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Education

and/or integrate with payment. It market will be a powerful draw to financial services providers and app devel-
requires insight into merchant busi- opers eager to develop partnerships with service providers who have one foot
nesses beyond payment acceptance. inside the merchants' doors. That can only lead to stickier relationships with
Service providers must become trust- merchants, and the development of incremental streams of revenue based on
ed advisers who can provide a smart apps beyond the core payment application.
POS solution that – out of the box –
will provide merchants with a full Nicky Koopman is vice president of content and value-added services with AEVI. She is a pioneer in
set of apps that automate business
processes and provide new custom- digital innovation with an entrepreneurial mindset who is responsible for bringing together AEVI's
er-facing services. digital value-added content. Nicky works with AEVI's App Developer Community to lay the foun-
dation for the next-generation of value-added content and can be reached at info@aevi.com.
These solutions must be easy to use,
given the high staff turnover that
many of these businesses experience.
Small business merchants in these
segments, and in general, have little
time or acumen to train new staff on
technology solutions that are hard to
master.

Stepping up to new role
For the most part, they don't have
the time or the interest in investigat-
ing what will eventually amount to
hundreds and thousands of apps that
might help them run their business-
es. They'll expect their trusted ad-
visers to have pre-evaluated what is
available and come to the countertop
with a core suite of essential func-
tions to begin with, and come back
time and again with add-on apps
that will build on merchants' grow-
ing knowledge and understanding of
what the technology can do for them.

The survey also indicates that if the
acquirers and other service providers
don't step up to the plate, merchant
loyalty may be tenuous. While most
indicate varying levels of satisfaction
with their payment service provid-
ers, slightly more than 47 percent
indicated they'd be willing to switch
to another for better pricing, and just
under 47 percent indicated they'd do
so if it enabled them to acquire an all-
in-one solution.

It's up to the acquiring community to
take advantage of the existing mer-
chant loyalty and take a more aggres-
sive stature in marketing and offer-
ing the solutions merchants clearly
want.

As acquirers and ISOs begin to mar-
ket smart POS solutions to the health
and beauty segments, the size of this

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