Key Characteristics Of A Tremendous Payment Processing Partner

By Phil Wimberly, Senior Vice President, PayPros

Through the 1990s, evaluating payment partners was as easy as sorting out the revenue offering–a simple question of who will pay the biggest share of the profit on merchants signed together. In the 2000s, additional values like gift card solutions, PCI security strategies and mobile payment options became important measuring sticks when deciding how to participate most effectively in the valuable revenue stream represented by your customers’ merchant accounts. These payment-related business services–products and programs that are not credit card transactions themselves, but make electronic payments smarter and more effective–are increasingly the most important values a payments partner can offer a software developer or VAR.

These value-added, payment-related business services come in many shapes and sizes. Some have a horizontal appeal. Activation portals which approve merchants for an account without application or underwriting processes are valuable, whether your customer is a yogurt shop or a chain of health clubs. Some are vertically-specific, such as parallel payments, allowing a single transaction for several products offered by disparate vendors, with the intelligence to deliver funds to the proper merchant account. This is useful to veterinarians, online retailers and membership management solutions, but may not create leverage for grocery stores. eInvoicing solutions and the ability to custom-brand payment-related portals and reporting represent a new breed of technologically-based payment services that providers are delivering to developers and VARs, with the goal of differentiating your solution from simple banking services.

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