In Pursuit Of The Perfect Payments-As-A-Service Pairing

From loyalty to inventory management and data to omnicommerce strategy, there’s no shortage of available features and options for retailers looking to upgrade to full-service payments solutions.

But with so many different solutions and combinations of features out there, finding the right system that can fit each business’ needs is difficult. Even after a retailer does find a suitable option, integrating the system into their operations can be a challenge.

To find out how companies can choose the best solutions for their needs, PYMNTS recent caught up with Perry Kramer, vice president of Boston Retail Partners, to talk about the state of the full-service payments industry, the method his team uses when helping retailers find and adopt new payments solutions and what he sees coming down the pike.

Here’s a preview:

The glut of full-service features and solutions in the marketplace is having an effect not only on the modern merchant but also on the modern consumer.

As more retailers roll out experiences designed to improve their customer in-store experience, consumers are beginning to expect merchants to cater to their various whims. That may include faster or mobile checkout processes, loyalty programs, targeted promotions or many other perks or benefits.

Kramer noted that many merchants come to him and his team looking to solve this challenge by upgrading their payment systems so that they can offer their customers some of these features.

“Everything right now is centered around understanding the customer and being more in touch with them,” Kramer said. “It’s about identifying … what they want and finding out how we give them a personalized experience and, on the payments side, a frictionless experience.”

Around the full-service payments world

Inspired in part by research that suggests the new technology is decreasing fraud, payment processing providers around the space recently debuted new services and solutions designed to help retailers adjust to and accept EMV chip cards.

Nova Retail Technology Solutions this month partnered with Creditcall to debut a new card processing solution that promises to integrate EMV chip-reading capabilities with a POS system. Meanwhile, NMI recently launched a new EMV chip card solution aimed at small and medium-sized retailers.

Similarly, Intrix Technology announced recently that it had taken over EMV and payments processing company Maas Global Solutions in a move aimed at increasing Intrix’s EMV capabilities and customer base. Under the terms of the acquisition, Maas Global Solution’s assets and customer base will go to Intrix, as will some of the company’s employees

To download the October edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker, click the button below.

About The Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management and more.