Empowering relationships
Founded by payments veteran John Martillo, SignaPay Ltd. launched in 2007 as a payments technology company. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, SignaPay offers a suite of merchant payment solutions, including credit and debit card acceptance, gateway integration, fraud prevention, customer loyalty, mobile and POS equipment, and analytics software.
According to the company's website, relationships are at the core of SignaPay's business focus and its success, along with the entire team's desire to build "profitable partnerships based on trust, honesty, and integrity."
Elaborating on this, Matt Nern, SignaPay's executive vice president, said, "We truly focus on empowering others, whether that's our partners, our merchants or our employees. Our goal is to give them the knowledge and all the tools they need to excel in payments."
Honoring core competencies
SignaPay's marketing message indicates the company is dedicated to putting its "clients' needs first" and working with each individual merchant "to make sure their business has the right products and solutions in place to help them grow and increase their bottom line." Further, SignaPay's leaders enthusiastically support the firm's open promise to "stand behind a long history of excellence offering low costs with high-quality products."
"It's very easy to get wrapped up in all the different moving parts of a business," Nern said, describing how easy it is lose sight of what's important. "We're all chasing that new magic bullet."
Nern indicated the key to staying on track is committing concentrated attention to your company's core competencies. For SignaPay, he said, those boil down to the "PayLo service fee/cash discount program, investing in partner offices and having empathy for sales partners."
Branded-partnership model
"We are the creators of PayLo, a service fee program that has seen monumental growth in the last three years and continues to spread across the country," Nern said. According to a SignaPay video describing PayLo, the product is a legally vetted service fee program that "automatically knows when to keep a service fee on card sales or give a discount to customers that pay in cash."
The video stated the fee is "disclosed on the customer receipt." It also indicated the SignaPay PayLo program is available in all 50 states, has no hidden fees, and includes options for both terminal and POS equipment.
Nern noted that in an effort to make the program more widely available to prospective merchants, SignaPay also runs an authorized PayLo partnership program and has been busy developing new partnerships across the United States. "Our partnerships are carrying their own ownership, but under our brand, and we invest our dollars to make sure they have what they need to succeed," Nern said.
SignaPay's partner offices all receive top-level support from the SignaPay corporate entity, with such assets as online access to customizable marketing materials and a robust business management portal. Partner locations are also backed by the SignaPay customer support team, reported by SignaPay to be "the best in the industry."
Nern noted that SignaPay's authorized partner model gives the partner "better name power and recognition," which in turn, "builds loyalty and buy in. … We're spending money on office space and giving the partners the power behind the brand. We make a lot of investments in our partner offices and have launched locations in New Mexico, South Carolina, New York, and Chicago."
More growth ahead
Nern also shared that SignaPay's long-term strategy in 2020 will be to continue to focus on growing the company's dynamic partner channel. "We've grown the company three times over in the past three years, and it's certainly paying off."
Nern added that the company will continue to rely on its current hands-on approach to growing relationships. "My team puts in over 200,000 miles each year," he said. "John Martillo still actively uses the old-fashioned high-touch approach, which is demanding, but it has worked well for us over the years." 
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