There are some choices we make only once or twice during a business’ lifetime that end up having a subtle yet enormous effect on that business’ success. These are the choices any CIO wants to be as informed and prepared as possible for since they can almost single-handedly determine the future of the business.

This is particularly the case for businesses in high-risk industries, as they face many more potential pitfalls and dangers than any other. One of the most crucial choices is that of which payment system your business is going to rely on. With safety and payment scalability being crucial for any business, here is why CIOs should prioritize high-risk payment systems that are both secure and scalable.

What Is a Scalable Payment System and Why Should You Prioritize It for Your High-Risk Business?

The question of security is rather straightforward. It is clear that you want payment processing software that helps protect your business from fraud, chargebacks, and other issues.

Scalability is another essential yet often misunderstood factor a CIO should consider when choosing a merchant provider. Explained succinctly, scalability is the ability of a payment system to handle a rapidly increasing number of users, payments, data, inputs, and outputs without reducing performance, security, and productivity.

This is a must for any business that often sees a sudden increases and decreases of incoming clients and payments, but it’s even more so a must for businesses in high-risk industries. With so many fraud, chargeback, and payment insecurity risks in such industries, the last thing a business needs is their payment processor malfunctioning or even just slowing down in the crucial periods of high customer activity.

Benefits You Can Expect from Robust Scalable Payment Systems for High-Risk Industries

The advantages a robust scalable payment processor brings to your high business are numerous enough to be worth examining separately in a list. Without looking at each of them individually, it is easy to miss out on and ignore some of the benefits you would get from the right payment tool.

1. Improve Security

Scalability provides much-needed security to a high-risk business. It ensures that you never have to worry about payment errors, chargebacks, system slowdowns, or outright crashes at inopportune times.

2. Support Business Growth

By giving you the ability to handle rising volumes of transactions, scalable payment solutions enable the growth of your business. Without a good payment processor that has the ability to scale up rapidly and significantly, your business may get artificially handicapped by a software ceiling.

Furthermore, scalable solutions give you the freedom to try strategies that can lead to sudden spikes in activity. Sudden promotions or major shopping season discounts can be great for business growth but only if your payment processor can handle the increased traffic.

3. Improve Customer Experience and Retention

Customers value the speed and ease of payment transactions and tend to find it troublesome when there have been issues with a given transaction. Even if everything has worked out in the end, the average customer will still often be dissatisfied with an overly slow transaction, which can lead to negative reviews, the loss of a customer, a hit on the brand’s reputation, and more. All this is easily avoided with a good scalable payment processor.

4. Maintain Stable Operations

A CIO has a lot of things to consider during the daily operations of a business. Robust scalable processors help remove any unnecessary stress and instability, reducing the number of problems the company has to deal with and leaving you time to focus on its further growth and progress.

5. Cloud-Based Flexibility

Scalable payment systems are typically cloud-based. This is a big part of what makes them scalable, as it allows them to dynamically reallocate resources during periods of high demand. This is also possible without the need to invest in additional hardware or infrastructure on your part.

What’s more, with cloud-based systems, you and your entire team can access the system from anywhere, which gives a lot of flexibility to work teams who work remotely or from numerous different locations.