Payment Industry Relevance – Do Labels Matter?

Mike Monocello recently put together a blog called The Death of POS VARs. It’s a pretty interesting tale regarding naming of parts of the industry and suggests that the naming should be updated to reflect the current services which these dealers, resellers, and distributors provide.

From a marketing perspective, we see that names are broken all the time. What is an Amazon or an Apple? These names clearly don’t define these companies. To that end, let’s look at titles for a moment. Recently I have seen “Chief Ninja’s” and “Development Rockstars.” What role does a Ninja play in a company and how does that impact ROI?

By way of background, I will admit that: 1) I am not cool, 2) I wear socks and never wear jeans to a business meeting, and 3) I am getting up there in age and am clearly separated from the latest generation on several fronts.

For instance, while driving the babysitter home last night a song came on the radio from a band apparently called One Direction (we were listening to my daughters channel, so don’t hate!). Apparently the babysitter had never heard the song on the radio before, only watched the video and said that, “This is the biggest thing ever.” Well, it was no Durbin amendment, Google Wallet launch or iPhone 5 release leaving out NFC, but I can see how it would stack up highly on a teenage girl’s list of ‘biggest things ever’.

Either way, let’s get back to the point. Does it matter what these VAR’s call themselves?  Does their name impact their success? I will agree that it is much easier to understand what Mike’s Car Wash provides versus the local ‘Autopia’. Yet does that matter with the implementation of smart search algorithm’s, Angie’s List and Yelp?

From my own experience, my wife and I almost exclusively find service providers by word of mouth or by ratings services. So from my perceptive, a service provider can call itself Chocolate Pudding and if they are recommended by a couple of people, I will use them to address my needs.

Mike also points out that these dealers, resellers and distributors are really not just dealing, reselling or distributing product, but rather are working in a consultative fashion to develop real solutions for merchants. Thus while retail technology is quickly changing from expensive per lane hardware to inexpensive tablets and mobile solutions, the solution providers who continue to provide up to date guidance and advice to their clients on the best way to solve their business problems are going to continue to thrive.

Following through on that solving problems theme, I love The Wolf character from Pulp Fiction. As you know, he solves problems. While I am not going to take over the moniker, one of the best parts of my job is getting to sit down with merchants from a variety of industries and work with them to improve their security, customer service, solution set, or in short – solve problems. What is even better is that I am lucky enough to work with a whole pack of Wolves here at VeriFone looking to solve problems.

If you have read my blogs before, you will notice that they are not advertisements or calls to action to spur sales. Rather, I try to inform and educate in an easily consumable fashion. Today I will venture off of that path a bit and simply offer this – if you are interested in talking to experts who are truly interested in solving your payments related issues, often you can do no better than contacting your VeriFone representative. If this representative doesn’t have the solution at hand, they can often get to an industry expert in one phone call or email.

Oh by the way, there is an entirely different pack of wolves here at VeriFone working to solve the problems that you don’t know you have yet. I can’t wait to start implementing these macro technologies to help solve a host of problems for merchants.