White-Label Payments Solutions Monetize Resellers’ eCommerce Efforts

In an increasingly digital world, the ability to accept and process payments anytime, anywhere has become a critical component of business success.

And white-labeling payment solutions has emerged as a powerful tool for sales organizations and merchants to streamline their operations and boost their bottom lines.

It’s a trend that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Ben Griefer, chief operating officer of Maverick Payments, who told PYMNTS that the sea change in how and where merchants accept payments spells an opportunity for independent sales organizations and software vendors to meet the payment needs of those merchants. But even the software firms need some help in providing a broad range of payments functions to their merchant clients.

The Way It Had Been Done

Historically speaking, sales organizations would work with a prospective merchant and send them a merchant agreement — via fax or PDF — which, once signed by the merchant, would be submitted to the processing partner working with the merchant, Griefer said. The method has traditionally been full of friction and manual processes. Digital processes can, and do, streamline the interactions so that merchants can begin accepting a broader range of payment options.

But for those sellers, any new technology integration has its hurdles and requires investments in terms of time, money and staff resources. Maverick Payments exists as a full-service payment provider with a core focus on the back-end, operational complexities of managing merchants and card transactions, Griefer said.

“The position we have with our reseller partners is to provide them with a turnkey payment offering” through its own payments stack as sales organizations look to monetize payments by selling those services to businesses across the country, he said. The company reaches 25,000 merchants and 4,000 resellers, and it processes $1 billion worth of transactions monthly.

For the vendors using the Maverick system, the white label lets them operate under their brand without having to manage the burdens tied to back-end efforts of onboarding, supporting, managing and underwriting merchants, all the while managing risk. Maverick does so by offering a merchant-facing end-to-end platform that helps sales organizations manage their staff and seller partners in a PCI-compliant and SOC-compliant manner, all the way down to the electronic invoicing level.

“We act as the [sellers’] operational and infrastructure partner,” he said.

Depending on the type of merchant, businesses can conceivably be onboarded in a matter of seconds, and API documentation can be integrated into their online shopping carts and customer relationship management software. Elsewhere, he said that in-person payments can be supported by point-of-sale systems and loyalty programs. Card-not-present transactions also demand more robust fraud prevention, chargeback management processes and network tokens.

Revolutionizing Onboarding

The process of onboarding merchants has been revolutionized by white labeling. Historical methods involving faxes, emails and fillable PDFs were clunky and time-consuming. Maverick Payments’ digital system streamlines the process, allowing merchants to fill in information securely, accept terms through a proprietary digital signature process, and receive a white-labeled welcome email to their dashboard upon approval, Griefer said.

Additional revenue streams for merchants depend on their business type and use case. Griefer highlighted the opportunities in eCommerce, saying, “There has been a pretty significant shift with eCommerce businesses just because of all of these, not only pain points, but I think opportunities where the end goal is how do we increase their bottom line, right? And that’s a combination of chargeback prevention and fraud prevention, but also authorization and sales optimization.”

For sales organizations considering white labeling, Griefer advised investing the right amount of time and resources to learn the system and set things up correctly.

“Ultimately, technology is there to make everyone’s life convenient and make the operation more efficient and scalable,” he said. “But it comes with taking the time to understand, make sure you’re checking all those boxes when you’re looking at maximizing the use case.”

As a privately owned company, Maverick Payments prides itself on its nimbleness and ability to compete with larger payment processors, Griefer said.

“It’s very exciting to see where the industry has shifted with the amount of technology adopted,” he said. “It’s been great and [we’re] very excited, definitely about the future of payments.”