The rapid rise of eCommerce and strong economic growth in emerging markets has driven massive growth in the global digital payments arena.
According to a Research and Markets report, the market size has jumped from $115.93 billion in 2023, to $126.47 billion in 2024. By 2028, it’s expected to reach $180.26 billion, representing a CAGR of 9.3%.
There are many factors contributing to this growth, including the proliferation of mobile transactions and digital wallets, as well as government initiatives promoting cashless transactions, and the growing popularity of A2A transfers.
The demand for secure, faster and more convenient transaction methods has never been higher - but to deliver frictionless payment experiences, near real-time insights into authorization data has never been more important.
What is Mastercard Early Detect Insights (MEDI)?
Since May 2024, Mastercard has introduced new standards for authorization requirements for their principal customers in select countries in the Europe and Middle East and Africa regions.
To fulfil these requirements, customers are mandated to implement an advanced tool, either of their own choosing – or the Mastercard-provided MEDI tool.
The chosen solution must be capable of providing the following:
Proactive monitoring
Continuous, near real time monitoring across the Mastercard network to detect authorization anomalies or potential fraud threats.
Key performance indicators
Providing insights such as transaction volume (the number of authorization messages) and transaction approval rates, with a lag time not exceeding 30 minutes.
Transaction data insights
Providing insights based on relevant data factors such as credit/debit/prepaid card type, with a lag time not exceeding 30 minutes.
Early alerts
The ability to research transaction-level authorization data, and send notifications of anomalies in real time, and fraud risk factors before threats escalate.
Why the new requirements are necessary
The increasing complexity within the payments industry means that payment processors, merchants, card issuers and financial institutions are exposed to frequent payment failure.
Frictionless payment experiences are critical, and this requires near real time insights into authorization data.
The ability to process the vast amounts of transaction data and analytics allows organizations to leverage this information to provide better customer experiences and mitigate risk.
Choosing an alternative to the Mastercard EDI tool
Organizations who choose not to implement the MEDI tool must be able to demonstrate continued compliance with Mastercard’s revised standards as defined in their Transaction Processing Rules Manual related to network integrity.
Their chosen solution can be developed in-house or provided by a third party.
The additional benefits of a third-party tool
While the Mastercard-supplied tool fulfils the mandated requirements for transaction insights, the complexity of the payments world will only continue to grow, as indicated in the opening statistics.
A comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution that can accommodate growth and increasing complexity can add immeasurable value to every organization.
A third party transaction monitoring solution like IR Transact will fulfil not only the minimum requirements listed above, but provide customers with richer, far more detailed historical and real time transaction information.
Detailed data exploration
IR Transact can provide access to large, complex sets of transaction data in seconds, with deep problem-solving and analytics capabilities. Transact also has the ability to create dynamic graphs and dashboards, allowing you to drill deeply into specific data sets for greater detail, or zoom out to gain a broader view of your payments information. You can even dissect the data to highlight relevant areas of interest.
Omni-channel integration
It can consolidate in-store, eCommerce and mobile transactions, alleviating the need to navigate through different systems to provide a centralized view of payments across multiple payment channels.
Universal, role-based access
Transact can provide access through customized dashboards to various stakeholders throughout the organization, depending on their data visualization and reporting needs.
Trend analysis
Trend analysis helps keep track of important payment metrics such as usage of payment methods, payment volumes, or comparisons of approval rates. Transact enables you to view these trends hourly, daily, weekly or over specified periods of time.
Managing today’s card payments business, with constantly changing compliance requirements and an ever-expanding array of systems and channels is complex.
With over 600 million transactions managed every day, IR Transact can help you manage multi-vendor solutions across on-premises and cloud environments, assuring the transactions that keep you in business.
Find out more about how IR Transact can streamline your payments experience. 
