Brooke Turner, Payments Product Manager, POS Portal, a ScanSource Company
When it comes to Payments technology, Cloud and Semi-Integrated is winning. The market has seen significant growth in banks and processors offering an expanded array of merchant services.
Most of the leading players in the payments space have achieved this through a slew of acquisitions that have consolidated the payments industry over the last few years. We have seen the acquisition of CardConnect by First Data who then was acquired by Fiserv. Additionally, FIS completed the acquisition of Worldpay who had originally acquired Mercury Payments and Element.
Most recently, JP Morgan Chase acquired WePay, utilizing their platform to attract new ISV partners to integrate to Chase. The WePay platform offers ISVs a quick merchant-boarding process which is highly valuable to an ISV or VAR looking to get a merchant up and running on their software as quickly as possible. All these acquisition efforts have been part of a bid to consolidate and ultimately support a more robust and integrated offering.
In a Recent PYMNTS.com article, Deepak Gupta, Global head of PaaS at Volante Technologies stated, “It’s becoming critical to ensure that your payment infrastructure is highly resilient, highly scalable and highly available.” Today’s commerce relies on an entire host of robust integrations. Consumers and merchants must feel confident that when they swipe their credit cards on any kind of device or conduct digital transactions, the infrastructure supporting all of it is robust and connected.
Integration is the key. It’s no surprise to those with experience in payment processing that over the last 5+ years, semi-integrated and cloud connectivity have been sought after prizes in the payments and POS space. As such, the market has seen significant growth in traditional banks and payment processors who offer merchant services that go beyond just transaction processing.
Whether merchants need to accept payments in-store, online, or on the go, many market forces have answered the call through integrated solutions. With players like Square and PayPal offering increasingly more consumer banking-like products such as online storefronts and digital wallet integrations, more traditional payment providers like Chase have invested in solutions.
Integrated solutions enable many things, like the ability for an ISV to connect additional value to a payment platform, something that can bring real benefit to an SMB. In turn, this added value enables the VAR channel to not only sell payments hardware to these customers, but to add on additional hardware sales, configuration, support, and services connected to the core payments offering.
Whether you’re a software provider, a processing or gateway partner, or a reseller looking to add payments to your current solution offering – the ScanSource team can help you deliver and support the industry’s best solutions.