Forward enables software companies to monetize payments from almost every type of card present equipment ever deployed in the United States. This means replacement cycles won’t impact the growth of your payments business.
This is significant since typically, merchants replace their payment acceptance device every 5-7 years. If you have to wait for the merchant to purchase a new device in order to generate payments income, only a fifth to a seventh of your market is available for capture in a given year. – That’s a huge headwind that prevents software companies from achieving 70% payments attach rate to their customer base.
There’s a bit of secret sauce in how we approached, designed, and built a solution to this problem – but here is what I can share. If you are in the business of selling payment acceptance devices, you are required to certify them to a core acquirer. These certifications often take 9-12 months (per device), so manufacturers are forced to prioritize which certs they pursue. If you are trying to sell the most payment devices, your first certification is going to be to the core acquirer that processes more payments than everyone else. We developed a strategic relationship with that acquirer that enables Forward to support, essentially, every device that has ever been deployed in the United States.
What does this mean for you?
This enables you to board a new or existing software customer through Forward and begin monetizing their card present in-person payment volume immediately. There is no need to convince the merchant to purchase a new device, or wait for their device to age and hit a natural replacement cycle. You can monetize on day one. It also means, you will never attempt to sell your software to a potential customer that says, well, I’d like to use your software but you can’t support my payment device.
Let’s put a face on this rather abstract concept by diving into an existing Forward customer. This government payments software company enables local and state governments to accept payments for utilities, fines, licenses, permits, and much more. Many of those payments take place online (that’s the easy part), but a material amount of the payment volume originates from in-person kiosks that are oftentimes built into a wall.
Forward onboarded their customers (governments) to our platform, required no change to the kiosks, and enabled our customer to immediately begin generating income from the payment volume already flowing through their platform. If the government payments software company required their customers to change payment acceptance devices, they would be at the beginning of a multi-year (if not a decade process) – instead their payments business is up, running, and contributing to their bottom line.
This is a dense, complicated topic – that the particulars of your industry and customer types make a big difference. Reach out to us here, and we’ll apply our experience running billions in card present payments to your use cases.
