merchant accounts
Business services
Merchant account vs payment gateway: what does your business actually need?
Setting up online payment acceptance often feels like navigating an alphabet soup of fintech jargon. You hear terms like acquiring banks, payment rails, settlement windows, and processing fees thrown around interchangeably. Two components that cause the most confusion for growing businesses are merchant accounts and payment gateways. While many operators assume these terms refer to the same tool, they handle completely different responsibilities in the payment lifecycle. Navigating the merchant account vs. payment gateway landscape is essential to optimizing your checkout experience, keeping transaction costs low, and maintaining a healthy operational cash flow. Decoding online payment infrastructure: the short answer
Business services
Choosing a card acquirer in the EEA: questions to ask before you sign
There are many options when it comes to card acquirers if you’re running an e-commerce business or just scaling your business across Europe. Usually, the card acquirer is evaluated based on three things: how much you keep after every transaction, how fast that money hits your account, and how many customers actually complete the checkout. Yet many businesses care only about headline processing rates. The common story for them is to sign a multi-year contract, and only discover the real costs are hidden in reserve holdbacks, FX markups, or that a provider doesn’t offer a compatible settlement speed for merchants.
Business services
Merchant accounts for travel agencies: seasonal bookings and cross-border payments
Running a travel agency, tour platform, or online booking portal is an exciting business. You connect travelers with memorable experiences across the globe. But behind the scenes, managing the money flow for global bookings is far from simple. Travel businesses operate in a unique financial landscape. From sudden seasonal booking surges to high chargeback risks caused by long lead times between booking and travel, traditional acquiring banks often view the travel sector as high risk. When you combine those challenges with foreign card declines and heavy currency exchange fees, everyday payment processing can quickly eat into your profits. A special
Business services
Getting approved as a high-risk merchant in the EEA: what underwriters actually check
Being treated as a high-risk business by a payment provider can already make onboarding more complex, but getting rejected when applying for a high-risk merchant account is probably a whole other experience. Before you apply for a high-risk merchant account with an EEA provider, it is worth understanding what usually goes wrong and why businesses in the same industry can receive different outcomes. The quality of their documentation can make a difference, but providers also consider factors such as ownership, operating countries, processing history, transaction volumes and the overall business model. Many factors can improve or weaken your application. A
Business services
Chargeback prevention for high-risk merchants: practical strategies that work
Running a business in high-risk e-commerce, iGaming, SaaS, or digital services is an exciting journey – but it comes with its fair share of bumps in the road. Among them, chargebacks are arguably the biggest headache for merchant owners. At Genome, our team stays in touch with international founders and financial managers, and we know how frustrating it is to see hard-earned revenue tied up in payment disputes. Not to mention the anticipation that elevated dispute rates might jeopardize your payment processing setup altogether. The good news? You don’t have to stay on the defensive. Today our team has prepared
Business services
Merchant accounts for e-learning platforms: how to scale cross-border digital sales and localized checkouts
Selling digital courses across borders should be simple, as for many people it is a valuable service. And in times when the internet makes knowledge more accessible, you can expect many people around the world to want to join your platform. However, when an international student reaches the final purchase step, basic payment friction can easily ruin the conversion. To expand internationally, EdTech companies and course platforms need more than standard domestic card processing. Some of them require merchant accounts for e-learning platforms, and, in some cases, localized checkouts. The combination of both will help you scale cross-border digital sales
Business services
Merchant accounts for SaaS businesses: how to optimize global subscription billing and reduce churn
Recurring revenue is the foundation of most successful subscription-based SaaS businesses. You can track monthly recurring revenue (MRR), annual recurring revenue (ARR), or both, but it doesn’t matter if the payment infrastructure fails you. There are a lot, and we mean a lot, of reasons why customers churn, or subscription revenue is lost. Expired cards, payment declines, insufficient funds, fraud, chargebacks, cross-border issues, not to mention issuer and authentication failures. That’s why, in this article, our team wants to explain why global SaaS platforms lose customers. In many cases, it is not because the product fails, but because the payment
Business services
Hosted payment page vs. self-hosted payment page: which checkout is best for your business?
Did you know the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is now 70.22%? The figure comes from the Baymard Institute. Seven out of ten shoppers who were interested enough to add something to their cart just leave. Even if statistics are exaggerated a bit, it doesn’t mean that six or five out of ten customers’ figures would make it much better. There are other studies that have been done to uncover why it is happening, but we want to focus on 2 things: the checkout experience itself and customers’ trust in providing their financial information. Many of the reasons
Business services
Why subscription businesses are switching from cards to Pay by Bank
The subscription economy is wide and diverse: SaaS platforms, streaming services, digital media, etc. Do you know what they share? Involuntary churn – card expirations, payment limits, and payment accounts that get closed. Studies show that failed payments have become one of the leading causes of subscription revenue leaks. Visa conducted a research and found that businesses spend up to 15% of the payment value trying to recover a failed payment. And even then, up to 15% of those initial failed payments permanently fail and turn into absolute bad debt. The chargeback problems and high fees from the card payment