1. Look for a partner that optimises their payments stack and processing performance.
2. Prioritise partners who simplify financial operations through automation, multi-layered support, and streamlined processes.
3. Choose a partner who provides strategic insights and helps you stay ahead of changes in the payments industry.

The right recurring payments partner isn’t just a technology provider — they’re a long-term collaborator in your business growth.

Read more about what you can expect from Precium as your payments partner here.

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