Priority Technology, Wix Team to Accelerate, Streamline SMB Online Sales

Payments technology company Priority Technology Holdings and website development platform Wix announced Thursday (Nov. 4) a new partnership aimed at boosting merchant revenues within the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) market.

This partnership combines Wix’s ability to create an online presence — it has over 210 million registered users worldwide today — with Priority’s payment processing services.

“We have a very common kind of vision of what we want to deliver to the SMB market and fit well together; we’re very complementary,” Priority Technology Holdings Executive Chairman and CEO Tom Priore told PYMNTS. “They are on the front end of generating revenue for small merchants, and we’re building a platform to combine payments and banking that allows that revenue to accelerate through businesses.”

Delivering Solutions to SMBs

Priore noted that this is an example of the consumerization of B2B as well as a case of FinTech partners combining with others to deliver solutions to SMBs.

“This partnership with Wix is representative of what makes FinTech businesses such viable participants in businesses that were traditionally kind of banking oriented,” he said.

Each partner brings its own strengths to the table, Priore said. Wix takes care of marketing, business management, and tools that bring the physical store presence in collaboration with what’s happening online. Priority’s strengths are in payment acceptance — the collecting, storing and sending of money.

Throuth the partnership, merchants using Priority’s payment infrastructure will be able to leverage the Wix platform to create and manage a fully customizable and comprehensive online presence.

Bringing Capabilities for Cash Acceleration

In announcing the partnership, the companies noted that SMBs need a payments partner, not just a processor.

“We’ve had a vision at Priority that started from our very inception that we wanted to bring capabilities for cash acceleration to our partners and to the small businesses that we serve,” Priore told PYMNTS.

To that end, Priority built not only the traditional acquiring tools in terms of point-of-sale (POS) card acceptance, but also automated payables tools that operate both virtual cards and physical plastic and allow businesses to collect that money into a bank account that will be part of Priority’s offering.

The partnership with Wix follows on the heels of Priority’s acquisition of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform Finxera over the summer.

Read more: Priority Technology Holdings Finishes Finxera Acquisition

“As an organization, we felt it’s time to stake our claim as a payments powerhouse,” Priore said. “This is just one more example of our ability not just to talk the talk, but to walk the walk, that organizations like Wix are selecting Priority to be their partner for SMB payment solutions. And we think others should be making the same decision.”