Commerce Module

The Commerce Module lets financial institutions offer merchant acquiring services — from onboarding and payment processing through settlement and dispute management. For institutions serving the growing e-commerce market across Cabo Verde and the broader Lusophone African space, this module provides the full infrastructure to become a payment facilitator or acquirer without building acquiring technology from scratch.

What sets this module apart? Payment method orchestration. Rather than routing all transactions through a single acquirer, the Commerce Module distributes transactions across multiple acquiring banks based on cost, card type, geography, and success rate. This multi-acquirer routing increases authorization rates by 5-15% compared to single-acquirer setups. That's not a marginal improvement — it's the difference between a merchant staying with you or switching to a competitor.

The module includes pre-built e-commerce plugins for major platforms, POS terminal integration for physical retailers, and marketplace payment support for platform businesses. Settlement management with reconciliation, chargeback handling workflows, and recurring billing make it a merchant services platform that institutions can deploy rapidly.

Digital merchant onboarding with KYB verification, business document collection, and risk classification. Onboarding reduces merchant activation from weeks to 24-48 hours, with risk tiers that determine processing limits and monitoring intensity. The faster a merchant can start accepting payments, the more likely they are to choose your institution over a slower competitor.

Payment method orchestration is the core differentiator. Multi-acquirer routing based on card type, geography, transaction amount, and historical success rates means each transaction goes to the acquirer most likely to approve it. Routing decisions are made in under 50ms — no perceptible latency added to the payment flow.

For physical retail, full POS terminal support covers card-present, contactless, and QR code transactions. Integration with leading POS terminal providers and softPOS solutions serves mobile-first merchant environments.

Online merchants get pre-built payment plugins for WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and custom integrations via JavaScript SDK and server-side APIs. Hosted payment pages handle merchants without development resources — same tokenized security, same 3DS2 authentication, no merchant-side compliance work.

Settlement processing runs on adjustable schedules — daily, weekly, or monthly — per merchant. Multi-currency settlement with FX conversion at point of settlement, and reconciliation between acquiring bank settlements and merchant payouts runs automatically.

Chargeback management follows structured workflows: case creation, evidence collection, response submission, representment. Chargeback ratio monitoring per merchant triggers alerts and risk reviews before ratios reach scheme-mandated thresholds. Proactive monitoring reduces chargeback losses by 30-40%.

Recurring billing handles subscription and recurring payments with secure tokenized card storage. Failed payment retries, card update management, and both fixed and variable billing cycles are supported.

Marketplace operations get split payment automation — platform fees, seller proceeds, tax withholding, and commission distributions handled per pre-configured rules. Escrow, delayed capture, and partial capture workflows support marketplace business models.

Alternative payment methods — mobile money, bank transfers, digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later — expand accepted payment methods and increase conversion rates by 10-20% in markets where card penetration is low.

What goes wrong when merchant onboarding is handled poorly? The biggest issue we see is risk classification that's either too strict (good merchants rejected, revenue lost) or too loose (fraudulent merchants approved, chargebacks spike). The module's tiered risk approach helps — new merchants start with lower limits and tighter monitoring, then graduate to higher limits as transaction history builds.

Another common problem: reconciliation failures when settlement schedules don't match acquiring bank cycles. The module handles this with automatic reconciliation that flags discrepancies for review rather than silently posting incorrect amounts.

Every processed transaction generates merchant discount rate (MDR) revenue. Typical MDR rates of 1.5-3% per transaction create a growing revenue stream that scales with merchant transaction volumes. A portfolio of 500 active merchants averaging EUR 50,000/month in processing volume generates substantial recurring income — and that's before considering chargeback fees, currency conversion spreads, and value-added services. Multi-acquirer routing increases authorization rates by 5-15%, meaning more sales for merchants and higher processing volumes for the institution. Digital onboarding reduces merchant activation from 2-4 weeks to 24-48 hours — faster activation means merchants start processing sooner, generating revenue from day one. Proactive chargeback monitoring and representment workflows reduce chargeback losses by 30-40%, keeping merchants below scheme-mandated thresholds and avoiding fines. Tokenized payment processing keeps cardholder data off merchant systems, reducing their PCI DSS compliance burden to SAQ-A level — a major barrier to merchant acquisition removed.

The technical layer rests on a full REST API for payment initiation, refund processing, and merchant management. Webhook notifications deliver live transaction events — authorization, settlement, chargeback — to merchant systems for direct integration with order management workflows.

All card data is tokenized at the point of entry. Sensitive cardholder data never touches merchant servers, which dramatically reduces PCI DSS compliance scope and eliminates the risk of card data breaches at the merchant level. The multi-acquirer routing engine applies adjustable rules based on BIN range, card type, amount, currency, and geographic origin, making routing decisions in under 50ms.