At PYMNTS.com, we hear from companies looking to innovate and provide services in the payments industry all the time. But how do the clients of those companies really feel about the products and platforms they’re using? We put CSI Enterprises on the spot by speaking with executives from one of their major clients: Mike Straube, Corporate Director of Finance for Trump Hotel Collection, and Michelle Schneider, director of finance at the Trump SoHo property. How does CSI’s globalVCard paysystems ePayments platform stack up against the rest?
It’s easy for a payments company to claim that they’re innovative. But what do their clients say when put on the spot?
PYMNTS.com decided to put CSI Enterprises to the test by speaking with Mike Straube, corporate director of finance for Trump Hotel Collections, and Michele Schneider, director of finance at Trump SoHo: one of CSI’s major clients.
Why did Trump Hotels decide to move to ePayments, and how easy was it to onboard with CSI? We asked those questions and more to find out what working with a payments innovator is really like.
According to Straube, shifting to electronic payments through CSI has been a big step for Trump Hotels, as some in the hospitality industry have yet to move all of their payments processes away from paper.
“Well a little bit of background for your listeners who aren’t familiar with the hospitality industry: it is an intensely manual industry, unfortunately,” Straube said. “We’re trying to catch up with the rest of the business world in terms of automation.”
That being said, the advantages that electronic processing and payments provide are the same in hospitality as they are in many other fields, making the move a necessary one that can save companies both money and time.
“The primary drivers are pretty self evident: it’s much more efficient, in terms of process, to move payments electronically rather than by physical checks. And there is a bit of documentation, if you will, that comes with electronic processing of payments that is absent in that manual process,” Straube said.
“I think all of that combined really were the drivers for us to move toward electronic processing.”
Both Straube and Schneider indicated that while important, the initial shift to eProcessing and ePayments can be a difficult one. That’s one area in which their experience with CSI really shined, causing minimal disruption throughout the system conversion.
“It was one of the easiest transitions that I’ve ever gone through with any type of system conversion,” Schneider said of Trump SoHo’s transition. “It was a very easy, seamless process; their team’s amazing. The customer service that we got and the attention was just really more than I ever anticipated, and it made the transition that much easier to make this switch.
In my opinion, it’s just a win-win situation. There’s minimal work, implementation and maintenance all throughout the process.”
To hear more Straube and Schneider on their work with CSI and conversion to ePayments – plus the grade they give CSI on a scale from 1-10 — listen to the full podcast here.
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