How do you offer payment solutions that serve merchants today and are future-proof enough to continue serving them tomorrow, even if the industry goes in a completely new direction?
Whether you’re a traditional front-end provider, like an independent sales organization (ISO), or a software platform offering a next-gen embedded payments experience, staying ahead of a rapidly changing market is critical to success. For most payment providers, the best solution is to center your strategies around modularity.
Modular payment solutions are designed to be flexible and composable. Whether it’s bolting on a service, like a new fraud protection tool or security system, or keeping the door open for unforeseen tech in the future, modular systems enable your business to adapt quickly as better solutions come to market and merchant needs change.
Prioritizing modularity allows you to give merchants the best solutions for their current needs while leaving the door open for additional functionality (all without having to overhaul your entire system). That means that instead of locking merchants into a monolithic solution, they can quickly adapt to changes in their business, consumer demands, or the market without ripping anything out.
Below, we explore seven reasons to invest in modular payment solutions, including:
- Staying competitive in an evolving industry
- Enabling merchant growth
- Greater customization and flexibility
- Higher-quality solutions (and happier merchants)
7 Reasons To Invest in Modular, Scalable Payment Solutions
In the past, when payments were limited to cash, credit or debit, one-size-fits-all systems made sense. Change was infrequent, and when it did happen, it was incremental. That meant a business could adopt a static system and be confident it would remain relevant one, five or even ten years down the line.
Those days are long gone.
In today’s fast-paced payments space, new technologies are emerging by the year, and merchant and consumer preferences are shifting just as quickly. That means the payment solutions your merchants select today need to be dynamic and adaptable — especially since the market might look completely different in the near future.
Highly scalable, modular payment systems address the need for adaptability. They offer an enormous number of benefits to both end merchants and their customers. Plus, they allow payment providers like yourself to stay competitive as consumer preferences change. The following are seven reasons why adopting a modular approach to payments is essential to the future of your business.
1) Modular Payment Solutions Ensure You Can Move With the Industry
Large companies take a long time to change directions, mostly because clunky, static systems are difficult to update and upgrade. When you put those two things together, you get one of the biggest problems with one-size-fits-all payment platforms — they don’t give you the flexibility or adaptability to move with the industry as it changes in real time. Instead, you get stuck waiting for generic, platform-wide updates designed for the average use case, making it more difficult to meet specific user preferences and putting you behind the market instead of at its cutting edge. Today’s merchants won’t accept that.
Modular payment solutions are designed to add or subtract new pieces as needed. Think of it like the International Space Station, which is designed for different components to be added or removed from its infrastructure as needs change. Solutions like these make it easier for your platform partner to integrate new technologies and services as they become available and to shed old ones that don’t deserve your business anymore.
2) Modular Payments Prepare Your Merchants for Growth and Change
Like the rapid change in the payments space, your merchants’ businesses are also constantly evolving and growing. Modular payment solutions are ideal because they ensure your merchants can access new features, experiences and technologies as they need them instead of being forced to pay for tools that are built for someone else.
With modular solutions, small- and medium-sized (SMB) merchants can start with a simple solution. Then, when it comes time for them to scale up, they can add what they need without having to completely redesign their payments experience. By offering more flexibility, you become a key growth enabler and far more valuable as a long-term partner in your merchants’ success.
3) Modular Payments Enable Your Merchants to Choose What Matters Most
As mentioned before, one of the biggest issues with one-size-fits-all payment solutions is that merchants end up paying for features they don’t need. That might not matter for large sellers that use a wide variety of tools and services, but for SMBs, it can represent huge cost and operational inefficiencies.
Small merchants need affordable payment solutions, and allowing them to choose features from an à-la-carte menu is one of the best ways to offer them flexibility and savings. Not only does that help them, but it also helps you, because putting money back in your merchants’ pockets is one of the best ways to foster loyalty and maximize lifetime customer value.
4) Modular Payments Offer Tailor-Made Solutions for Unique Merchant Needs
Offering your merchants a more personalized experience ensures they get the right solutions for their needs. It also helps you stand out from the crowd and fosters stronger relationships. One-size-fits-all platforms offer little room for customization, and as a result, SMB merchants are often presented with solutions designed to cater to their biggest competitors.
In contrast, modular payment platforms enable you to present your merchants with a combination of services and tech custom-assembled to meet their unique needs. That not only serves them better, but it also makes them feel like valued partners rather than just small fish in a very big pond.
It’s like the Peloton experience; when you’re taking a class on your Peloton, it feels like the instructor is there just for you and the class was designed with your fitness goals in mind, even if there are actually a hundred other people taking the same course. The best modular platforms offer a similar white-glove experience so merchants can feel like their payment platform was designed just for them.
5) Modular Payments Help You Get Products to Market Faster
The payments industry moves at breakneck speed, and it’s one of the most competitive environments imaginable. When merchant preferences change, or demand heats up for new rails or technology, you need to be able to move quickly to capture market share.
Modular payment solutions powered by a partner with a strong history of innovation ensure that you’ll be able to integrate new payment technologies as quickly as possible. Ultimately, that means faster time-to-market. And, in a game where merchants have no shortage of options, getting new services to market faster could be the difference between thriving and falling behind.
6) Modular Payments Enable Higher-Quality Solutions
One big advantage of modular solutions is that your merchants can choose the level of service they need. For example, a one-size-fits-all platform that forces everyone into the same fraud management tools may not offer the best tools. Despite this, merchants have few choices — especially if they have a contract requiring them to go through that platform for all of their payment needs.
As a modular payments provider, you can give your merchants more options. If simple fraud management is all they need, they can save money (and the headache of learning something new) and stick with basic tools. But, if they want to really clamp down on risk, they can upgrade to a premium, modular add-on, like Kount AI-powered fraud protection. That ability to choose where and when to apply premium options ensures merchants can get the highest-quality payment solutions without breaking the bank.
7) Modular Payments Make Compliance Easier
Modular payments offer significant advantages when it comes to compliance:
- First, as new regulations arise, adjustments can be made to specific modules without overhauling the entire payments system
- Second, certain modular options can reduce the compliance burden for you and your merchants
For example, off-site data storage and tokenization services, like NMI Customer Vault, can significantly reduce Payment Card Industry (PCI) scope and shift liability to your payments partner. Not all of your merchants will need that, but when they do, it’ll be easy to add on. And when new tech emerges that makes compliance even easier — like network tokens that are currently pushing security to new levels — your partner can integrate it for you quickly and with zero friction.
Future-Proofing Your Business With Modular Payments Solutions
NMI has been driving innovation in the payments space for over two decades. During that time, we’ve always kept our customers on the cutting edge of payments technology. Today, our payments platform is fully modular, allowing you to pick and choose which parts to embed into your offerings and enabling your merchants to select the services they need in an ideal payment solution.
If you’d like to learn more about how modular payments can future-proof your business, we’d love to chat. So, don’t hesitate to reach out to a member of our team today.
Don’t just turn on payments, transform the way you do business
- Generate New Revenue By adding or expanding payment offerings to your solution, you can start earning higher monthly and transaction-based recurring revenue.
- Offer the Power of Choice Allow merchants to choose from 125+ shopping cart integrations and 200+ processor options to streamline their onboarding.
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