Case Study

Auchan Retail Keeps
Its Payments Fresh and
Future-Ready

For more than half a century, Auchan Retail has been a changing retailer in a changing world. Today, it aims to meet the diverse needs of convenience, health and eco-conscious omnichannel consumers, helping to change lives for the better, while protecting the planet. With millions of customers and thousands of suppliers, here’s how the retailer ensures a fresh approach to payments with strategic partner, ACI.

The Challenge

With more than 160,000 employees, 2,000 sales points in 12 countries and consolidated €32.9B+ in revenue, Auchan Retail is one of the world’s largest and best-known grocery retailers. Its growing network of hypermarkets and supermarkets is complemented with a market-leading webstore. As an omni-retailer, it aims to bring the digital and physical worlds together with comprehensive take-away and delivery services that include drive throughs (representing 75% of its turnover in France), click and collect, home and express delivery, an online marketplace and catering.

Keeping payments optimized across such diverse operations, internationally and at this level of scale, requires a highly experienced omnichannel payments partner. It also calls for a highly flexible and agnostic platform that can embrace change and integrate with other systems, as Auchan’s business continues to expand organically and through acquisition.

ACI Auchan Collaboration

Over the past 10 years, ACI has provided Auchan with a full spectrum of payments support, including eCommerce, tokenization and fraud management. Today, ACI is seen as a strategic partner that helps the retailer drive higher acceptance by managing payments efficiently, securely and seamlessly across multiple channels and hybrid services. ACI also provides Auchan with the technical expertise it needs to evolve future-facing initiatives from intelligent stores to express delivery of daily groceries.

Auchan expects a no-compromise approach to three key priorities, and ACI delivers on all fronts:

Security: Using advanced AI technology, 3DS and tokenization to help safeguard digital customers, without detracting from the experience
Choice: Responding to Auchan’s strategic requirements with payment solutions that give its customers the choice they expect, including contactless, eWallets, self-service and recurring payments
Customer centricity: Working in partnership to innovate and enhance customer engagement at the checkout to foster loyalty and generate revenue

ACI’s agnostic payments platform offers Auchan a high degree of flexibility. It can integrate with Auchan’s other tech partners, as well as existing and future systems. It’s also internationally scalable and can be utilized in countries where Auchan is present or planning to expand, providing Auchan with a simpler and more sustainable payments environment and potential cost savings.

Achieving Payments Success

How does Auchan measure payments success? It closely monitors conversion rates to determine if the expected payment methods satisfy customers, as well as monitoring acceptance rates to assess whether the selected payment method is successful. Increasing the acceptance rate by just one point can generate several million euros in revenue. ACI helps Auchan achieve this with the right payments and the right safeguards, including SCA, exemption management and tokenization, delivered in an environment that is optimized to achieve the highest levels of acceptance with the lowest risk.

As it looks to the future, Auchan understands the importance of payments — it is no longer simply a technical issue for IT departments but rather a strategic one that requires attention from top management. It’s why the retailer values its partnership with ACI more than ever. By collaborating together daily, they can determine and facilitate better payment strategies to solve business-wide problems, reduce risk, generate loyalty, and ultimately, contribute to Auchan’s revenue.