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Education

The business shutdown created a surge in online order- Find newer, better cheese
ing, which pushed numerous restaurants into partner-
ships with third-party service providers—like DoorDash, I recently attended a conference, the MPC Digital Com-
Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates and more—popping up merce Event in Atlanta, where there were a lot of discus-
every day. sions about new wallets and alternative forms of payment.
We heard from all sorts of fintech companies offering a
Inside dining processing volumes declined as restaurants range of payment types, including wallets from other
began selling food through mobile apps and began to cut countries and cross-border payments in local currencies.
back on their indoor POS systems. This impacted our busi-
ness as well as numerous other ISOs and MLSs, as digital When you consider the profusion of changes taking place
commerce and ecommerce took off like a rocket. in the payments ecosystem, it can't hurt to check your
merchants' websites to see what other forms of payments
In fact, a study published Aug. 2, 2022, by Juniper Re- they're accepting besides credit cards and what other
search predicted the total number of digital wallet users third-party services their payments are flowing into.
will exceed 5.2 billion globally by 2026, up from 3.4 billion
in 2022, a 53 percent increase driven by "superapps" in de- If you've seen a dip in major credit card activity, it's pos-
veloping countries, researchers found. sible your competitors or even your own customers are
moving your residual cheese. If that's the case, here's a
As our restaurant processing volumes declined in recent simple fix: find newer, better cheese in the form of digital
years, we began to focus on other areas, such as digital wallets, cryptocurrencies, touchless commerce and other
wallets, cryptocurrency and ecommerce. But ironically, emerging payment methods, and tap into new recurring
we began to see a second wave as ecommerce volumes be- revenue streams.
gin to decline. And upon closer examination, we saw a
ton of checkout options being offered on ecommerce sites, Allen Kopelman, a serial entrepreneur, is co-founder and CEO of
including PayPal, Venmo, ShopPay (Shopify), Amazon Nationwide Payment Systems Inc. and host of B2B Vault: The Payment
Checkout and more. Technology podcast. Email him at allen@npsbank.com, and connect
on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenkopelman/ and Twitter
@AllenKopelman.

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