Adyen: How unified commerce could save you millions

True Alliance, a retail distributor and licensee, has shared its journey from struggling with siloed legacy payments to thriving with a profitable consolidated platform thanks to Adyen, saving over $1.4m annually with unified commerce.

By unifying their online and in-store payments via one platform, True Alliance cut operational complexity, optimised the checkout experience, and reduced fraud to 0 percent, enjoying major cost savings in the process. Here’s how they did it.

The challenge: Siloed legacy payments

True Alliance distributes 19 global brands, and operates 23 ecommerce site and 100 stores across the retail industry including Lacoste, The North Face, Speedo, and Under Armour. With so many brands to manage, the company was facing issues with a traditional banking set up and numerous integrations, which led to disconnected legacy payments technology. 

“We’ve got a multitude of brands that we need to manage and that becomes quite a complicated process,” said Ken Kennedy, Group Head of Digital at True Alliance.

“One of the biggest challenges we actually had was that we had these individual siloed relationships with many of our integrated payment vendors. And this created a lot of challenges for us in terms of scalability,” said Ken.

Few payment providers even have the in-house tech stack to support a truly unified cross-channel setup, and these semi-integrated system of providers for online and in-person payments are prone to error, increased latency, and complicated payments consolidation.

True Alliance needed to prioritise innovation, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth – with payment methods and fraud being some of the key areas for optimisation which is where Adyen comes in.

The solution: Multi-brand, multi-channel manoeuvres

True Alliance transitioned to Adyen in 2022, with local acquiring, one contact, and one contract with global tiered pricing for all regions of operation across ANZ. 

Being able to offer key local and alternate payment methods, Least Cost Routing (LCR), as well as cross-channel shopping, and click-and-collect – ensured brands like Lacoste and The North Face can deliver world-class experiences to their customers at every touchpoint.

“We were able to add on new payment vendors quite easily – WeChat Pay, Alipay, Apple Pay Express Checkout – which had a significant impact on our business in terms of being able to offer new opportunities for our customers to transact with us,” said Noel David, General Manager of Finance, True Alliance.

“Seamless reconciliation took us from manually reconciling separate payment files across each payment method to one unique reconciliation file that is integrated into our ERP,” said Noel. “We now reconcile all tenders and channels daily.”

The result: 0 percent fraud, and $1.4m saved annually 

To optimise their ecommerce experience, True Alliance was able to switch 23 websites to Adyen without missing a single order – giving them a single overview of real-time shopper insights, and peak period transactions just in time for the holiday season. “And that was a remarkable effort, not just from the local team here in True Alliance, but also from the Adyen team. It was fully supported through the process,” said Noel.

With Adyen’s fraud solution, RevenueProtect, True Alliance can now respond to fraud with customisable risk rules with speed and ease, across all its brands and channels, with massive cost savings.

And across its 100 physical stores, True Alliance rolled out new in-person payment terminals, all tied to Adyen’s single platform for seamless and new customer journeys like cross-channel returns and click-and-collect – delivering a frictionless commerce experience for customers.

With payments from all sales channels sitting within a unified payments platform, True Alliance has a more complete view of the business. Data from the entire payment flow helps the team gain valuable insight into shopper journeys across all channels, adjust commercial strategies, and reward loyal visitors.

“With Adyen, we’re able to connect all those dots together, create one unified system, which makes it really easy for us to understand the relationships between one brand and another, and how our teams can manage the payment processes behind the scenes, “ said Ken. That’s just not something we could have done before.”