Golfpay Teams With Get Beyond to Expand Golf Payment Platform

Golf course payment platform Golfpay hopes to expand its offering through a collaboration with Get Beyond.

“Our partnership with Get Beyond adds an innovative ecosystem partner from the payment space with feet on the ground,” Golfpay CEO Dale Merritt said in a Tuesday (Dec. 13) news release, noting that payments had become “more and more productized.”

Based in Arizona, Golfpay offers a “golf communication platform” that lets golfers make payments directly to golf courses over the phone, via email or text, through webchats or online with a stored payment method. The companies said in the release that Get Beyond will “leverage its network to bring the solution to more businesses.”

Get Beyond, headquartered in Princeton, N.J., offers a number of services for small businesses, including payment processing, point-of-sale systems and employee management.

PYMNTS looked at the expansion of digital payments in the golf world in July in a conversation with Ryan Ewers, chief operating officer of tee-time booking site Supreme Golf.

As we wrote then, the digital shift that sped up during the pandemic has come with some challenges, such as payment declines. They can happen for dozens of reasons, and their sheer inconvenience can doom single transactions and customer life cycles.

“Payment declines can be the end of the relationship,” said Ewers. “That’s the worst-case scenario for us: A person wants to book a tee time, the payment declines for whatever reason and they may never come back.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS research has found small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) of all stripes face significant hurdles when it comes to payment friction.

These complications can take many forms, with 45% of SMBs saying that manual reviews are a key challenge, 43% complaining about the high costs of making payments, 41% saying they deal with time-consuming payment processes and 35% lacking financing options. The average SMB cited at least four different payment challenges.

Reducing these challenges requires picking the right financial partners, and for many of these SMBs, traditional players in the banking sector haven’t met their expectations.

More than 6 in 10 of these businesses told PYMNTS they desire embedded financial services to help them smooth their payments processes, and 50% believe embedded finance solutions could help them analyze their payments data and provide insights into day-to-day operations.