Blood is thicker than water, and when it comes to full-service payments building customer loyalty may also be more important than creating a ubiquitous payments solution, according to Stephen Goodrich, president and CEO of ZipLine, the team behind Cumberland Farms’ SmartPay app. This edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker™ features an interview with Goodrich about the value of loyalty and other trends in the PaaS space, along with the latest news from around the industry and a ranking of more than 59 global providers.
There was a time when it seemed that ubiquity would become the focal point of full-service and mobile payments systems. Experts believed that universally accepted mobile wallets from trusted companies like Apple or Samsung would dominate the new wave of payments.
That belief was perhaps misguided, according to Stephen Goodrich, president and CEO of ZipLine, the company that built the loyalty and mobile payments app known as SmartPay for popular convenience and gas chain Cumberland Farms. Goodrich says that the loyalty and data collection options offered by an in-house payments solution offer merchants a wide range of advantages.
PYMNTS caught up with Goodrich for this month’s Payments as a Service Tracker™ cover story to discuss how brick-and-mortar retailers can use full-service payment systems to build relationships and loyalty with consumers.
Here’s a preview:
“People believed that for payments to be successful, it had to be ubiquitous, like Visa, that consumers were unwilling to carry additional cards or load additional apps,” Goodrich said. “That’s clearly not true.”
The success in adoption of loyalty and payment apps like Starbucks and Cumberland Farms are a sharp contrast to widely accepted mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, MCX and Mozido, which are commonly known to be struggling today, he said.
And this is why, “there will be more and more merchant-centric payment options,” he predicted, citing the recent news surrounding Walmart Pay and CVS Pay. “These make sense to me.”
Around the full-service payments world
With new research from Visa indicating that EMV chip-enabled credit and debit cards are gaining popularity among American consumers, PaaS providers recently debuted new products and services designed to help retailers measure up to security standards and accept new forms of payments.
For example, Total Merchant Services launched a new line of EMV-compliant POS platforms, called the Groov. The device comes equipped with a Samsung tablet, NFC technology and a suite of tools including inventory management and integrated marketing software.
Other companies, meanwhile, are pursuing partnerships in order to offer retailers a deeper full-service payment product. Notably, iQmetrix announced it will integrate its EMV-enabled POS system with Ingenico’s smart terminals, and Unified Grocers announced it would work with PCI Security Standards as a participating organization to develop new security protocols.
The August Payments as a Service Tracker™ features the latest news and analysis from across the Payments as a Service industry. It also contains profiles of 59 players, including 10 new provider profiles, that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies, but also integrate with other features that make merchant experience easier.
To download the August edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker™, click the button below.
About the Tracker
The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker™, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies, but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail experience, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management, and more.
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