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TSG in Digital Transactions: Gateway Operators Slice Transaction Time in Half As Uptime Average Nears 100%

U.S. gateway providers have cut the average transaction time in half to 1.6 seconds from 3.2 seconds only a year ago, according to data compiled by Omaha, Neb.-based researcher The Strawhecker Group.

Derived from the firm’s Gateway Enterprise Metrics platform that debuted in 2017, the results show that the 12 participating gateways also had an average uptime of 99.997% in August. That means GEM gateways had an authorization fail rate of 27 basis points (a basis point is one-hundredth of a percent) of total transactions processed.

The measurement service uses anonymous transaction data to calculate the gateways’ performance. “What GEM does is it shows you the merchant experience with the gateway, which is not always the same as internal monitoring would show,” says John Kirkpatrick, senior associate at Strawhecker. “That is important because if a transaction never gets to a gateway they have nothing to monitor.”

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