Embedded software-as-a-service (SaaS) payments are the future. For your users, they simplify things by using payments integrated directly into the operational software they already depend on. For you, they represent a way to monetize the payments flowing through your software, turning a cost center into a revenue driver and enabling you to deepen relationships and create stickier customers.
But embedded payments are not an “if you build it, they will come” scenario. Your users have no shortage of options for payment processing, including big platforms, and likely some of your direct competitors. To capture your users’ processing, you need to offer great embedded payments that can match or beat the experiences being offered by big, brand-name players.
One of the most critical aspects of offering an exceptional SaaS payments experience is onboarding – the process of guiding a user from sign-up to approval and enabling them to take payments. In this article, we’ll take a look at why great merchant onboarding is so important for your success, and how modular CRM systems can help you offer the best experience without the cost or headache of building anything yourself.
The Problem: You Need Sign-up and Onboarding Without the Burden of Custom Building It
Today’s merchants want convenient payment processing they can set and forget; they want the freedom to focus on their core operations, instead of dealing with finicky payment systems. That’s one of the things that makes embedded SaaS payments so appealing.
That convenience starts with sign-up, a process the biggest players in the space do exceptionally well. A slow or complex sign-up and approval process immediately sends the wrong message to your users and risks driving them into the arms of one of those big players, who they know can get them up and running within hours or even minutes. Unfortunately, high-friction sign-up is one of the biggest weak spots of many SaaS players.
Then there are your competitors. According to research from Boston Consulting Group, more than half of business-facing software providers have already integrated embedded payments. So, your competition isn’t waiting to get into the game. If your sign-up and merchant onboarding process isn’t fast and frictionless, you risk losing users altogether to another platform.
This creates a potentially tricky situation. On one hand, fast, frictionless onboarding is a must if you want to succeed in payments. But, on the other hand, you’re not a payments company, and you probably lack the internal expertise necessary to design and execute truly frictionless merchant onboarding. So, what do you do?
The Solution: Automated Onboarding Through a Plug-In CRM Module
Until recently, SaaS providers could choose one of two paths. They could use slow, clunky external onboarding systems to minimize cost, or they could take on the enormous task of building something in-house that could be directly integrated. And even then, the process would likely still be slow.
Today, there is a third path: low-code CRM-based onboarding modules. These systems provide you with a fully optimized, lightning-fast onboarding platform that can be integrated into your software quickly and easily, right out of the box. You get the functionality, speed and unparalleled user experience of a purpose-built system, designed by payments experts, without any of the expensive development or maintenance costs.
Plug-In Rapid Onboarding Gives Your Industry-Best Performance with Low-to-No Development Cost
Modular merchant onboarding systems are discrete parts of a larger payments CRM. But, instead of integrating an entire CRM platform, modular options allow you to pick and choose which functions to adopt. Modular onboarding systems are driven by application programming interfaces (APIs), giving you the flexibility to choose how to integrate them and how much or how little to customize them. They’re also fully capable of being whitelabeled, so even if you opt to use a low-code onboarding module straight out of the box, it’ll look and feel as if it were purpose-built to be part of your software.
Automated Onboarding Improves the User Experience and Helps You Earn Faster
Traditional onboarding is dependent on human data handling. When a user signs up for payments, someone at your company (or your payments partner’s company) has to manually transfer the data from the application to the acquiring bank’s system, line-by-line. It’s excruciatingly slow, and, like all human data transfer, highly prone to errors. That means your users wait longer for approvals, and data entry mistakes can bounce or even tank an application outright. Those are problems today’s merchants won’t put up with.
With automated onboarding, the data transfer happens automatically, creating a perfectly configured, error-free application that just needs to be reviewed and submitted. That makes the merchant onboarding process up to 40% faster, resulting in two things. First, your users enjoy a sign-up process that feels smooth and gets them processing without delay. Second, your residuals start flowing faster, earning you a slice of the fees on each transaction.
Modular Systems Offer Turnkey Access to Critical Payments Capabilities
Onboarding is just one of the processes you can automate and enhance by integrating customer relationship management (CRM) modules into your software.
With modules for everything from residuals management to payments reporting to sales and support, you can create an environment that streamlines all areas of your payments monetization. That ensures you can enjoy the benefits of payments without sacrificing focus on your core software.
Residuals Management Modules
Calculating and managing residuals manually requires parsing and understanding specific data from complex monthly reports. Even experienced payments professionals can spend hours or even days working out the numbers and ensuring the correct payouts.
An automated residuals module does the hard work for you, pulling the key numbers from monthly reports and presenting them instantly, in a single, easy-to-understand format. The result? Monthly residuals management can be measured in minutes instead of hours or days.
Complete Payments CRM Functionality
By integrating a payments-specific CRM into your tech stack, you can unlock a variety of additional benefits, including:
- Advanced payments reporting with fully integrated user/merchant-level analysis
- Traditional CRM benefits like enhanced lead management and sales processes
- A built-in help desk
- Embedded lending tools to offer your users access to instant, pre-approved small business loans through their account
Embed Payments Capabilities Quickly and Easily With NMI Merchant Central
NMI Merchant Central is the payments industry’s most powerful customer relationship management platform. It provides complete end-to-end coverage of all the critical parts of monetizing payments and delivering merchant services to your users. And, now, it’s fully modular, giving you control over how and what you integrate and ensuring you only pay for what you need.
Modules Include:
- Merchant Central Onboarding: NMI’s automated merchant onboarding system. Get users from sign-up to processing faster and compete with the big platforms
- Automated Residuals: Get instant access to your monthly residuals numbers, down to the penny, through a single, unified dashboard
- Reporting: Centralized access to complete data on your payments operations, including in-depth user-level reporting
To find out more about how Merchant Central’s turnkey payments modules can make monetizing software payments a breeze, reach out to a member of our team today.
Or, explore Merchant Central’s Payments CRM on your own with our virtual demo.