Visa, which is the official payment technology partner of the National Football League (NFL), will provide small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with a one-day offer that will waive some of the costs connected with getting online and taking digital payments on Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 7), according to a Tuesday (Feb. 2) announcement emailed to PYMNTS.
Authorize.net, Visa’s SMB digital payment management system, is eliminating its monthly gateway fee for the life of an account in addition to its transaction fees for the first 100,000 transactions of new North American clients enrolling on Feb. 7. The sign-up process takes a couple of minutes, according to the announcement, which noted that Authorize.net works with many banks and credit unions (CUs) for onboarding.
“The resiliency of small businesses is inspiring, but there is work to do to help them recover and thrive,” Carleigh Jaques, senior vice president and general manager of Visa’s Authorize.net, said in the announcement. “The Authorize.net offer extends Visa’s commitment to digitally enable businesses and helps alleviate burdens by minimizing some recurring operational costs. While we have rallied behind our small businesses all season, Super Bowl Sunday is an opportunity to give small businesses support that could last a lifetime.”
Since the pandemic, 82 percent of SMBs have changed the way they run their business to satisfy the rising demand for digital payments, headed up by selling through the web (43 percent) and taking contactless payments (39 percent). But a number of companies encounter obstacles in accessing resources that will allow for growth over the long haul, according to the announcement, which noted that Visa’s Authorize.net helps companies “create flexible, creative digital commerce solutions to help them fast track and grow.”
The offer is a culmination of Visa’s season-long commitment to help SMBs as part of its collaboration with the NFL, according to the announcement.
Those efforts include helping the Tampa SMB community get ready for the big game. To that end, Visa’s Street Teams visited more than 2,500 SMBs in Tampa to provide contactless point-of-sale (POS) tool kits and digital transformation suggestions as part of the company’s commitment to help digitally enable 50 million worldwide SMBs, the announcement stated.
Visa, via its partnership with the NFL, is also contributing 20 Super Bowl tickets to Black Girl Ventures, which will provide them to 10 local Black woman-owned SMBs in the Tampa and Miami areas, according to the announcement. Additionally, Visa is working with GenYouth to contribute 50 Taste of NFL @Home tickets to Black Girl Ventures to provide to additional Black woman-owned SMBs.
Furthermore, Visa said in the announcement that its marketing efforts from 2020 NFL Draft to the regular season have concentrated on encouraging fans that where you shop matters, with an emphasis on Black-owned businesses that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.
Ahead of the Super Bowl, Visa will introduce a new advertisement starring NFL player Saquon Barkley “supporting his local small business and encouraging fans to do the same,” according to the announcement.
And Visa has worked with the New York Giants, New York Jets, and San Francisco 49ers to provide grants of $60,000 overall to help Black-owned SMBs in the New York and Santa Clara, California, regions that have been affected by the pandemic, the announcement stated.
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