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1 in 4 of all online transactions in India are made via a card
Despite the rise of UPI, cards still remain one of the most trusted and widely used digital payment instruments in India, preferred for higher-value transactions. Cards are often the first credit product for Indian consumers, opening them to affordability instruments like EMIs and revolving credit. Card transactions are also considered secure, especially with the advent of measures such as tokenisation.
It then becomes extremely important for businesses to ensure that their card payment solution is supported by a robust infrastructure that guarantees not just the best success rates but also the best payment experience.
At Cashfree, we are relentlessly focused on building India’s most advanced card stack. By working closely with banks and card networks, we’re delivering faster, frictionless, and more intuitive card payment experiences. An integral part of this journey is the development of our in-house card-acquiring switch, giving us the ability to innovate at scale and set new benchmarks for speed and reliability.
What is a card acquiring switch?
A card payment flow involves communication between the merchant (via its payment aggregator like Cashfree) and the issuing bank (bank that issued the card to the customer). The issuing bank verifies that the card is genuine, active, and has enough balance or credit to approve the transaction.
A switch is the technology layer that routes these messages securely and efficiently between the PA, network, acquiring and issuing banks.
The case for an In-house Card Acquiring Switch
While a PA can depend on external processors to facilitate processing card transactions, it comes with some challenges
- Lower Success Rates
Dependency on an external or third-party switch involves an additional hop in the transaction flow. The more steps, the higher the transaction time and the more chances for delays and payment failures
- Innovation Bottleneck
Any innovation within the card’s payment flow or certain customisation requests from the merchants requires changes at the switch level. Dependence on an external switch can slow down the implementation time.
- Data Visibility & Control
With external switches, the payment aggregator has less granular visibility into response codes, network hops, etc, which is essential to understand and solve for payment failures quickly.
How Cashfree’s In-House Card Acquiring Switch Can Elevate Your Business
Industry-best Success Rates
Cashfree’s switch establishes direct connectivity with networks and hence faster and secure transactions. Not just this, the in-house switch enables full control over transaction routing, retries, and fallback logic, enabling optimised success rates.
Faster Access to Card Innovations
In the card payment space, network-led innovations have been plenty. From tokenisation to contactless payments to affordability solutions to fraud prevention features, these network-driven innovations need processor-level changes to be brought to customers. With in-house switch eliminating dependence on third-party processors, these innovations can be incorporated and brought to customers faster and at scale.
High Scalability and Reliability
Cashfree’s In-house switch is EVMCo certified across major card networks, eliminating authentication failures by 25% and powers checkout even during spikes with a 10K+ TPS processing capability.
With 1 billion cards in circulation and growing year on year, today’s businesses require a card stack that is reliable, secure and quick to adopt the latest innovations. That’s why we build our in-house card switches to power our card stack. For businesses that we serve, this translates into happier customers and stronger growth.
