The pandemic largely flattened the $18 billion trade show industry, leaving businesses scrambling to find better ways to foster and form virtual relationships with potential vendors. In the latest Payments Orchestration Playbook, multivendor wholesale platform Ribbon’s Lindsay Thain explains the role of payments orchestration in helping businesses engage newly digital vendors by offering them payments choice.
Businesses have reopened their brick-and-mortar locations and resumed in-person operations in the past year, but the pandemic’s impact has nevertheless left a lasting mark upon how many businesses conduct both customer-facing and business-to-business (B2B) operations.
The global health crisis put an abrupt halt to in-person trade shows, for example. That, combined with supply chain and other disruptions, led many merchants to seek more efficient, digital-first ways to connect with potential vendors, Lindsay Thain, lead product manager for multivendor wholesale platform Ribbon, explained in a recent PYMNTS interview. Ribbon, a Bay Area-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company, offers B2B hybrid marketplace and omnichannel order writing services on one holistic platform to enable businesses to run everything from virtual trade shows to digital sales agencies more smoothly.
“If we’ve learned one thing in the past two years, it’s that nothing is certain,” Thain said. “A digital component is a necessity for making real-time shifts and allowing business to continue — no matter what challenges our customers are facing.
Enabling a smooth and easy payments experience is one of the key services merchants must provide their business partners in this ecosystem. Businesses seeking to launch new products or services that better appeal to customers’ rapidly changing expectations or foster lasting relationships with multiple vendors and other partners must also be able to make and receive payments swiftly, regardless of method or channel. This is where solutions such as payments orchestration can come into deeper play. Payments orchestration allows platforms to offer their business partners easy access to the myriad payment gateways and services they need to thrive in an increasingly virtual world.
Enabling payment diversity in a virtual world
Merchants across industries are seeking to expand their digital capacities and brand presence in the pandemic’s wake, but fully transitioning to a digital-first business model can be tricky for those that have relied on analog B2B processes for years. Finding the digital tools needed to support relationships with different payment gateways and other third-party players is therefore essential to helping companies bridge the gap between their brick-and-mortar and eCommerce channels.
Payments orchestration tools, which consolidate access to multiple financial and payment services in one central location, can help companies both streamline their payments operations and shorten new products’ or services’ time to market. Ribbon offers its merchants a wide variety of payment gateways through a partnership with payments orchestration provider Spreedly, helping ensure that its clients’ cash flows continue to run smoothly, according to Thain. With Spreedly’s help, Ribbon has enabled its customers to process thousands of transactions as well as tens of thousands of application program interface (API) calls just in the last month.
“With a supported gateway, [our incoming merchants] can quickly get going on our platform without disruption to their existing business flow,” Thain said, adding that Ribbon’s clients have reported a significant reduction in credit cards becoming compromised when transacting through their platform as a result.
Tapping payments orchestration is also allowing Ribbon to expand its own services more rapidly to other markets and new business areas, she continued. The platform recently partnered with an art fair in Germany, for example, an endeavor in which the ability to connect with international payment gateways easily and swiftly was critical.
“The ability to immediately support international payment gateways when launching hundreds of merchants in a brand-new region is crucial for a commerce-based platform like ours,” Thain said.
This flexibility allowed Ribbon to launch its first European client without having to worry about building additional payment integrations from scratch.
Making space for alternative payments
Thain predicted that the migration to digital-first business channels is likely to accelerate over the next several years – especially as more and more companies begin to eye emerging digital payment methods with more interest. This might include alternative payment channels and methods that fall outside the traditional financial space, such as cryptocurrency — an area Ribbon is closely watching.
“We foresee more businesses leaning into the digital world both as a stand-alone channel and in support of in-person business,” she said. “The ability for buyers to directly engage with vendors, both in person and online, provides a fully immersive experience that we see many people searching for.”
Supporting frictionless payment experiences regardless of method or channel is becoming more advantageous to businesses across multiple sectors. Creating a path forward for businesses to adopt new and emerging payment tools will therefore be a key goal for financial players moving forward. This means that payments orchestration solutions are likely to play a more critical role as the digital-first business world continues to develop.
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