The merchant is misunderstood

In 2010 both MasterCard and Visa purchased major payment service providers like DataCash and Cybersource. As did some payment processors that acquired payment service providers. The e-commerce market now has a solid place in retail activities. Due to the scale and consolidation of the market the PSP´s became international payment processors themselves, often with the particularity that they collected the payments as well, with a lot of opportunities of increasing revenues from that. The only remaining difference with traditional institutional payment processors is the channel itself.

A question that keeps popping up in my mind is that this current thinking in channels, e-commerce, point of sale, MOTO, mobile can´t stay valid. Although I can see the specialism from either bankacquirers for POS and payment service providers for e-commerce and often specific segments like airlines in addition, this is not how a merchant would prefer to work.

The merchant has already choosen, is or will be confronted with consumers that don´t fit in this classic segmentation. The consumer is focussed on a transaction with a merchant, via mobile proximity at the POS, mobile internet with a remote payment, classic internet or in the shop, whatever is most convenient to him.

As this is the case how can a single channel provider be the best advisor to the merchant? These current providers have to many strings in the payment method acquiring to be an independent advisor for the true multi channel retail experience. As the channels merge this brings new opportunities for the merchant with regards to payments. Insight in consumer behaviour is more important than ever and asks for a redesigned payment strategy.