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Education

Recently, I attended the WSAA
conference in Fort Worth, Texas. It
was a terrific event and very well
attended. However, it struck me
during this event, that our industry is
a supertanker struggling to stop.

As I entered the exhibit hall, I couldn't
help but notice that the majority of
exhibitors, vendors, ISOs, processors,
etc. were B2C focused. Countless
Getting off the B2C vendors appeared to be selling
terminals and POS technology.
Legions of ISOs were focused on
supertanker agent recruitment for the B2C space,
and still other vendors were engaged

By Roger McNamara in the usual B2C banter.
Guide2Interchange The event organizers breakout
sessions were further focused on
upertankers are among the largest ships in the world. They can B2C, discussing dated items like buy
exceed 1,500 feet in length, which is longer than the height of the now, pay later. To be sure, the B2C
Empire State Building in New York City. One other amazing fact: It industry has been very good to many
S takes almost 20 minutes for a fully loaded supertanker to stop when people in our industry for a long
traveling at normal speed. The good news is that it can manage this stop in 14 time. Consumer payments on cards
minutes under emergency conditions. Whew! I'm sure glad about that. in the United States in 2018 exceeded
$5 trillion. That's a lot of basis points
no matter how you add it up.

An overloaded vessel
But the supertanker is becoming a
little worn. Margins are down due to
increased competition. We also sell a
product that doesn't take merchants
out of the market but puts them into
it for our competitors to sell them the
same product at a lower cost. In many
cases, the new seller even ends up
making less. Long term, this can’t be
sustained.

As I walked the event hall, the
supertanker image kept coming to
mind. The industry is struggling
to find the next big step, as B2C
payments have essentially capped
out. There are scant untapped
industry segments within B2C.
Therefore, if the pie is not growing in
B2C, why is there so much focus on
it? For the most part, it’s been easy
to sell. When cash is the only serious
competitor for about 95 percent of the
market, credit becomes king. If you
are a B2C business, you must be able
to accept cards, and many agents can
gladly sell it to you.

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