Optimising online & mobile payment reconciliation

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Our client is a leading global fast food company that owns several popular chain stores. The organisation serves over two million customers every week across more than 640 stores nationally. In recent years, they have invested in innovative marketing campaigns with a strong digital focus to attract and retain customers, including online and mobile orders. In this case study, we explore how we provided our client with best practice data integration services that streamlined reporting and the payment reconciliation processes, and provided improved visibility of payment reconciliation data to their franchisees and store owners

The Challenge

As part of the organisation’s digital expansion, customers can now place orders and make payments through a mobile app. While this has created significant new opportunities, payments through the app presented some challenges at the back-end. The organisation was using a traditional payment gateway involving a bank to process mobile and online orders, which had limited flexibility in terms of payment options (for example, it did not accept PayPal). Our client needed to provide more visibility to it’s franchisees and store owners over online payments and orders, specifically in regard to the fees charged by merchant gateways.

Our client decided to adopt the Braintree payments gateway as the platform to accept and process mobile and online payments. Braintree is a flexible and scalable payments platform that enables customers to pay how they like – via credit and debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more – and integrates them in one place. Its reporting functionality also provides our client with better visibility and granular details on transactions occurring through online and mobile platforms with breakdowns to individual transaction fees.

Having successfully implemented Braintree, the organisation needed assistance to streamline its reporting and payment reconciliation processes. It engaged Analytics8 to undertake a data integration project to extract data from Braintree and PayPal, and to automate key reports to assist the finance team with payment reconciliation.

The Solution

As a trusted partner who had previously provided successful data and analytics services for the organisation including NPD demand planning and leveraging customer data to deliver personalised experiences, Analytics8 was well positioned to deliver data integration and reporting services. Our brief was to establish a mechanism for ingesting data from Braintree and PayPal to support payment reconciliation, and in addition, improve the associated reporting processes through automation.

We assembled a team of data specialists and analytics consultants to deliver the project. The initial focus was to define and agree on the data integration requirements to ensure that our client’s expectations could be rapidly met.

Next, the team developed robust processes to pull data from Braintree (using Braintree’s SDK) and PayPal (with report files provided via SFTP). With the data available, our team then shifted its focus to designing and implementing a rapid data integration process to ingest, process and format data from Braintree and PayPal in a single view, as required for our client’s Payment Reconciliation Report.

The team had a strong focus on identifying opportunities to accelerate the payment reconciliation process, such as by speeding up data transformation, and built these into the design of the data integration sequence.

The project was completed in just three months and went live in June 2018.

Results

Our client is already realising the benefits of data integration in the payments back-end. The new data integration and streamlined reporting processes have noticeably improved quality, confidence and efficiency for the finance team.

Payment reconciliation has been transformed from a clunky, time-consuming and manual process to being structured, organised and automated.
The finance team has much greater visibility of payment reconciliation information, with a newfound ability to assess details at a granular level that provide useful insights for our client’s marketing, customer and management functions. For example, it can now gain insight into customer behaviour as it can identify whether payments were made through either Braintree or PayPal.
Reporting on payments reconciliation is faster and more efficient, with a higher level of automation and less time required to extract and transform data needed for our client’s management and franchise reports.
Payments data is now available in a single location in the enterprise data warehouse and can be used to fulfil future reporting requirements.

Our role is now to continue optimising the data integration solution, and provide support as needed.

Let’s talk.

enquiries@analytics8.com.au

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