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Checkout.com Uses AI To Boost eCommerce Acceptance Rates
Intelligent Acceptance leverages the company’s global data network to increase acceptance rates, lower fees, and improve merchant’s profits.
Global payments solution provider, Checkout.com, has launched a new feature called Intelligent Acceptance. The system uses an AI-powered optimization engine that can monitor billions of transactional data points, with early beta testing showing a 9.5% average improvement in checkout acceptance rates.
“We believe in abstracting complexity for businesses and empowering them to optimize their payments with ease. Machine learning enables us to […] leverage our expansive global transaction data to provide real-time insights. Meanwhile, an adaptive AI-powered payments engine constantly optimizes acceptance rates, unlocking more revenue, saving time, and offering greater cost controls,” says Meron Colbeci, Chief Product Officer at Checkout.com.
False declines — legitimate transactions mistaken for fraud attempts and subsequently blocked — are a $50.7 billion problem globally. Intelligent Acceptance can route card payments through the system much more smoothly, using continuous adaptation while leveraging Checkout.com’s global network and direct relationships with card acquirers to deliver incremental improvements.
Also Read: A Guide To Digital Payment Methods In The Middle East
Intelligent Acceptance can also drive down a merchant’s costs by dynamically routing transactions to the network with the lowest fees. Furthermore, if a transaction requires 3DS authentication, data can be automatically added to a payment request to ensure compliance.
The launch of Intelligent Acceptance comes as business leaders seek new ways to drive revenue and improve cost efficiencies to reconcile increased expenses. Research conducted by Checkout.com in partnership with Oxford Economics recently revealed that up to 25% of consumers abandoned an online purchase due to too much checkout friction, resulting in significant lost revenue for merchants.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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