Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Payments provider NMI is counting on the addition of an artificial intelligence tool from Arcum to mitigate merchant retention.
Announced Tuesday, the partnership integrates Arcum’s AI services with NMI’s Merchant Relationship Management platform, formerly known as IRIS CRM, to enable Schaumburg, Ill.-based NMI to get advance notice of possible attrition and take measures to retain as many merchants as possible.
Atlanta-based Arcum says merchant attrition is a mounting challenge for payments providers. It’s often much less costly for a merchant acquirer to retain an existing merchant than to book a new one. The Arcum AI tool will predict which merchants are at risk for switching within the next 12 months, helping NMI take steps to retain them.
An application programming interface token connects the NMI merchant database to the Arcum RevMax Studio platform, its AI-enabled service, to produce reports in minutes versus the hours a more manual review would require.
NMI hails the integration. “This partnership is a game-changer for ISOs looking to leverage advanced AI to grow their business efficiently and effectively,” Peter Galvin, NMI’s chief marketing officer, says in a statement.
“Our whole vision behind this is, this is your revenue growth tool with the intended purpose of having the client being able to optimize their portfolio by retaining their revenue and being able to cross-sell merchants new products,” Sebastian Builes, Arcum chief executive and cofounder, tells Digital Transactions News.
For example, an analysis can show which merchants are at risk and the specific suspected factors, such as declining volume or revenue. It can show how many responsive actions the payments company has taken, the monthly attrition rate for this set of merchants, and the monthly revenue and volume impact.
It also provides a merchant-by-merchant list with more specific data, such as tenure with the payments provider and which sales agent the account belongs to. It also labels the risk level, from low to high.
Users can click on an individual merchant’s entry to get more detailed information, such as revenue, the risk level and the reason for that risk level, and graphs that can display volume, revenue, effective rate, and transaction volume, all this sussed out by the artificial intelligence integration.
Arcum says NMI customers can access Arcum’s AI within a week by adding their API token. “Once the API token has been input they have access to our AI model,” Builes says. “It’s not just about making the prediction right but doing the work on behalf of our clients and only adding a human when needed.”
