“You’re Going to Have a Lot of Friends”: Infinicept CEO Ablowitz on the PF Market

As a relatively new entrant into the payments industry, the payment facilitator model raises a lot of fundamental questions, from both SaaS companies that could benefit from it and legacy payments providers looking to serve it.

With that in mind, Todd Ablowitz set the stage for PF WORLD 2018, opening the event with research projecting that the PF market can grow to be “really, really big.”

Ablowitz is CEO and founder of Infinicept and Double Diamond Group, and founder and publisher of PaymentFacilitator.

Ablowitz cited Double Diamond Group research forecasting that North American payment facilitators would represent $513 billion in gross payments volume and $4.4 billion in net revenue by 2021.

SaaS companies are recognizing the potential ROI of accepting payments as part of their business model, which means many more companies are likely to enter the PF market, Ablowitz said.

He cited a survey of companies currently operating as independent software vendors (ISVs) and value-added resellers (VARs) conducted by Double Diamond Group, in which more than half of the respondents said they are developing plans to monetize the payments coming across their platforms.

“Whether you’re coming from a merchant acquirer or card brand perspective, or you’re coming from a vertical software company perspective, what you’ll see is you’re going to have a lot of friends in this market,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of payment facilitators. There’s going to be a lot of learning and maturing of the offerings.”