Become a NextGen ISO and Stay Relevant in an Ever-Changing Industry

Read the headlines from your favorite tech publication or blog on any given day and you’ll probably get an instant headache from all the innovation taking place alongside ever-shifting trends. It’s overwhelming to have to keep up. Still, if you want to become a NextGen ISO, it’s critical that you keep your business poised for change and ready to seize every opportunity that comes your way. Here’s some advice to help you with this endeavor.

Act like a NextGen ISO

Being a NextGen ISO isn’t just something you can decide one day and become the next, unless you’re already one of the few in operation. More likely, you’re a forward-thinking ISO or value-added reseller aspiring to offer your customers more to better serve them and become an indispensable asset. To truly become a NextGen ISO, you must:

• Differentiate through value-added technology—embrace software, engaging in design and development, to deliver additional value to merchants. Don’t look at yourself like as just a payments company; you are an innovator who brings together everything a merchant needs to engage with customers, drive sales, and collect payments securely.
• Build your own brand rather than that of your vendor partners—Offer white-labeled payment solutions to increase brand awareness, establish stickier relationships, and control the onboarding, offboarding, and administration of accounts.
• Innovate—Lean on strategic partnerships with vendors to tap into priceless R&D. Take comfort in knowing that key trends such as contactless payments, omnichannel, and unattended are being addressed and that exciting new value-added functionality is being continuously added.
• Focus on compliance—The right payments partner will have you covered from a security perspective and allow you to confidently go to market with the latest secure solutions. (NMI releases more than 100 industry compliance and regulation updates every year so its partners don’t have to.)
• Change your sales and marketing strategy—Providing and supporting a holistic niche technology and payment solution is the key to delivering real added value and differentiating. You’re offering something unique, so you should let that be clear in your marketing materials and during sales calls. Your niche solutions will allow you to flourish.

Bring on expertise

If you don’t have staff with the time or capability of keeping up (or, more likely, catching up) with the changes taking place in this industry, it might be time to hire an expert. This is especially true if you’re aspiring to become a NextGen ISO and add software development to your business. General developers will take a long time to understand the nuances of your industry and, especially, the payments components. Here, again, is where having a good payments partner with developer resources will come in handy. Additionally, you should try to find developers that are already familiar with payments. Ideally, you want your hires in all departments to bring new knowledge to you, not the other way around.

Select powerful allies

The best bit of advice we can share is that you don’t have to figure things out on your own. The right partners will allow you to focus on the core competencies of your business while they tackle the pieces that are outside your comfort zone. We see this all the time when it comes to electronic payments. Some companies attempt to build their own payment infrastructure, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time when they could have partnered with a company like NMI that specializes in payments, has hundreds of subject matter experts on staff, and offers SDKs and APIs that make tapping into our payment solutions easy and fast.

In addition, the right payment partner will have a broad portfolio of certified integrations, which gives you and your customers choice. The bottom line: the right allies make your life way easier.

The Evolution of ISOs & the Future of Payments

The payments landscape is ever-changing and there’s no shortage of disrupters that have popped up, resulting in more competition and raising the stakes for ISOs. We’re seeing more and more ISOs address this shift as they evolve into what we’re referring to as NextGen ISOs.

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