ISOs Trade Terminals for Trusted Adviser Status

Independent sales organizations (ISOs) helped build the modern payments business by doing the unglamorous work: knocking on doors, swapping out terminals and winning accounts on pricing.

But that playbook is running out of road. Merchants now expect processors to act as strategic partners, offering guidance and helping them choose solutions that fit their business needs. They are increasingly willing to switch when onboarding is clunky or when a processor can’t support their growth.

That shift is forcing ISOs to modernize how they sell, what they sell and how they run their sales teams. In an interview with PYMNTS, Jonathan Aguilar, associate vice president, partner experience at Maverick Payments, argued that the winners will be those who stop treating payments as a commodity and start treating it as a platform for delivering services merchants can feel in their day-to-day business.

“The modern ISO is solution oriented, tech-enabled and focus on delivering value beyond price,” Aguilar said. “I think of the challenge that modern ISOs will have with converting from a standard sales process they’ve done for quite some time to something new, is getting away from that hardware first or price-driven sales model. They want to move toward offering integrated solutions that drive growth and add value.”

That transition is not only about adding new products to a pitch deck. It starts with updating the sales process itself. Aguilar pointed to a basic but telling signal: many agents still lean on paper, even as merchants have grown accustomed to digital onboarding everywhere else.

Maverick has a dashboard where partners can submit information digitally, he said, but “we still see quite a few agents that want to use a paper app.” Some merchants will prefer that approach, he added, and sales organizations need to accommodate it. Still, he said moving merchants toward digital onboarding can remove unnecessary friction.

“Moving them towards a digital application using e-signature, having the tools available to make things effortless are really going to help them get through that sales quickly,” Aguilar said. “It makes the experience better.”

Modern Selling

The broader point is that “modern selling” increasingly looks like modern operations: fewer manual steps, better visibility for managers and faster time-to-live for merchants. In the same way merchants digitized inventory and payroll, ISOs are now expected to digitize how they prospect, qualify, onboard and support accounts.

That operational upgrade reflects a deeper change in what merchants want from an ISO. In the early days, an ISO could win business by offering a slightly better rate or a more attractive terminal. Today, merchants can shop online, compare offers quickly and change providers with far less hassle than they once could. The value of the in-person relationship has not disappeared, but it has shifted toward advisory work: helping a business choose solutions that fit its workflow, and then sticking around to make sure the solution is delivering results.

“The modern ISO is a growth partner,” Aguilar said. “The business relationship they have with a merchant is more important than ever.” He added that while a merchant can find solutions through a search engine or a cold call, the ISO that builds a trusted relationship is set up for success.”

In that role, the ISO’s portfolio starts to look less like a box of terminals and more like a toolbox. Aguilar listed the kinds of products he expects strong ISOs to understand and explain clearly: “integrations, POS systems, gateway, smart terminals,” along with newer approaches to checkout that merchants may already recognize from their own customer behavior — “a QR code for example, or text to pay.” The competitive edge, he said, comes from being able to connect those tools to a merchant’s business outcomes and articulate how they add value.

Tech Talk

Technology, in Aguilar’s view, is what turns that toolbox into a repeatable, scalable sales model.

“Payment technology empowers sales team by simplifying the pitch, removes friction from onboarding and it really gives agents the modern tools they need to be able to close that sale,” he said, pointing to everything from the customer relationship management (CRM) software a team uses, to the way reps contact and keep up with merchants.

The payoff is not just speed. Properly deployed, technology helps an ISO create “stickiness” — reasons for a merchant to stay because the ISO is actively engaged and can show progress. Aguilar cited reminders to check in, as well as dashboards that track milestones such as processing volumes, as ways to keep the relationship current rather than reactive.

That visibility becomes even more central when an ISO adopts a white-labeled payments platform, an area where Maverick has positioned its offering. Aguilar framed white labeling as more than cosmetic branding. Done well, it can reshape how an ISO identifies, prioritizes and manages opportunities by giving the organization a shared system of record and, crucially, the ability to connect that system with the rest of the sales stack.

“With integration, there is more visibility and barriers are really removed,” he said. And while white labeling can include “their icon, their logos, their colors,” he emphasized the operational impact: it “allows them to build out their sales team internally, give them different permissions and really set their team up for success — who can see what, who’s reaching out to who, who’s managing what merchants.”

Integration is the bridge to opportunity targeting. If an ISO already has a CRM that works, Aguilar said, a modern payments platform should connect to it so “the two systems are communicating to each other, which just creates efficiency and removes barriers.”

In practice, that kind of connectivity can help teams focus less on chasing every lead and more on quickly spotting which prospects and existing merchants represent the highest-value opportunities, which are the accounts that are ready for integrated solutions, or those where additional services can deepen the relationship.

Customer In the Center

The essential tools for that tech-enabled strategy, he said, start with a unified payments platform that multiple stakeholders can access so everyone is looking at the same information. Aguilar cited Maverick’s dashboard as an example of a shared environment that supports digital applications, e-signatures and ongoing servicing.

His view is shaped by experience on the support side of the business. “I started in customer service,” he said, and one recurring pain point was “being able to help them see what I see.” A shared platform reduces confusion, speeds resolution and strengthens the relationship because merchants and sales teams can align on what is happening whether that is onboarding status, chargebacks or other operational issues.

For ISOs, the message is straightforward: value-added services are no longer only an add-on. They are the basis of differentiation in a market where pricing is visible and switching costs are lower than they used to be. Modernizing the sales motion with digital onboarding, integrated platforms, analytics and shared dashboards is increasingly what separates the ISO that wins an account from the ISO that gets undercut, ignored or replaced.