Spreedly: Creating An Adaptable Payments Infrastructure

Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly, explains how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a spike in demand among all payment ecosystem participants for greater choice and flexibility. “We see that merchants are able to digitize their commerce faster when these kinds of services are available and effective,” he said. “That’s why we think it’s so vital to aid the diversity of platforms and other services in the payments ecosystem.”

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly.

With COVID, card-present merchants have had to scramble to move online at a massively accelerated rate. Fortunately, there are many commerce platforms — from restaurant order-ahead systems to subscription management tools — that are either in place today or are leaping into the fray to help these merchants move online to digital commerce.

We see that merchants are able to digitize their commerce faster when these kinds of services are available and effective. That’s why we think it’s so vital to aid the diversity of platforms and other services in the payments ecosystem.

The pandemic has also accelerated the evolution of these platforms and how they leverage payments. We see new platforms offering modern approaches to the age-old business problems of immediate access to customers and specific goods and services. But this growth and evolution can be inhibited if built on an inflexible payment stack.

All of this has led to more demand for the basic promise of payments orchestration — allowing all payment ecosystem participants (merchants, marketplaces, gateways, payment services and others) to work with whomever they choose, quickly and safely.

We see that payments professionals are increasingly recognizing the importance of having an adaptable payments infrastructure. Alongside the organizations that are for the first time venturing into digital payments and struggling to maintain the channels on which they’ve historically based their businesses, there are well- established organizations that now need to step back and re-evaluate their payments strategies. That might mean extending support for card-not-present (CNP) transactions for a traditionally brick-and-mortar company that has adopted order-ahead or delivery models, or supporting gaming and digital goods companies that are seeing their existing CNP business expand rapidly.

That’s where we come in. Spreedly helps merchants — and platforms that aggregate merchants — to orchestrate digital payments. We’re already hearing from analysts that up to 70 percent of digital merchants want to orchestrate their payments. Now, this trend toward flexibility will only grow further.

This back-to-basics focus on the organization’s payment strategy has further accelerated the need for payments orchestration. As merchants move into online payments, they are evaluating the cost of payments and the success rates they’re achieving.

And platforms are seeking to work with more payment services and to support the diversification of payment gateways to bring on new merchant customers faster. Still others are finding themselves with an entirely new and unexpected customer segment, such as a new geographical market, that they can serve by connecting to another payment service.

How these companies quickly pivot, limit risk and optimize upside will dictate who survives and thrives in this economy — and that includes our team. While we continue to innovate and develop tools for the next generation of payments needs, our focus from day one has been on welcoming all payments participants. Merchants, platforms and marketplaces depend on the power of all types of payment service providers (PSPs) to transact with their customers, and we are working hard to maintain the best tools to support the entire payments ecosystem.