Monday, January 6, 2025
How can companies in competitive industries like payments ensure their solutions not only address immediate challenges but also align with long-term customer needs?
In any industry, especially those that are hyper-competitive like payments, prioritizing a customer-first mindset is critical to ensuring success. When companies understand their customers' markets, challenges and pain points, they can appropriately invest in programs, products, and services the market not only wants – but needs – to succeed.
At Stax Payments, we've had great success with our Partner Advisory Council, for example, where we connect with Partners on what's happening in their verticals, our plans for the future, and common challenges and pain points so we can help drive payments attachment and deliver more value for their downstream customers.
Payments is an interesting industry, not just because of the technological advancements that have fueled the past 10 to 15 years of growth, but also because of the 'co-opetition' that exists. It's more important than ever to understand your value proposition and make important business decisions on partnerships that help you extend the value of your products and services without compromising customer service or your unique selling proposition. Strategic decisions around buying, building, and partnering are critical as companies chart their course for the future.
What are the key considerations payments and fintech businesses should keep in mind when using AI to maintain trust, authenticity, and security in their marketing strategies?
There's a lot of noise in the market about AI replacing jobs. I view AI as another tool in the toolbox to help us become more efficient. How can AI support self-service support? How can AI expand our capacity in A/B testing for marketing ads? How can AI support reporting efficiencies?
Companies need to be pragmatic about the use of AI and how they can leverage it as a super-power, while not rushing to too much reliance on AI. AI tools are not a rip-and-replace for existing departments or roles, but rather an addition to help teams deliver a better, more personalized experience in less time. If you can do that, you will continue to build trust with your customers without losing authenticity in service delivery.
Security is paramount in our business, so ensuring you have data protection for you and your customers is critical. For third-party tools, thorough reviews of not just the technology but also data usage policies and the like are key to protecting sensitive data.
How can the use of personalized chatbots enhance a merchant services business? What other AI-driven tools or innovations do you see delivering significant value in the short term for the payments sphere?
Even with AI-driven tools, there still needs to be a lot of thought about what's being fed into the tool(s) in terms of data and information so that requires analysis, planning, testing and oversight. I see a place for AI in self-service support, helping to sort through data from a knowledge base, generating auto-responses quickly and efficiently to customers engaging through chat or search.
Looking at marketing and some of the tools we use on a daily basis, we are leveraging or investigating AI elements for copy options to expand our A/B testing or to even refresh an existing piece of content. HubSpot, which we use throughout our organization, just introduced Breeze, their in-app AI companion, which we're proud to be piloting across sales and marketing to drive efficiency and personalization.
There are also a lot of convenience features with AI support, like note-taking and summaries from web-based meetings. These make us more efficient internally, giving us more time to spend on key strategic initiatives.
How do you see the balance between AI's potential and its limitations shaping marketing strategies for payments companies over the next two to five years?
2025 will be a telling year as we begin leveraging tools that rely more and more on AI in our day-to-day work, but I think it's too early to tell where it will be in the next two to five years. As I mentioned earlier, I don't see AI replacing jobs or teams, but I do see it playing an important role in both marketing and customer support as well as overall internal efficiencies.
I think the key will be more about how companies are managing it versus how they are using AI as AI still requires human input to get the desired output.
How can merchant level salespeople and ISOs evolve their marketing efforts to move beyond metrics and focus on storytelling and personalized connections to build stronger partnerships?
Payments alone is a highly-commoditized industry, so sales and marketing must engage with prospects and customers on something beyond price. Understanding and clearly communicating your value proposition is key, whether that comes in the form of people, process, or technology.
As I mentioned earlier, knowing your customers' pain points and aligning your value proposition with those is critical. Prospects and customers must understand why your company is different and how your solutions will help them grow as a business. It's also important to ask customers for reviews, testimonials and case studies as decision-makers love to have relatable validation as they make their final selection for a payment partner.
Metrics are always going to be the foundation for evaluating marketing success, but storytelling, thought leadership and content are the foundation for engagement with prospects and customers and a core contributor to advertising, promotion, and education.
How can payments professionals help their merchant clients implement AI in their marketing? What are the pros and cons of introducing this type of consulting as a value-added service?
The role of the payments professional has definitely expanded over the last decade as merchants look to their payments provider for more VAR-like support. In response, many payments providers and ISOs have strategically added value-added solutions to their list of offerings, integrated and stand-alone.
Today, I don't see a huge demand for payments professionals to resell or consult on AI-based marketing tools for merchants outside of vertically based SaaS and some of the embedded features those firms are including. Time will tell how quickly small and medium-sized businesses adapt AI functionality and how payment providers evolve to support that demand. 
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