Outsourcing electronic payment services

Graham Williams

According to Grant Thornton's International Business Report, 47% of business owners surveyed in the 4th quarter of 2012, placed the skills shortage as their top growth constraint.

While stats like these may encourage companies to revisit hiring procedures and to put measures in place to retain skilled employees at all costs, we would suggest an alternative tack. Particularly when the skills in question are highly specialised and mission-critical, such as managing your electronic payment environment.

This might seem counter-intuitive. Surely, having your customers pay you for goods and services rendered is core to what you do and you would be mad to trust the management of this critical business process to anyone but a member of your own team, right? Or maybe not.

Indeed, there are several very compelling arguments for trusting a payment management service to handle this management function for you. I would argue this is the better way to resolve any issues quickly with minimum downtime and to sort out any potential issues proactively before they bite you, and your profits and productivity.

In fact, your core business is not about taking payments for goods and services. Your core business is about providing the best goods and services, from loaves of bread to designer handbags, making your customers happy and keep them coming back. However, you need peace of mind that your payment environment is extremely efficient, effective and current.

However, why unnecessarily create the headache of building a team of payment solution ninjas to do everything from day-to-day maintenance and report running, to expert customisation, problem solving and trend spotting? Not to mention keeping abreast of local and international financial regulations, for example the on-going EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) migration and ensuring your company continues to comply.

Nevertheless, let us say you get this right and manage to build the skills in-house. It is all very well until that staff member - or more likely, critical members of the team you have had to build - move on, taking their hard-won domain knowledge with them and leaving you back at square one.

Using expert management services

Far better to entrust the management of your payment service to an expert management service, for this, and a range of additional reasons:

1. Access to wide skillsets - an outsourced supplier has a multitude of personality types to supply a range of skillsets to carry out a spread of tasks from the mundane but focussed daily maintenance and reporting, to highly specialised and advanced customisation, problem solving and compliance. It's unlikely you'll find one or even two candidates who can cover this breadth of requirements. Then there's the small matter of hanging on to them in an era where two years is considered, by employees at least, to be far too long in a single role.

2. Benefit from wider knowledge - a well organised management service team works across a range of clients and each one benefits from the knowledge, experience, bug fixes and trends that happen in other environments. EMV is also a good example of this: this provides a foundation for fighting fraud and allows issuers to take charge of transactions at the point-of-sale. However, using these tools to prevent fraud needs a deep understanding of the EMV standard as well as the systems within the transaction chain. Few companies have the resources to ensure complete control of the value chain.

3. Proactive management of your payment environment - spotting issues before they occur and preventing them - requires specific temperaments and a discrete set of processes, tools and skills. Technical problem solvers are unlikely to be satisfied tackling the day-to-day tasks required for high-quality proactive management. Again, this points to the spread of skills you require to achieve certain business outcomes.

4. Extend the value and the lifespan of your investment - with the right management, the value and lifespan of a payment switch can be dramatically extended, while decreasing the cost but only if it is properly managed, with the right tools, processes and skillset and an eye on the future.
   

Control still in-house

Outsourcing the management of your payments environment does not mean giving up complete control, however. Payments are a strategic asset, which, if manipulated innovatively, can add significant competitive advantage to your business. Your payment management partner should provide you with strategic information about both payment industry trends and accessible business metrics relating to your payments environment and infrastructure capability. This is provided through a number of enabling channels including real-time mobile reporting. This will allow you to make and control the strategic decisions unique to your business case.

Nor does outsourcing mean you are going to get one-size-fits all approach. A good payment management service will be able to incorporate any third party monitoring, reconciliation or other software you have already invested in, thus maximising your investment and giving you the nuanced reporting your industry requires.

It seems that South Africa's do it yourself attitude is not serving companies well when they come up against skill shortages. Well-informed companies realise that taking customer payments for goods and services rendered is probably not their core focus, and nor should it be. Rather, creating the perfect goods and services for your customers is your core focus, so far better to build and retain skills here, rather than in non-core, yet still highly mission-critical functions such as the management of payment switching.