What makes a good payments partner: Five key considerations

For enterprise level companies, taking card payments is rarely simple. Multiple locations, across different markets, handling currencies, customs and regulatory differences, all at scale offers challenges, often unique to your own business. 

That challenge is only going to get harder. Like all tech-led industries, payments rarely stand still. Payment methods and consumer expectations are constantly evolving. As they do, regulations and consumer protections are introduced to keep pace with those changes.

Speed and reliability

There’s a huge wave of change coming: regulatory change, new payment methods, new suppliers and more. You need an industrial level partner to process industrial level volumes and transactions. As well as speed, it needs to be based on a reliable, sturdy platform that won’t fall over. That ability to process volume, quickly and seamlessly is of the utmost importance and should be a key consideration when choosing your platform. Coupled with that, is a partner that can quickly and efficiently implement scheme innovations such as tokenisation.

A unified payment experience

Your customers don’t think in channels so your payments shouldn’t either. Advances in technology means your customers expect to be able pay at every touch point they have with you without being bounced to a different channel to pay. Think of a hotel guest who pays for a room booking online, adds extras in an app and settles up at the end of a stay in-person. Or a shopper who finds your store on Tik Tok and wants to make an immediate purchase but then chooses to exchange in-person. A unified payment experience keeps things simple for you and your customers. It removes friction at each payment point for your customer and creates one point of reconciliation and reporting, no matter where or how a payment was made.

Backed by a bank

Over the past decade top class banks and top-class payments providers have diverged, with banks and payments preferring to specialise in one or the other. That left merchants having to make a choice: best in class payments, or best in class banking. That’s not a sacrifice you need to make. At Elavon, we own the acquiring and we’re part of U.S. Bank, offering the strength, scope and stability you would expect from the fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States. Our enterprise customers can take advantage of our banking services, such as cash management tasks, foreign exchange services, corporate financing or the support of a world-class risk and compliance team. 

Growing your payments strategy

Picking the right payments partner is rarely as simple as picking a POS off a shelf or integrating a gateway into your website. Ultimately, it’s about choosing a provider with the stability and ability to meet your payment processing needs, the scale to grow with you, the adaptability to meet your needs as they grow, and the support to implement technical and regulatory changes in the industry.