TRENDING: Driving Small-Scale Event Sales With Embedded Payments

From fundraisers that enliven a community organization’s finances, to workshops that introduce potential customers to what an SMB has to offer, events can be a powerful way to raise awareness and boost sales. But while small organizations may stand to benefit big from events, they rarely have the bandwidth to maintain their operations while also learning all the ins and outs of selling seats, processing eTicket payments and other event planning intricacies.

In the May Payments Powering Platforms Tracker, powered by WePay, PYMNTS dives into how one payment platform is seeking to make ticket sales easy and give event planning newcomers a boost. That includes enabling organizers to collect money as each ticket is purchased – rather than waiting to collect a lump sum after the event or after all tickets are sold – and also offers a mobile app for consumers to buy and store mobile tickets. Plus, the Tracker showcases the latest developments in the platforms space, including how eCommerce platforms are working to improve conversion rates by embedding mobile wallets, and how workers’ shifting expectations are putting a spotlight on instant payments.

Around the Payments Powering Platforms World

Around the world, digital wallets are increasingly gaining traction as retailers look to boost revenue from mobile commerce. And recently, national governments and mobile payments players alike have been looking to push more consumers to pay through mobile means.

In Nepal, for example, the country’s central bank is implementing new rules to help stimulate digital payments use. In a recent push aimed at driving adoption of digital payment methods, Nepal Rastra Bank recently announced new regulations, which put a cap on the amount of cash that consumers can withdraw with a credit or debit card.

And in Canada, tech giant Samsung is continuing its expansion into the country, as it looks to capitalize on the country’s growth in use of mobile wallets. According to a recent announcement, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)-branded personal payment cards are now supported by Samsung’s mobile payments system, joining existing Samsung Pay partners like American Express Canada, ATB Financial, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Interac Debit, Mastercard, Scotiabank and Visa Canada.

Even American consumers, who largely have remained lukewarm to using mobile wallets, may begin to warm up to the new payment method.

Google Pay, Google’s mobile wallet offering, recently topped 100 million installs, a milestone some observers say could boost mobile wallet usage in the U.S. And an increasing number of retailers are reportedly beginning to accept mobile payments. The 100 million installs might just give the mobile wallet the boost it’s been needing.

For more on these stories and the rest of the latest headlines from around the space, check out the Tracker’s News and Trends section.

Offering Integrated Payments to Power Small-Scale Events

Event planning and organizing platforms are also embracing mobile commerce, with giants in the space like Ticketmaster debuting mobile-connected features for their big-name events.

But these days, high-powered event planners with stadium-sized venues aren’t the only ones who can get their hands on these mobile features.  In a recent interview with PYMNTS, Muthu Kumar, founder and CEO of online ticketing and event planning platform Eventzilla, explained that when it drew up its business plan, the company decided to focus on offering mobile features to the relative newbies of the event planning world and on getting people through the doors at small-scale events.

To do so, Eventzilla built its platform to not only process ticket purchases, get tickets into the hands of attendees and pay event planners, but also to offer an additional suite of features to help inexperienced event planners get their trivia night fundraisers, business seminars, yoga classes and other small-scale events off the ground.

“Ticketing was becoming a very common thing, so we tried to go deeper into the vertical to serve these smaller events,” Kumar said. “We decided to focus on things like conferences, classes, fundraisers and other small events, and that’s how we tried to differentiate ourselves from Ticketmaster and the other 10,000 companies and platforms in this space.”

To read the full feature story, along with the latest Payments Powering Platforms headlines and trends – along with the rankings of more than 100 industry providers – download the Payments Powering Platforms Tracker.

About the Tracker

The Payments Powering Platforms Tracker, powered by WePay, serves as a monthly framework for the space, providing coverage of the most recent news and trends, along with a provider directory highlighting the key players contributing across the payments-integrated platform ecosystem.