Today’s business ecosystem is all about being disruptive, thinking outside-the-box and transforming your enterprise business practices into thinking like a startup. But how does that translate into innovating enterprise payments?
Let us count the ways (five, to be exact). For enterprises to start moving quickly, they must be able to pivot at a moment’s notice when trends are shifting. This starts by having a better understanding of how to integrate new solutions and make enterprise payments more nimble.
It’s easy for an enterprise model to become its own worst enemy. Unlike a startup, which is always ready to change its business practices, enterprises are focused on building strategic, incremental changes that don’t rock the boat too much with their customer base. In the long run, that won’t help you scale your business.
Because the world of enterprise payments is being disrupted in ways never seen before, now is the time for your business to start thinking about if it has the right payments enablement partner by its side to power its enterprise payments needs.
Enterprise Payments Tip No 1: Think About Platforms vs. Services
For many years, companies in the payments ecosystem were hyper-focused on only providing one type of service or solution. Today, much like the startup model, the trend is all about embracing the platforms model.
Finding a company with a solid platform of solutions, instead of a fragmented series of products, is the first way your enterprise business can start thinking about payments holistically as part of your overall business strategy — instead of just one piece of its own puzzle. Business today need to think about how platform-focused partners can provide more comprehensive ways to innovate your enterprise payments strategy.
Enterprise Payments Tip No 2: Use Your Size as Your Strength
Unlike a startup, you have one major advantage: you’ve got a solid structure that can help your company scale its solutions faster than a startup could ever dream. When thinking about how to innovate your enterprise payments solutions, you should be thinking about how you can leverage your already established relationships to make your own products and services better.
By having the power to innovate like a startup, you can challenge the status quo of how business has always been done, including how your enterprise payments systems have been managed. But from there, you can leverage your deep pockets and many resources to invest in solutions and platforms that can help your business scale.
Enterprise Payments Tip No 3: Have the Right Partnerships
Of course, the first step in being an enterprise that thinks more like a startup is all about having the right leader who isn’t afraid to change when necessary. That also means having a leader who is willing to invest in the right enterprise payment partnerships, and pivot from a relationship that isn’t helping your business grow.
For example, by working with Payline, your business can have the added advantage of having access to flexible, dynamic, secure payment processing solutions that are built to scale, will drive revenue and can boost your business’ conversion rates. How do we know? Because we’ve built our payment enablement services for enterprise payments around delivering better experiences for you and your customer.
Enterprise Payments Tip No 4: Grow Organically From Within Your Organization
The best way to be an enterprise, but think like a startup? Build a startup within your own company. This not only allows you to think like an innovator, but you can test new enterprise payments solutions within this startup to see how it can then better impact your organization as a whole.
If you really want to be an enterprise business with a startup mindset you need to dedicate your time and resources into investing in new technology in the market. That also means working with companies like Payline to power that experience.
Enterprise Payments Tip No 5: Be Ready to Move Quickly and Be Nimble
The problem that most enterprises have is that they aren’t ready to change fast enough. But, if you don’t want to fall behind the latest trends and risk losing customers, you must embrace change.
Thinking more like a startup is all about being nimble and evaluating every decision as it’s made. When it comes to applying that philosophy to choosing the right enterprise payments processing solutions, you should always think about how it helps your business scale, how it helps convert more customers and how it helps your business move faster in its everyday interaction with customers.
Once you’re ready to embrace change, focus on the payments experience and find the right payments partner, then you’re on your way to innovating like a startup.
Anna Lothson is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.
