How to Receive International and Multi-Currencies Payments with Salesforce

Salesforce, the #1 CRM, serves businesses of all sizes, industries and geographic regions. It is one of the top CRM providers around the globe, with more than 150,000 customers. Despite its engaging capabilities, businesses face various challenges when receiving international and multi-currency payments in Salesforce.

Based on a Rapyd report, they face issues like delays in payments, navigating the complexities of foreign exchange and regulations, high costs, and compliance with cross-border payment regulations. All these challenges affect the growth and profitability of those businesses. 

Thus, to cater to all these challenges, they need a solution that is compatible with their system. What could be a better solution than a Salesforce payment processor? Therefore, in this blog, you will get to know what a payment processor is and how it helps in receiving Salesforce payments.  

Let’s get started!

Understanding Payment Processor

It manages the transaction processing between the merchant and the financial institutions involved in that particular transaction. 

In simpler words, it processes the real-time transfer of money from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s bank account while making a purchase. 

Still confused? Let’s understand it differently. 

Suppose you are shopping online and add an item to the cart. When proceeding with payment, it will ask you multiple payment options to select from, and you choose one. After you click on the ‘pay now’ button, the website establishes a communication with the payment processor.

It encrypts the payment method’s information and sends it to the relevant bank for verification. After successful verification, it checks for sufficient funds in the bank account.

Based on the status shared by the bank, the payment processor approves or declines the payment. This status is then shared with the merchant’s website, and the customer is informed about the payment status. 

Well, this is how a payment processor works. 

Now, let’s come to the point and see how it helps in receiving international and multi-currency payments. 

How Does the Payment Processor Help in Receiving International & Multi-Currency Payments?

1. Currency Conversion and Exchange Rate Management

Payment processors provide real-time currency conversion services. When a customer is making a foreign purchase, they automatically convert the transaction amount into the merchant’s preferred currency, allowing seamless management of exchange rates.

Additionally, some payment processors offer Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) options during checkout. It lets customers see and pay in their currency at the point of sale, with the exchange rate displayed clearly. 

2. Security Measures

When transacting money online, be it in any country, spammers are always looking for that one golden chance to steal your money. To avoid this money theft, payment processors guarantee secure and reliable transaction processing. 

They follow strict security standards like encryption, tokenization and multi-factor authentication. 

Let’s see how these techniques eliminate unauthorized access to the transaction data. 

Encryption converts the data into a code that can only be decoded by a unique key. This prevents the unauthorized user from looking into the transaction data and misusing it. 

On the other hand, tokenization replaces the transaction information into a unique and random set of characters called tokens. This process helps the user to keep the data safe, as the original data is not being used or stored anywhere. Even if anyone gets unauthorized access to tokens, they wouldn’t be able to make a fraudulent transaction. 

Multi-factor Authentication enhances security by requiring users to go through multiple verification steps during login. This added layer of protection makes it more challenging for hackers to compromise transaction data.

3. Compliance International Regulations 

Payment processors ensure compliance with international financial regulations that are designed to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion and other financial crimes. Let’s dig deeper into some of the compliances followed by payment processors. 

• Anti Money Laundering

It is a set of policies, procedures and technologies that prevents criminals from exchanging the black money they earned through illegal practices for legitimate or clean money. 

• Know Your Customer (KYC)

It helps verify the identity and legitimacy of the user, its sources, and the destination of funds through their governmental documents. 

• Cross Border Transactions 

When it comes to processing cross-border payments, payment processors adhere to various regulations and laws set by different jurisdictions. These rules include the guidelines provided by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and the Common Reporting Standards (CRS). 

These regulations help ensure that cross-border payments are transparent, secure, and in compliance with international standards.

4. Automated Record Keeping in Salesforce

It might be very tiring for you even to think of creating payment records in Salesforce manually. What if you had to do it? Don’t worry, you don’t have to! 

The payment processor’s automation feature synchronizes the transaction data and stores it in Salesforce, saving time and reducing the risk of errors. It allows you to create multiple categories based on countries, currencies, customers, etc. and adds up the new records, based on these criteria. Additionally, you can extract data and gain insights whenever needed. 

All these capabilities of a payment processor make it an efficient option to receive and manage international and multi-currency Salesforce payments. 

Benefits of Receiving International and Multi-Currencies Payments for a Business 

1. Increased Revenue by Access to Untapped Markets

While the business is present across nations in the world, the customer base is automatically spread across. This enables the company to receive payments from various countries and tap into markets that have not yet been tapped. Therefore, international payments indirectly contribute to increasing the business’s revenue.  

2. Diverse Income Streams

As we have discussed above, that business can tap the markets that were untapped before, which benefits it in receiving payments from various income streams. This is because the business is no longer reliant on a single market or currency. With this, you get financial stability as the risk of fluctuating currency and the down age of the market is reduced. 

3. Improved Customer Experiences

Think of a situation where a potential customer from Armenia is purchasing your product. At the time of checkout, he is unable to find a suitable currency option due to the limited payment options at your gateway. In this case, the customer might leave the product in the cart. 

So, to avoid this, multi-currency support helps the customer choose their preferred currency to use in the transaction. This way, the customer experience is enhanced if you are valuing what the customer is actually looking for.    

4. Better Supplier Relations with Streamlined Payment Processes 

Paying your suppliers in the currency of their choice would help in building strong relations. This is because there would be a reduction in the money matter dispute, formulating a streamlined payment process and valuable relations. Also, they tend to give you discounts on the supplies you buy from them. 

Let’s Understand Multi-currency Use Case with Example

Let’s Understand it with an example of the e-commerce industry, Salesforce can help a global e-commerce company manage sales transactions in multiple currencies. Here’s how it works:

1. Opportunity Management: When a customer from a different country wants to buy something, you can create an opportunity in Salesforce for that sale. You can assign a specific currency to that opportunity based on the customer’s location.
2. Currency Conversion: Salesforce can automatically convert the sale amount into your company’s default currency for reporting purposes.
3. Currency Rates Update: Exchange rates for different currencies change over time. Salesforce lets you update these rates regularly to reflect the current exchange rates. You can either update them manually or use third-party services for automatic updates.
4. Reporting and Analysis: Salesforce’s multi-currency support enables you to generate reports and dashboards that show sales performance across different regions and currencies.

Now managing multi-currency operations can be challenging and risky. That’s where Salesforce’s appExchange application “ ChargeOn” comes in. ChargeOn simplifies all the processes of multi-currency conversion, real-time rate updates, reporting, and integration. By using this you can focus on your business while ChargeOn will handle your business’s multi-currency operations.

Conclusion 

Enabling your Salesforce platform to receive International and multi-currency payments is a great strategic move for businesses. It will help you reach a wider audience and cater to their payment requirements with ease. You just need the right Salesforce payment processing solution. 

But, with so many options in the market, you might be confused as to which could be the right one! 

Therefore, look for a payment processor that is compatible with your Salesforce org, has multi-currency support and guarantees a secure transaction.