TRENDING: Capturing — And Keeping Up With — The Mobile-Hungry Diner

When guests are a no-show, restaurants get burned by losing a table and a paying customer. But reservation platforms are firing up solutions to capture customers’ attention — and, more importantly, to keep their cancellations to a minimum.

It’s not just restaurants that are hit by cash flow problems. Small businesses (SMBs), too, are feeling the pain of revenue not streaming in as expected. For these merchants and businesses, a slow-moving payment process adds to their financial strain.

To address these financial woes, Payments as a Service (PaaS) solution providers are trying to offer a lifeline. The new Payments as a Service Tracker charts the latest payment developments, including how players in the space are working to tackle SMBs’ cash flow conundrums.

Around the Payments as a Service World

Rising to the defense is Xero, an SMB accounting platform. The company recently announced an expanded partnership with Stripe that is intended to give SMBs more efficient ways to get paid — including ACH bank transfers.

SMBs are also being targeted by a new multichannel payment processing offering from Net Element, a mobile payments solutions provider. The platform is designed to give merchants a one-stop integration for handling payment across multiple channels, including in-store, online and mobile.

Meanwhile, in the skies, South Africa’s FlySafair became the first low-cost airline in the country to go cash-free. The airline’s mobile point-of-sale system removes the risk of carrying cash by enabling debit and credit card payments in-flight.

Getting Diners over Their Reservations

Receiving faster payment is often a stage II problem for businesses. Stage I is driving foot traffic into their venue.

Chalkboard street signs. Sidewalk greeters. Brochures in the mail. Restaurants turn to a range of strategies to lure customers and keep them coming back.

The goal of reservation app and restaurant software Resy is to ease these demands for fine dining venues, while also handling their reservation fees and ticketed event payments. In this month’s feature story, Ben Leventhal, co-founder of Resy, explained how the technology is designed to reduce reservation cancellations, boost restaurant discoverability and increase customer loyalty through better communication, targeted offerings and other features.

“We’re laser-focused on the connectivity between diners and their restaurant,” Leventhal said.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

About the Tracker

The Payments as a Service Tracker 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.