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Uncover New Opportunities from a Return on Experience

return on experience

Uncover New Opportunities from a Return on Experience

The pandemic, though terrible, has given us much-needed time to pause, reflect, and perhaps make some changes to the way we live our lives. We have a chance to reevaluate what is really important to us. What brings us happiness? What drains our energy? What experiences add meaning to our days? Which ones take it away? We have an opportunity to face this challenge in a way that makes us better people.

Businesses are on a parallel path. With the diminishing of old norms comes the possibility of reimagining our old processes. That has brought about an acceleration of technology adoption across virtually every industry. Still, there’s another storyline emerging as well—the rise of what Heather E. McGowan calls The Human Capital Era. McGowan believes that the workforce has exhibited incredible resilience and creativity during the pandemic. They’re “an asset to develop rather than a cost to contain.”

I’m all for it.

Everyone knows the term “return on investment”—or “ROI”—meaning you get more monetary value out of something than what you put into it. But money is not the only measure of value. As we take stock of our business and personal lives, I think we should re-establish a lesser-recognized concept: return on experience.

Return on experience is significantly more objective than a return on investment since the measurement varies by opinion rather than hard numbers.

For example, we all have gone out to have dinner and found that the bill was more expensive than expected. Maybe the food was just so-so, you had a long wait time, or the server was brusque. Whatever the reason, it just wasn’t a great experience. But you might gladly pay twice as much for dinner where the food is delicious, or the service is kind and attentive. That’s what I think of as return on experience—getting value beyond what money can buy.

We embrace this concept more easily in our personal lives, where there’s less accountability for how we spend our money. For example, pre-COVID, I enjoyed traveling with my wife and two kids. Those trips were expensive, even after accounting for the hotel points and airline miles I’d collected. But the memories will stay with us forever, long after the cost has been absorbed and forgotten.

When you think about your business and your accounts payable team, what is the return on experience from antiquated methods like processing checks? What is the opportunity for growth? One person can’t cut or sign checks much better than another. There’s a limit to the impact you can have by stuffing checks in envelopes every week. It’s the opposite of a good experience.

Incorporating automation in your back office is a good way to tackle ROI and ROE simultaneously. When you have removed mindless tasks from your AP team’s plates, they are free to spend their energy on more interesting, strategic, and valuable tasks. I think that’s an initiative that’s well-aligned with the Human Capital Era.

As we re-examine our lives and our businesses, let’s remember what it means to evaluate something in the first place: to judge or calculate the quality, importance, amount, or value of something. And in that calculation, consider the return on experience in terms of your business, beyond money. It’s about setting yourself and your employees up to live and work in a high-quality environment—one that encourages personal and professional development.

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Derek Halpern is Senior Vice President of Sales for Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company. He has over 20 years of technology sales and leadership experience, including 16 years in the fintech and payments space. 

processing solutions

Payments Processing Solutions Market to Witness Steady Growth During 2020-2026

According to a recent study from market research firm Global Market Insights, the payments processing solutions market is set to grow from its current market value of more than $60 billion to over $140 billion by 2026, gaining remarkable traction over the 2020 to 2026 period.

The payments processing solutions market is set to record significant gains over the forthcoming timeframe due to the increasing digitalization of payment methods, growing adoption of mobile wallets, and increasing popularity of cashless transactions. As the consumer preference for m-commerce rises, in tandem with the high penetration of smartphones, the preference for payment processing solutions is becoming more and more apparent.

Payment processing refers to how transactions are being automated between the merchant and the customer. Online payment processing further enables merchants to allow for any add-on payment methods, simply by setting up recurring payments, or approving transactions remotely. In other words, a payment gateway means software that interfaces in a secure manner between an eCommerce website and a customer’s preferred payment mode.

The mode of payment could be the customer’s bank account, gift card, debit card, credit card, or any other online wallets. A few examples of recognized payment gateways are Amazon Payments, PayPal, BrainTree, PayTM, Skrill, PayU among many others. As per research, nearly 86 percent of customers make online purchases via debit or credit cards, and more than 60% consider it to be their preferred method of payment while making a purchase.

At present, mobile payment acceptance is helping to satisfy the coming generation of customers with simple and seamless payment experiences. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are changing the way business is done.

The payments processing solutions market is divided into different segments in terms of technology, deployment model, mode of payment, organization size, end-use, as well as regional landscape.

In terms of end-use, the overall payments processing solutions market is categorized into government and public sector, BFSI, healthcare, retail & commerce, and tourism and hospitality. Among these, BFSI end-user segment is anticipated to witness a respectable CAGR of more than 9% over the projected time period. The segmental growth is chalked up to the increasing digitalization of payment methods across the BFSI sector.

Government & public sector segment will witness substantial growth over the coming time period. In fact, in 2019, the segment held a market share of over 8% due to the increasing popularity of cashless transactions in federal agencies.

From a regional frame of reference, the Latin American payments processing solutions market will witness a CAGR of more than 13% through the forthcoming time period owing to the increasing penetration of mobile wallets in the region.

Meanwhile, Middle East & Africa is set to record momentous gains in the upcoming time period. In 2019, the region held over 5% industry share of the overall market. This anticipated growth is ascribed to the increasing consumer’s preference towards m-commerce. In fact, high social and digital penetration in the Gulf states or GCC has led consumers to shift to mobile or m-commerce.

Source: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/payment-processing-solutions-market

payment

The New Business Case for a Powerful Payment Solution

Back in 2009, when my co-founders and I started Nvoicepay, there was very little technology in the market to help companies make supplier payments efficiently. Banks were the only game in town. Companies were still making a very high percentage of their supplier payment with paper checks, using painful manual processes. The fintech revolution was getting underway, and we were starting to see tech companies begin to deliver innovations in consumer payments—think Venmo, Apple Pay, etc.—and these quickly gained mass adoption.

Business payments are far more complex, and we’re still not at mass adoption, but the market is picking up steam. There are now several strong suppliers in the market, and investment continues to flow into B2B payments tech. As a result, the move off of check payments is accelerating. According to the 2019 AFP JP Morgan Electronic Payments Survey Report, organizations on average make 42 percent of their supplier payments by check, down from 50 percent in the prior year. This is the biggest drop we’ve seen in several years.

As all this happens, the business case for B2B payment solutions is becoming stronger and multi-dimensional.

Efficiency at the core

Process efficiency remains a core feature of payment automation. It enables an accounts payable organization, which could be making tens of thousands of supplier payments a year, to automate the workflow of making payments of any type—card, ACH, wire or even print check—using cloud-based software and services.

Software automation provides the customer control over the payment, visibility as the payment clears, and complete traceability if they need to access the payment history. But payment services are critical to creating efficiency in accounts payable.

A large portion of accounts payable’s time is devoted to unwinding payment errors and resolving payment exceptions. A single payment error can take 20-30 minutes or longer to resolve; even with a low error rate, most accounts payable teams are dealing with hundreds of errors every month. Payment service providers take that piece off their plates completely and that’s a huge efficiency boost.

These services also address the historic barrier to electronic payment adoption: the labor of reaching out to each supplier to determine how they want to be paid, where the remittance information should be sent, and—if the supplier wants to receive ACH—to collect their banking data and securely store it. Accounts Payable teams working with thousands, or even tens of thousands of suppliers, just don’t have the headcount to do that level of outreach.

Fraud protection and continuity

As enterprises have shifted toward electronic payments, we’ve seen an uptick in ACH fraud. Organizations have become accustomed to dealing with check fraud, and banks usually offer Positive Pay and Positive Payee services to combat it.

ACH fraud is a whole different animal. It’s cybercrime, and prevention requires sophisticated technology and controls, and ongoing employee training. It’s a lot more than most companies can do on their own, but a payments solution provider has the scale to offer extensive security services to all of its customers, and to assume that risk on their behalf. Fraud protection adds another very significant dimension to the business case.

With the global pandemic, many accounts payable teams are still working from home, where it is almost impossible to produce paper checks in a safe, secure, repeatable way. Paying by check was expensive and time consuming before the pandemic, but now the problem is acute. It’s incredibly difficult to approve invoices and make payments by paper check when your accounting staff is spread across their home offices. You literally have to drive paper from place to place to get approvals and signatures. Payment automation gives accounts payable the visibility and control they need to do remote payment approvals from home, making business continuity another dimension of the business case.

Now we’re heading into a severe global economic downturn. Businesses are pivoting to reducing costs, and checks cost a lot—around ten times more than electronic payments. So, in the near term, reducing costs is going to become a driver that accelerates payment automation adoption.

I think this driver will remain over the long term as well, and could very well change our payment behaviors forever. Short term imperatives will drive greater adoption, but as more organizations get a taste of automated payments, it will change the way they think about payments. They will realize there is a far better way to pay than writing checks, and I can’t see anyone who’s adopted payment automation going back to the old way.

Fintechs really are redefining business payments. Banks provide ways to move money from point A to point B. The business case for that is pretty simple—get the best deal on per transaction costs, but beware of the need to add headcount to use these products.

As awareness of these solutions grows, buyers should dig into the details and ask questions to really understand what they are getting and the differences between solution providers, and bank offerings. Some questions to ask are:

-How are payment issues handled and what are the SLAs (service level agreements) around payment support and resolution?

-What does the provider take responsibility for?

-How is data managed?

-How does the provider treat your suppliers, and what services do they offer them?

-How does the provider protect against fraud?

-How are they protected in the event of a disaster?

-How many payments are really sent electronically with their solution?

Some fintechs offer a surprisingly low number of electronic payments. Anything lower than 20 percent is not a payment solution; it’s a payment hobby, and buyers today can make the case for something a lot better. The best fintechs address the entire payment process with automation and services, which enables organizations to move 100 percent of payments electronically with a fraction of the effort previously required, and, by doing so, dramatically lower overall costs.

Global Payments Inc. to Acquire Australia’s Ezidebit

Atlanta, GA – Payment solutions provider Global Payments Inc. has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Australia-based Ezi Holdings Pty Ltd (Ezidebit).

Founded in 1998, Ezidebit is a leading integrated payments company focused on recurring payments verticals in Australia and New Zealand.

Under the terms of the agreement, Global Payments will acquire Ezidebit for US$269 million.

Similar to Accelerated Payment Technologies and PayPros, Ezidebit markets its products through a network of integrated software vendors and direct channels to numerous vertical markets.

The transaction is expected to close during the second quarter of Global Payments’ 2015 fiscal year, subject to receipt of regulatory approvals in Australia and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, the company said.

For the partial year of fiscal 2015, Global Payments expects the transaction to contribute approximately US$25 million in revenues and to be “slightly additive to total company cash operating margins,” it added.

10/30/2014