The Bard had it right, penning words mouthed by Hamlet that in a way echo for eCommerce centuries hence: The readiness is all.
In the age of eCommerce, software providers need to be ready and able to pivot in order to satisfy their own enterprise clients’ fluid, evolving ways and means of creating the best possible experience for individual consumers.
As Greg Cohen, CEO of the newly branded Fortis (formerly Fortis Payment Systems) told Karen Webster, that optimal experience is an “invisible” one, where everything from healthcare to hospitality to B2B verticals embed payments into the continuum of interaction. The payment itself may occur at any point of the journey and takes a cue from the “Uberization” of commerce.
But just as one size does not fit all, there’s a crawl, walk, run evolution as software companies mull what a “seamless” end user experience is at the moment.
And what it could be.
Future-proofing is the goal, and having a specialty solution including payments facilitation in the mix for independent software vendors and businesses can have positive ripple effects downstream. The providers maximize their own growth potential, expanding their relationships with enterprises; the enterprises delight individual clients and keep them transacting.
“We’ve been witnessing the merging of payments and software,” he said, adding that it may not be a new phenomenon, but every provider is different. Some firms need payment facilitation capabilities, others need sales assistance capabilities, and still others need to bring an evolving arsenal of multi-channel solutions to their clients.
Cohen said the company is expanding its enablement capabilities — its stack, in other words — to allow those same software partners to scale at their own pace, in a modular approach as they offer payment connectivity and other options to client firms. Fortis’ rebranding, announced Tuesday (Oct. 12), drops the “payments” from the name and details the broadened capabilities.
Fortis, Cohen said, has taken on the mindset of building in a technology platform first and bringing in payments “second” in an open environment.
Among the features (although not new) is a “guide driven” approach that Cohen said can help those software providers and developers embed commerce into the mix. Removing the word “payment” from the name is a nod to the full-stack, end-to-end nature of the rebranding.
Guided Offerings
He noted that the guided offerings have helped Fortis boost its organic volumes by nearly 50% this past year.
The guidance and the end-to-end offerings speak to the fact that what was once a “rigid” journey for software providers integrating payments processing, terminals and point of sale (POS) now must be a lot more flexible, he said. Providers need to be able to open up integrations and connectivity to include an ever-expanding roster of offerings — and when dealing with only one payment provider or operating model on the backend of operations can be limiting.
“They can migrate from model X to model Y to model Z as they take more and more services in house,” said Cohen of the single point of integration via the platform. “Not every software provider wants to become full service or offer every solution Day One, but we can take them on a guided journey.”
He added that “a partner may not need the solutions we offer and may even want to unload certain functions to us at onset, but in three years when they scale, those may be things they want to deliver. Having them rip everything out and start over again with a new provider makes no sense.”
Most of Fortis’ clients, he said, are not new to payments acceptance inside of their software, but they need help moving into the next leg of their journey as they help enterprises build out omnichannel presence and maximize adoption. The flexibility of the platform model means the providers can offload the services they want to offload to Fortis, take more services in house (aided by application programming interfaces or APIs), or embrace a range somewhere in between. Fortis has created specialty modules for the software providers focused on a vertical (healthcare, for example), which makes software stickier.
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, he said, new features that are driving software provider interest include buy now, pay later (BNPL), crypto acceptance and even invoicing capabilities.
Of bitcoin and its brethren, he said, “I don’t know if crypto will make it into every single vertical, but there is demand that people are seeing today that say, ‘I need to play in the game.’ That’s part of being able to future-proof your point of sale.”
In the meantime, there’s continued demand by verticals such as the hospitality sector to move beyond POS toward mini-marketplaces, for specialty healthcare to offer alternative payments, and for specialty retailers to move beyond brick-and-mortar verticals. With the scale offered by the platform, a software partner can help the small chiropractor schedule appointments, manage inventory and manage accounts receivables.
Although there has been sustained enthusiasm among those verticals to “go omnichannel,” the shift is not confined to consumer-facing commerce, he said.
“Many of our B2B customers now have websites where they sell direct either to their wholesalers or even directly to end users,” Cohen said.
As he told Webster: “We are bringing new commerce enablement capabilities to the world through a payments platform that enables the entire gamut of experiences that a software provider can integrate, drive adoption and scale. We make software businesses stronger.”
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