Tag: Todd Ablowitz

Payment Facilitators Expected to See $15 Billion in Transaction Revenue by 2025: Industry Forecast

Over the next five years, payment facilitators are expected to process more than $4 trillion in global gross payment volume, representing a 28.4% compound annual growth rate. During that same time period, PFs could collectively generate up to $15 billion in transaction revenue.

Asia’s Drive for Financial Inclusion Means Opportunity for PFs

It’s hard to read the global news about payments without continually seeing something new happening in Asia. Companies like Paytm and Grab are expanding rapidly, enabling payments in innovative ways for small and micromerchants across the region.

Facebook Dives Deeper Into Payments Under David Marcus, Competing As A PF, Again

The only thing separating Facebook from being a true payment facilitator is it registering as one. The social media giant today announced users of its Messenger app can now send payments from within the app to make purchases from sites who interface with the app using bots.

Facebook is working with Stripe, Braintree and PayPal, but also appears to be directly enabling acceptance of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to make this happen, and Messenger users can store their card info in Messenger for use at checkout. This can be combined with the ability of brands being able to buy ads that take clickers into Messenger where their card info is saved. David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging and a former payments executive, has raised the Messenger user base from 700 million monthly active users to 1 billion in a year.

Allpago Grows Using Location Location Location

allpago, one of Latin America’s leading payment facilitators, is using a real estate golden rule to achieve stunning growth, mirroring PF growth in the region. Enabling companies globally to do business and accept payments across Latin America, allpago uses locally-preferred credit cards and alternative payment methods via location-based checkout, and recently achieved 150 percent annual growth in transaction volume.

Double Diamond Group president Todd Ablowitz says allpago’s dominance is further proof of the power of payment facilitators.

The Payments Standard Bearers Are Waking Up To The Payment Facilitator Opportunity (And Threat)

There is growing realization among researchers that the payment facilitator model is a rocket ship, and that old models in the payments industry have slowed their rolls at the PFs’ expense. Major players are now saying what we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years.

In the past three years, I said: “We are seeing more ISOs looking to do frictionless on-boarding and move into aggregation. Support for the aggregation model among acquirers is also increasing.”

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.

EMV Really Screwing Up Apple Pay

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when EMV data we receive. As more major retail chains fully accept EMV payments, Apple Pay is being dealt some serious experience setbacks, such as being asked twice for price verification and being asked for fingerprint biometric authentication and then, a few screens later, a signature. Neither of those steps were part of the Apple Pay process until merchants switched on EMV.

To be clear, those time-wasting moves are not part of the Apple Pay process at all, but are superimposed after the Apple Pay transaction is complete and customers think they are done. The reason this is now happening is due to very strict interpretations of EMV rules—and the fact that the nature of the payment mechanism (beyond that it’s contactless) is not always communicated to the POS. Hence, it must assume the worst. When two retailers—Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods–last week made the switch through upgraded Verifone POS terminals, customers used to speedy Apple Pay experiences were literally being called back to the checkout lane to complete the additional keystrokes. Before, once Apple Pay’s screen said “done” and displayed an animated checkmark, they were free to leave. Not so in an EMV world.

Finally, An Event Where PF Is The Focus, Not A Footnote

Given how important payment facilitators are to the rapidly emerging and morphing payments landscape in 2016, it’s stunning how few places there are to explore the implications of being a PF today. Plenty of meetings and symposium exist for chatting about payments in general or virtual currencies or mobile payments, but the opportunities to really delve deeply into PF issues are practically non-existent. Until now.

If you can swing by Las Vegas on April 19, PaymentFacilatator.com—in conjunction with Double Diamond Group, Rich Consulting and the Electronic Transactions Association—will present our version of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About PFs, But Were Too Geeky To Ask. Officially, though, it’s dubbed simply TRANSACT 16’s Payment Facilitator Day – In Depth and On Target.

How Flexible Is The PF Model?

The strength of any payment model is not merely how well it performs for merchants, but also how elastic it is in terms of being relevant to many kinds of companies and geographies. That is the topic for this week’s PaymentFacilitator.com podcast, with guest Todd Ablowitz, president of Double Diamond Group.

Ablowitz pointed to a recently-profiled company called RunSignUp.com as a good example of how flexible the PF model can be. The PF model lets merchants and software companies seamlessly integrate payments “without this artificial wall between the payment gateway and the merchant account,” Ablowitz said. “This removes many of the barriers. Banks move slowly and they have a lot of bureaucracy.”

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.