5 Key Things To Consider When Choosing A Payments Partner
February 4, 2019

Choosing a payments partner is a major decision for any organization and one you should need to make only once. Here we set out some key criteria to guide you when considering your options.

1. Considering a niche player? A holistic payments partner is the better choice. 

Whether you are a Financial Institution (FI), an acquirer or a FinTech, you will be best served by a payments partner that provides a comprehensive range of innovative and integrated solutions. While some payments partners focus on a particular niche within the industry, a payments partner with a rich portfolio of offerings is the better choice in the long term. Even if you don’t need everything they provide when signing up, you should consider possible future needs. This will prevent the upheaval and expense of having to switch to a more holistic partner should your business outgrow your niche provider’s capabilities.

Another important consideration is that a payments partner should be constantly focused on expanding and diversifying its offerings to stay ahead of the technology curve. They should provide a clear product and services roadmap. Review their offerings carefully. How frequently are new products and services introduced? Have those offerings had a significant and positive impact on the user and the industry? How often, if ever, is there a first-to-market breakthrough? Past performance is a strong indicator of what you can expect.

Finally, when it comes to service and fit, look for an organization that can be a true partner. One whose culture is unwaveringly client centric and founded on quality, urgency, getting things done and a focus on the future. This is the organization that will listen to you, collaborate with you and ultimately partner with you, taking your interests to heart and going that extra mile for you when you need it most.

2. The payments platform must deliver secure and superior technical performance.

FIs must ensure that their payment partner’s switch and platform are stable, reliable and provide exceptional availability. If things go wrong and your customers can’t access their accounts, for example, it won’t be your payments partner that your customers and news media will point to. Your brand’s good reputation, which may have taken decades to build, could crumble in just a few hours. That’s why it’s critical that your payments partner has a premier switch infrastructure with redundant architecture, rock-solid stability, and top-quartile performance.

Provisions for security and privacy must also be first class. Ensure your payments partner has invested in a hardened, totally secure data centre environment, with regularly tested disaster recovery and business continuity operations.

In recent years, numerous highly publicized data breaches have had serious implications for impacted customers and disastrous consequences for the companies involved. It is vital that FIs choose a payments partner that adheres to all security compliance regulations and is committed to investing in secure technologies so clients are protected.

3. The strength of fraud management solutions cannot be underestimated. 

Protecting clients includes having a robust fraud management solution in place. Unfortunately, media reports of recent data breaches indicate that some organizations had been under attack for months prior to discovery.

When evaluating a payments partner, FIs must ensure their fraud management solution provides real-time insight into fraud attempts. Look for the following:

o Real-time transaction decision-making capabilities
o Mobile SMS fraud alerts to cardholders
o Case management solutions
o Enterprise/multi-channel monitoring

Additional capabilities could include country blocks and travel exclusions; “hot card” automation, and account blocking.

4. Service and availability are paramount. 

While the goal of every payments partner is to provide 100% availability for its payments platform, service interruptions sometimes occur. Ensure that your payments partner can provide stable and repeatable processes for service management, problem resolution, product certifications, and implementations, as well as overall operational management.

If an interruption occurs, you will depend on open lines of communication with your payments partner for timely updates and consistent messaging on a 7x24x365 basis, so you can keep your customers informed. Do your research and be sure to understand exactly what you can expect.

5. Mobility is King.

Mobile service offerings have changed the payments landscape forever. In 2017, there were approximately 230 million mobile payment transactions in Canada alone, and that’s estimated to jump to about 750 million by 2022.¹ Further, in 2017, mcommerce sales hit US $1.357 trillion globally — making up 58.9% of all digital sales.²

The vast computing power of today’s smartphones and their proliferation worldwide has encouraged FIs, payments firms, and smartphone manufacturers to co-create a myriad of payment options for the point-of-sale (POS). These include mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay which enable shoppers to simply tap their smartphone on the POS terminal to make a purchase.

Other trends in mobile payments are in-app and in-browser purchases. Downloadable apps make shopping with your smartphone a breeze, and online retailers like Amazon have led the charge in making it easier than ever to make purchases on the fly. Similarly, in-browser allows you to make purchases, either domestically or abroad, through your smartphone’s browser, as easily as you can on your laptop.

Mobility in payments also extends to merchant services. Today, companies such as Square, offer payment processing via customer-owned smartphone and tablets, which benefits merchants by eliminating the cost of renting a POS terminal indefinitely.

When evaluating a payments partner, it’s vital to ensure they have solid expertise in mobility, that their payments platform supports most mobile wallets, in-app payments, and in-browser payments, and that they have an impressive roster of quality partners. Given that FIs issue debit and credit cards, providing the latest capabilities in payments is crucial to retain members and customers who are continuously looking to their FI for the most advanced, secure, and fastest payment methods.

For more information about what to look for in a payments partner, or what Everlink can do for you, please call 1.866.388.0076 or visit us at www.everlink.ca.

<sub>Sources:
1. Technology Strategies International (TSI) Canadian Payments Forecast, 2018.
2. emarketer</sub>