How to lead your business customers in the digital payment transition

We’re amid a very exciting time for businesses. The world around them is evolving very quickly and their payment needs are changing about as rapidly as their environment. For these businesses, they’ve got to accommodate a wide variety of end payee needs and use cases.

Financial institutions must find a way to not only create a path toward digitalization for their business customers, but also help to make existing payment processes more efficient. An ideal payment solution is easy to use, maximizes automation and minimizes disruption to existing processes, policies and infrastructure.

Meet your business customer needs

There’s a measure of expectation that’s underway in the marketplace. On the personal payment side, people are getting used to being paid electronically, and those expectations are being transferred to the business payment experience. To increase overall payee satisfaction, businesses have certain needs that can best be met with digital payments, including:

• Enhanced security measures
• Faster merchant processing
• Trackable payment status
• Simple remittance reconciliation
• Increased payment flexibility

Your business customers are actively seeking payment solutions. In a payments study, Deluxe and our industry partner Aite-Novarica Group found that more than 75% of small businesses look for flexible payment options when selecting a new bank partner. Banks can use digital payments to set themselves apart from the competition by offering a complete set of payment solutions for all use cases.

To prepare your business customers for a digital transformation, your bankers need to be aware of all the payment solutions you have and understand the best solution for each business client’s specific use case. For example, a bank may offer an ACH payment solution which works well in one use case, but not for all. By offering multiple digital payment solutions, banks can cover the full spectrum of use cases. Once you’ve assessed your bank’s current payment offerings, identify any use case gaps and advocate with your internal stakeholders to offer a full toolkit of payment solutions.

Select the right vendor partnership

Digital payments are the most important part of any business’s plan to be able to adapt themselves to the environment that they’re in. Maintaining a strong position as a trusted business partner in payments is critical to your bank’s success—as is selecting the right technology partner. You want to find an innovative solution provider with a proven track record who can offer support for both you and your business customer.

Questions you should keep in mind when assessing a new payments vendor:

• What are the strengths of your payment solution?
• Are there any areas where your solution doesn’t provide full coverage?
• Is this vendor’s solution complementary to the solutions that I already offer?
• Can this provider scale and provide the support that I need?

Best practices for successful digitization

When it comes to implementing a new digital payment with your business customers, one best practice we’ve seen is to offer your customers a payment solution that doesn’t require investing a lot of integration effort or education. Very few businesses want to try an unproven solution and scale with all their payments. Start by offering a solution to a specific subset of use cases where your business customer can try a product with low risk. Businesses are not inclined to make a large investment or change their existing practices until they see the solution work well with their payees.

Certain digital payment solutions can require substantive, meaningful investment both in terms of integration into software and process change. That's a big leap for a business to make. By nurturing this digital relationship with low-risk use cases, you prove that you are the right banking partner and you understand making the digital transition in one leap may not be comfortable for most of your business customers.

Another best practice includes using testimonials from businesses that have benefitted from your product offering. Your business customer doesn’t want to hear that the solution provider or your bank guarantees it’ll work—what works best is to show them what other businesses that look like them have experienced. Businesses have heard promises of how a solution will positively impact their operations, but it’s extremely useful to offer testimonials—especially from businesses of similar size or vertical. 

Become a trusted payments partner

It really is possible today for you to offer a suite of solutions that don’t require fundamental changes to your business client’s existing processes or systems. By offering these bridge-like payment solutions, businesses can experience the benefits of digital payments without the added stress of implementation costs and increased risk. You can position your bank as a trusted payments partner by understanding your business customer’s specific payment needs and supporting them through every step of digitization. These best practices will help strengthen your existing business customer relationships, increase your revenue and bring in new clients.