Ups, Downs, and “Frothiness” in Between: PF Day Wrap

Interest in the business of payment facilitation is growing, not just among companies lured in to monetize transactions and the investors excited to fund fast-growing startups, but also regulators wanting to make sure a new third party isn’t taking advantage of consumers.

And all these eyes on the industry mean payment facilitators themselves, and companies thinking about switching to the model, are hungry for more information about how to run their business to take full advantage of all the opportunity in the space.

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How To Get Cracking On Your PayFac-ing

There are at least two great reasons to jump into the payment facilitator game– increased revenues and market share—and many many tools to help. One of those tools is advice from the hard-won success achieved by those who have made the leap.

In a session on the ins and outs of starting a payfac at the second annual Payment Facilitator Day at Transact16 in April, Kevin Harris of RunSignUp said training people was more of a challenge than software concerns, and David Weiss of Yapstone shared the difficulties of international expansion. Nick Starai of gateway tech company NMI told the audience to concentrate on the business they know best rather than focus on technological bells and whistles. The highlights of the discussion fill this week’s paymentfacilitator.com podcast, the next best thing to having been there.

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Sports Event PF Running Between Processors

Payment Facilitator RunSignup.com is all about trying to take the complexities out of managing running events. It’s service and products include means to track times, tracker runners during events, assist with registration and creating customized sites. Making races easy is one thing. Making payments easy is, well, a much more uphill rocky path.

When the company started in 2009, they solely used Braintree to process transactions. As of March 2015, they added Vantiv and it’s that Vantiv relationship that turns them into a traditional PF, said RunSignup.com CFO Kevin Harris. The company finds the terms and capabilities of Vantiv more to its liking—referring to its customers, Harris said “We’d like to funnel them all through Vantiv, candidly”—but there’s a reason it needs to continue to offer both.

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