United States
Smart merchant services open lots of doors, and it all starts with your state bankers association.
Your state bankers association advocates for you, provides education, and fosters industry development. They are also your support system and resource hub. Their preferred vendors program is one of those resources. It can be a treasure trove of excellent, pre-vetted partners standing by to help you and your bank succeed and grow.
Prospective payment partners that are part of your association’s preferred vendors program are especially useful to get to know. Their products and services are essential to your business clients, and having great merchant-services options to offer can be a gamechanger—both for these businesses and for you. Much more than payment processing, they turn basic payments into a strategic growth lever.
Besides, business owners often prefer to get their merchant services from their bank. In fact, according to a Mercator Advisory Group study, fully 70% of small businesses choose their bank for payment services.
The banker/payment partner/business owner relationship is a win-win-win in a number of ways. How do smarter payments empower banks and bankers as part of this equation? Let’s take a look.
Stronger Client Relationships
Strong payment services strengthen the banker-business client relationship.
A banker who brings modern payment solutions to the table becomes more of a strategic, consultative adviser. Capabilities like mobile payments, omnicommerce tools, recurring/subscription billing, and the full range of payment methods—tap-to-pay, digital wallet acceptance, QR codes—can dramatically improve a business’s operations, saving them significant time and money.
Payment processing is just a small piece of the puzzle. Business clients see and touch payments in lots of ways every day. The excellent merchant services you’ve helped them implement are an ever-present reminder of your skills and value.
This ongoing engagement makes the client’s relationship to you and your bank stickier than most bank products. Smart merchant services build durable loyalty.
Data and Insights
To a modern banker, good data is worth its weight in gold. An excellent payments partner provides you with a window into your business clients’ financial health that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Payment settlement and transaction reporting can give you deeper insight into clients’ financial health.
Transaction trends allow you to sort clients into groups—growth, steady-state, or declining. Growth clients are good candidates for additional bank products, such as loans and treasury services. On the other end of the spectrum, payment trends such as dips in volume and chargebacks can heighten your risk awareness, potentially signaling emerging credit risks earlier than financial statements.
Bottom line: With the right payments partner at your side, you become an increasingly valuable asset to both your bank and your business clients.
Revenue and Cross-Sell Growth
For banks, merchant services create non-interest income streams through revenue-share or buy-rate programs. Processing-fee revenue is shared with the payment partner, or, typically for larger banks, processing fees are marked up. The payment partner handles the technology, risk, and compliance, and the banker serves as the client relationship manager. This three-way arrangement creates steady, recurring-fee-based income for the bank with minimal operational overhead.
As mentioned above, cross-sell growth is another revenue opportunity unlocked by smart payments. Payments data can not only signal coming risks, but it can also be a gateway to lending, treasury, and cash-management conversations. For example, identifying businesses with large daily card volume but delayed settlements might lead you to offer faster funding solutions—something that can improve a business’s cash flow significantly.
Bottom line: Your bank and your clients both profit from a smarter payments relationship, with you as the important link.
Banker Differentiation
Which leads us to how all of this benefits you and your career.
A banker armed with smarter payment experiences has a competitive advantage. Your payments expertise will help you stand out compared to peers who aren’t as well informed and focus primarily on loans and deposit accounts.
Financial knowledge is power. The education you receive about payments solutions equips you with knowledge and skills—something you can add to your resume, leverage throughout your career, and capitalize on for promotions or specialization.
The more you know, the better positioned you are to offer your expertise to your business clients. And the greater the difference you make to your business clients, the more loyal they become—and the more likely they are to refer other business owners to you. Your book of business grows, and along with it, your career.
Bottom line: With the right payment partner providing you with ongoing education, smart products and guidance, and excellent service, merchant services expertise can catapult your career.
Choosing a Payment Partner
Smart merchant services empower you to succeed and grow. They strengthen client relationships, provide client insights, bring in extra revenue and cross-selling opportunities, and differentiate you from other bankers.
The ideal merchant-services provider will see you as a strategic partner and treat you like one, providing education, marketing, reporting, and collaborative selling.
Of course, not all payment partners are created equal. As a member of your state association’s preferred vendor program, Payroc is standing by to help you and your business clients grow and prosper. We hold a BBB A+ rating, have partnered with financial institutions since 2003, and serve over 190,000 merchants. We offer a complete product lineup, POS and payment-system recommendations personalized to each merchant, and award-winning support for both our FI partners and merchants.
The bottom line is that Payroc not only offers the smart payment products you need, but we also prioritize banker relationships. We look forward to empowering you to succeed.