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Education

Let's eliminate friction Leverage AI and automation

from merchant services In this age of instant customer onboarding, you need to
augment credit decisioning with artificial intelligence, ma-
chine learning and automation to bring your risk manage-
ment and underwriting into the 21st century and derive
a fully dimensional view of your prospective merchants.

These tools are driving faster payment, settlement times,
fraud detection and prevention and more. Don't stay stuck
in manual procedures that hold you back from fully par-
ticipating in the merchant services ecosystem.
Differentiate

Twenty years ago, when I got into this business, merchants
were getting used to the idea of processing payments elec-
tronically, so it was okay to talk to them about it. Today, if
you try to open a conversation by talking about payment
processing, you'll be hung up on or asked to leave a store.

Don't make the mistake of trying to be like every other
By Allen Kopelman merchant acquirer. Show a business owner how to solve a
Nationwide Payment Systems problem, make more money, and attract and retain more
customers by demonstrating your knowledge of their area
id you know that friction is the number one of specialization, whether it's fast food, retail, ecommerce
cause of burnout among small and midsize or other vertical industry.
business owners? As merchant service provid- Give something away
D ers, we help merchants remove friction all day
long to improve the customer experience. Isn't it about Don't be afraid to offer free advice or a free referral. It also
time to apply that same expertise to our own businesses? can't hurt to buy something once in a while. Why be the
only one to make a sale? Merchant services is a relation-
Let's face it: we could be better at customer onboarding, ship business and it takes time to build solid relationships
portfolio management, transaction monitoring, PCI com- based on trust, respect and profitability.
pliance, KYC or AML—just to name a few. In fact, some
of the payments industry's best-selling solutions, like IRIS Let your prospects know you're in this for the long ride,
CRM, Secure Bancard's Pioneer, and Biller Genie, were all not to make a sale and disappear, never to be heard from
designed to solve internal problems until a team member again.
realized that others, even competitors, could benefit from
these services as well. Remove friction from selling
The best way to remove friction from the sales process is
A thorough audit of your internal business practices can to listen more than you talk. This will come naturally if
help reveal areas in need of improvement, and rest as- you are genuinely interested in the people you meet. Look
sured, we all have them. It's best to get your house in or- around their shop or restaurant, not as someone who's
der, especially if you're trying to attract investors, because desperate to make a sale but as a prospective customer.
anyone who bets on your success will care deeply about Business is a two-way street.
operational efficiencies.
Ditch duplications Stop thinking of the merchants you visit as sales targets.
Recognize we're all in this together as merchants, service
The first order of business is to figure out what you're re- providers, card brands and consumers. In many cases, we
peating, because the only place where double entry be- wear more than one hat. We're businesspeople, consumers
longs is in accounting. If you have data entry people who and some of us even have merchant accounts. Isn't it time
are manually entering information from merchant appli- to start acting like a community of professionals and help
cations, it's time to update your technologies. each other grow and scale?

If you're using more than one system to monitor your mer- Allen Kopelman, a serial entrepreneur is cofounder and CEO of
chant portfolio, a secure user portal with multiple permis-
sion levels can provide a real-time, single-access view of Nationwide Payment Systems Inc. and host of B2B Vault: The Payment
everything from payment flows, service tickets, transac- Technology podcast. Email him at allen@npsbank.com and connect on
tion disputes and inquiries to POS deployments and re- LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenkopelman/ and Twitter @
porting. AllenKopelman
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