A payments strategy is a vision that outlines how your payments stack helps your business to achieve its goals.

Here are some important parts of the payments strategy:

1. Payments partnerships
   It defines your payment processing partner, and how your business manages relationships with them: how you choose the partner, exclusivity, partnership deals, etc.
2. Cost optimization
   This part includes the forecast and measures to optimize processing fees and other costs associated with processing payments (fraud, chargebacks, and cost of additional tools).
3. Geo strategy
   This part describes what payments stack needs to support in countries where your business operates such as local currencies, local payment methods, cross-border transactions, local acquiring, and local regulations.
4. Payment methods
   This part outlines what payment methods your business supports (card networks, direct debit, e-valets, e-vouchers, etc) and what value each payment method brings.
5. Acceptance rate optimizations This plan describes the process of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing the acceptance rate.
6. Checkout conversion rate optimizations
   The checkout conversion rate includes customer experience and optimizations to reduce customer friction during the checkout process.
7. Anti-fraud
   There is always fraud with any substantial payment volume. It is crucial to identify, analyze, and define measures to reduce different types of fraud. With a high volume of fraud, the anti-fraud part can be a separate strategy.
8. Regulatory and compliance management
   Staying compliant with financial regulations defined by payment systems or local regulators is a crucial process to avoid penalties and keep the business running.
9. Operational support
   For a smooth operational experience, it is critical to provide the required tools for support, finance, and risk teams. It also can include tools for monitoring, alerts, reporting, and analytics.
10. All other things
    Payments strategy can include some other factors depending on your business model:

    For marketplaces or platforms, it is crucial to have a plan for payout experience, KYC, and AML.

    For subscription businesses, it is important to optimize the renewal rate and churn reduction.

    For mobile apps that sell digital goods, it is important to define how to run payments through mobile App Stores.