Reasons to Hire A Payments Consultant
If your company is thinking about becoming a payment facilitator or making other strategic changes to your payment acceptance program, you may have been advised to hire an independent payments industry expert or consultant. You might be wondering whether you need to take that advice seriously, or whether a consultant is a worthwhile expense. I’ll detail below why an independent payments consultant can be a highly valuable resource.
1. You’ll Get to Market Faster
Let’s imagine you’re building a house. If you want to save money, you can hire the plumber, mason, electrician and a multitude of subcontractors one by one, vetting them yourself, and managing each of those relationships and timelines. You’ll save money at first but inevitably the process will be slower, and come with hiccups and unforeseen challenges that you must deal with using precious time and resources.
Another option is to hire a general contractor to take care of all the details, keep you and the project on track and on time, and tell you what’s upcoming so you can make well-informed decisions ahead of time and not under duress.
An independent payments consultant is a general contractor for the payments industry. Building a payment facilitation model is incredibly complex. You’ll have to deal with compliance, operational demands, and HR issues including training and education. This is on top of legal worries, financial responsibilities, sales, marketing support, and relationship management with your vendors and payment partners, in addition to your clients.
The right payments industry expert will guide you through this process, making it run faster and more smoothly. You’ll be better informed throughout the project.
2. You Can Avoid Conflicts of Interest with Your Sponsor
Building a payment facilitation model, especially if there are international requirements, brings a number of new and high-stakes responsibilities to your plate. You must have a clear understanding of industry rules and regulations and develop appropriate internal procedures to meet requirements. The payments partners with whom you establish relationships will not necessarily be able to help you with these things because that would create a conflict of interest: they’re also subject to the same rules and regulations which require them to audit your ability to be compliant. They can tell you what you need to do to be compliant with various payments industry and governmental regulations, but not how.
A strong payments consultant is completely independent, and therefore best positioned to help you wade through complex requirements without presenting a conflict of interest for you or your partners.
3. You’ll Be Introduced to the Best Partners
Instead of taking months casting about and talking to people, a great payments consultant can introduce you to the right partners and best fits for your situation very quickly. The consultant can then help you better understand the new industry acronyms and what services they represent. Frankly, you don’t know what you don’t know, and the payments industry can seem opaque to newcomers. The same way most people need a lawyer to navigate the court system, your company might need experienced insight to know exactly who and what you’re looking for or what will create the most value for you.
4. Even the Best Attorney Won’t Be Enough
Many CEOs ask why they can’t just hire a good attorney to get them through the process. Certainly there are attorneys that specialize in payments and are highly expert, but the reality is they cannot help you build your internal procedures and processes or make tactical choices as the project unfolds. It’s simply not their role. For example, building an underwriting process is something only an experienced payment expert can guide you through.
A good independent payments consultant will insist that clients work with attorneys as vital to all contractual relationships and many compliance issues, and can recommend several that are notable in the industry.
5. A Good Payments Consultant Pays for Themselves
By getting to revenue growth faster, more quickly coming up to speed on the subtleties of payment processing, working with the best partners, and starting off in compliance, RPY’s clients find they have increased their profits significantly more than they’ve paid us. The ROI of a payments consultant is often very short indeed.
The fact is, hiring a payments consultant is not absolutely necessary. It is possible to do all the steps on your own, or with the help of contacts familiar with the payment facilitation services and payments industry. But the benefits of hiring a skilled, experienced payment consultant far outweigh the costs. RPY payment consultants bring decades of successful experience across a wide range of endeavors in the payments industry and can tackle tough tasks for our clients, untangling particular knots and saving you time, energy and money.
