MINDBODY’s Chandre: We Are a Payments Company
Dan Chandre, VP Strategic Development for MINDBODY, is slated to deliver the keynote address at PF WORLD 2018 on Sept. 25 in New York City.
For many B2B software companies, the integration of payments is an evolution. The company begins by offering software to enable business operations for a particular vertical. The benefit of offering payments to support those operations may become clear later on.
Not so with MINDBODY – or, for that matter, its recent acquisition, Booker. According to Dan Chandre, the company’s VP of Strategic Development, payments were part of the foundation for both platforms, a capability their founders thought would be critical from the beginning.
But while the company has always treated payments as a fundamental part of the service it provides to its clients, its image of itself as a “payments company” is one it has evolved into – in part out of necessity.
MINDBODY caters to boutique health and fitness businesses, such as yoga or Pilates studios. Last year, the company acquired Booker, which Chandre said the company plans to continue operating as a separate platform. Booker serves beauty and wellness businesses such as hair and nail salons.
MINDBODY has progressed to think of itself as a payments company in part due to the unique client experience offered by the types of businesses it serves.
According to Chandre, the company has found that many of the existing solutions available to enable point-of-sale hardware to communicate with web-based software such as MINDBODY’s were mobile POS solutions. However, most of MINDBODY’s merchants did not naturally operate their businesses on mobile devices. Out-of-the-box solutions required the company to try to fit disparate pieces together.
“So, we need a more flexible solution. And one of the things that has changed for us was that, instead of relying on everyone else to figure it out and for someone to bring us a neatly packaged solution, we needed to become more involved and figure it out for ourselves,” Chandre said.
Ultimately, the company envisions an environment where payments recede into the background, allowing the merchant’s services to take center stage.
“We believe the experience between a customer and a business should be about what the customer is there to receive and what the business loves to do,” he said. “That could be delivering a boutique fitness experience, a cut and color or a massage, but the experience between the business and the customer should be about that activity. It should not be about a checkout process that feels clunky and impersonal.”
To achieve this vision of frictionless customer experiences, Chandre said, the company feels that a strong payments platform meeting specific needs is key. The platform needs to support a different type of interaction. For example, the traditional model with a physical front desk and POS hardware may be increasingly unnecessary.
Developing that experience for its customers is a role the company is increasingly comfortable with taking on itself.
“We want to be the technology arm for our businesses,” he said. “We want to be their software solution, and in our minds, that includes their payments. We should be the experts. Payments are our responsibility to deliver.”
To hear more about MINDBODY’s vision for payments integration – and the steps it’s taking to achieve that vision – register for PF WORLD 2018.
PF WORLD is the first-ever standalone event focused exclusively on the payment facilitator ecosystem. It’s designed to tackle the challenges unique to payment facilitators head-on and provide the chance to network directly with the top names in the industry.
Seats are limited and going fast for this special event, so save your space by registering now.