Skipify and Synchrony Team on Frictionless Checkouts

Checkout-centric FinTech Skipify has launched a partnership with consumer finance company Synchrony.

The collaboration, announced Wednesday (March 13), “leverages Skipify’s payment infrastructure to provide simplified and enhanced checkout for Synchrony cardholders, improving the experience for shoppers and delivering higher authorization rates, conversion, and security for Synchrony merchants.”

According to a news release, the partnership will see Skipify add Synchrony Mastercard to its digital wallet, which recognizes cardholders on a merchant’s website automatically, autofills payment information, surfacing available cards, and offers instant access to points, rewards and financing from Synchrony.

As has been covered here, frictionless checkout experiences are critical to staving off cart abandonment, an issue posing a serious threat to online merchants.

“This issue is increasingly worrisome as budget-conscious shoppers use carts as wish lists while searching for better deals,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “Online businesses use various strategies to try to entice shoppers to become customers. The answer to boosting conversions may be as simple as offering the right payment options.”

Research from “How Preferred Payment Availability Can Reduce Cart Abandonment,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Adobe collaboration, found that 70% of shoppers view the availability of their preferred payment method very or extremely influential when picking which online store to purchase from. Online marketplaces come in first when it comes to payment selection, with 53% of consumers saying marketplaces perform better than other platforms.

“Providing a frictionless payment experience helps increase the likelihood that online shoppers will complete their purchases,” PYMNTS wrote.

Beyond that, merchants need to be mindful of generational differences in cart abandonment rates. For example, millennials lead in cart abandonment, abandoning an average of five carts in the 30 days prior to being surveyed, followed by Generation Z shoppers at four.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke recently with Mike Storiale, vice president of innovation development at Synchrony, about the changing landscape of customer authentication.

“There’s been a lot of advancements in technology,” he said in an interview posted in February. “We are trying to get to a point where we know the customer more deterministically as they move through their payment journeys. Customers expect personalization. They expect that we know them. And with fraud as an ever-present threat, we’ve got to get better at knowing who the customer is to avoid false positives and combat fraud at the exact same time. It’s a delicate balance.”