How MEGOGO scaled their global payments and saved €100K annually
+3,5%Payment conversion rate
-5%Subscription chunk
€100KReduction in expenses
Industry
Streaming servicesRegion
Eastern Europe, Central AsiaUse case
Global coverage, subscription payments, PSD2 & SCA complianceFeatures used
Orchestration, acquiring, fraud managementAt a glance
MEGOGO is an international media service originally from Ukraine, offering over 200,000 hours of content across movies, TV, live broadcasts, music, and audiobooks. As a leading OTT platform across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, MEGOGO streams on every major device – including Smart TVs, where subscription payments are difficult to set up effectively.
By early 2024, Smart TV had become one of MEGOGO's fastest-growing viewing channels. International expansion was accelerating. As device mix shifted and new markets opened, the cracks started showing.
The breaking points
Three specific problems were costing MEGOGO revenue:
1. 3D Secure requirements clashed with Smart TV limitations
Smart TVs can't support standard 3D Secure challenge flows, causing incompliance with PSD2 and SCA regulations. They needed a custom solution that would allow customers to pay with credit cards and popular alternative payment methods while balancing compliance with user experience.
2. Geographic expansion affected conversions & cost
As MEGOGO expanded into Poland and other markets, they faced three related problems:
First, approval rates varied widely by region. A single payment route couldn't serve every market equally. Poland had higher decline rates than their home market.
Second, reducing high per-payment transaction fees was essential. Given the small size of subscription payments in the Streaming Services world, the next issue was to reduce the cost per payment to make subscriptions economically viable.
Third, failed renewals were driving preventable churn. Payment flows varied across web, mobile, and TV. Cards expired. Credentials changed. Retry timing was suboptimal.
Without payment orchestration and multi-acquirer setup, there was no way to optimize routing for both performance and cost whilst scaling to new geographical regions.
The decision
MEGOGO needed a partner who could deliver three things simultaneously: a custom Smart TV payment solution, multi-acquirer orchestration for geographic optimization and cost reduction, and subscription infrastructure to prevent renewal failures while centralizing payment operations.
Most payment orchestration platforms could handle multi-acquirer routing, but required MEGOGO to maintain separate contracts for subscription billing, fraud tools, and acquiring. That wouldn't solve the cost stacking problem.
Solidgate offered orchestration, acquiring, and subscription management in one platform. One integration. One contract. One partner who understood both the technical requirements and the unit economics of subscription streaming.
That's when they chose Solidgate.
"After evaluating our options, Solidgate stood out as a partner that could solve multiple payment challenges simultaneously to help us scale." – Egor Yarotskiy, CPO at MEGOGO
Solution: Fixing the payments, not just the checkout
MEGOGO partnered with Solidgate to revamp payments at every stage – checkout, authorization, and renewal.
The solution addressed four areas: unified checkout across devices, geographic optimization for approvals and costs, SCA compliance without friction, and renewal resilience.
Making payments work across every device
MEGOGO implemented a Single Payment Page to support card payments, QR codes, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal. This created a consistent payment connectivity across platforms and reduced friction caused by device-specific payment differences.
But the real breakthrough came with solving the Smart TV challenge. Solidgate designed a tailored MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone Order) processing solution for Megogo. MOTO is a card-not-present transaction type that shifts liability to the merchant, allowing transactions to bypass CVV and 3DS challenges while remaining compliant with PSD2.
The unified flow removed device-driven inconsistencies that previously caused silent conversion loss on TV. The same experience worked whether someone subscribed on their phone during their commute or on their Smart TV at home.
Balancing compliance with conversion through smart exemptions
Staying SCA-compliant didn't mean adding friction everywhere. Solidgate helped MEGOGO leverage specific SCA exemptions to keep checkout smooth where regulations allowed:
- Low-value transactions under 30 EUR could skip unnecessary authentication steps
- Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA) enabled processing 2D transactions in the EU and UK when risk signals were favorable
- One-leg-out transactions initiated by non-EU cards and acquirers could flow through more easily
This meant MEGOGO could maintain compliance without forcing every renewal through a challenge flow – critical for a subscription model where authentication friction directly impacts retention.
Improving approvals and reducing payment costs
To improve both authorization performance and unit economics at scale, Solidgate deployed:
- Payment Orchestration, routing transactions to acquirers with stronger performance and lower cost by scenario.
- Solidgate Acquiring, enabling processing in specific locations as MEGOGO expanded, supporting better local performance and cost control.
- Location-specific alternative payment methods, including BLIK in Poland, to capture demand in markets where card penetration is lower
With a more stable, scalable payment infrastructure, MEGOGO maximized their payment performance while bringing costs under control.
Bringing down churn by making renewals resilient
For subscription businesses, conversion doesn't stop at the first payment; whether renewals keep succeeding matters just as much.
Solidgate helped MEGOGO strengthen renewal performance with:
- VTS/MDS network tokenization to replace static card numbers with dynamic tokens that remain valid even when underlying cards are reissued
- Account Updater to automatically refresh expired or replaced card credentials
Fewer false failures due to expired cards, replacement events, and poor retry timing led to an approximate 5% reduction in churn.
What changed
Now, MEGOGO runs a single subscription and checkout experience across devices, routes transactions to optimize authorization rates and processing costs, and supports local payment methods in priority regions.
Evgeniy Rutytskyi, VP Sales CEE: “It is only when you have a partner who understands every element of your business, and has the tools to be able to save you money across every one of these, can you truly benefit and scale effectively.”
With the new, unified payment and subscription setup in place, MEGOGO’s payments were finally working for them:
- €100K in annual cost savings, achieved by using Solidgate’s all-in-one payments solution, which integrated the subscription engine into the orchestration platform, reducing fees associated with subscription management.
- Seamless payment processing on Smart TV with full SCA compliance and Solidgate’s custom MOTO solution.
- +3,5% in payment conversion, driven by orchestration and scalable payment infrastructure.
- Local payment method coverage in priority markets, with BLIK available for Polish subscribers
- 5% reduction in subscription churn, with renewal success rates improving through network tokenization and smart retries
Beyond the metrics, the team gained operational breathing room. The payment infrastructure finally matched the product's ambition.
“After evaluating our options, Solidgate stood out as a partner that could solve multiple payment challenges simultaneously to help us scale."