Next Choice Takes Its Merchant Platform to the Next Level With NMI Payments
The Problem
To maintain its competitive edge, Next Choice needed a solution that enabled easy sign-up, offered great merchant service delivery and integrated seamlessly with its existing systems — no small order.
Results
Next Choice integrated NMI Payments into its existing point-of-sale (POS) and merchant platform, Lynqd. This enabled Next Choice to get merchants from sign-up to approval faster, which streamlined the merchant experience, reduced time-to-processing and improved its overall value proposition.
Introduction
Next Choice is a SaaS and technology solutions provider and merchant services company headquartered in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Next Choice serves clients worldwide in a variety of industries.
While it offers a broad range of consulting services as well, Next Choice enables merchants primarily through its Lynqd solution: an integrated payments system that provides merchant services and POS software capable of powering businesses in almost any vertical.
Lynqd provides everything merchants need to accept payments — gateway services, inventory management and a first-in-industry mobile delivery platform that tracks and routes delivery drivers and enables them to take payments in the field.
The Challenge
Lynqd was outstanding at powering omnichannel sales for businesses selling in brick-and-mortar, ecommerce and mobile environments. However, signing up for their payment services could be complex. Lynqd provided merchants with everything they needed to start selling — except a merchant account. That meant that customers either had to bring their own merchant ID or sign up for one the old, slow way.
Next Choice knew that if it could streamline onboarding to payment processing, it could simplify the payments experience for its merchants and get them selling even faster.
Although Lynqd was already a full-featured integrated payments platform with very advanced features and a complex back end, they needed more frictionless sign-ups to stay ahead of other platforms. When looking for a solution, the Next Choice team knew they would need something that fit seamlessly into their existing systems without requiring time-consuming or expensive integrations.
“NMI Payments was a no-brainer for us. With the NMI gateway already integrated into our POS, the whole sign-up and onboarding process is now baked in too.”
Michael Alfonso
Next Choice Director of Operations
How NMI Helped
Next Choice was already a reseller of NMI’s industry-leading payment gateway; the company had integrated it directly into the Lynqd POS software. Through that existing relationship, Next Choice knew how seamless an integration would be. When Next Choice discovered how easily the NMI Payments platform would plug into its existing stack to streamline onboarding, it was an easy choice.
“NMI Payments was a no-brainer for us,” Michael Alfonso, Next Choice’s Director of Operations, said. “With the NMI gateway already integrated into our POS, the whole sign-up and onboarding process is now baked in too. Through one system, we can send a new merchant application in, generally get same-day approval, order any hardware the merchant needs and get it shipped out. It’s all incorporated into our gateway, ready to use with just a couple of changes in the POS settings for the merchant.”
A Frictionless Rollout With NMI’s Signature Ease of Integration
Next Choice needed a headache-free solution, and NMI’s dedicated integration team delivered one. They set Next Choice up with everything it needed to offer merchants a seamless, fully-branded sign-up and onboarding experience. They also provided Next Choice with a fully white-labeled microsite and custom links that its sales team could send to merchants, ensuring Next Choice’s branding is always front and center.
“Once we’d decided to go with NMI Payments, the process couldn’t have gone smoother,” said Alfonso. “Getting our sales team up and rolling with the branded microsites and getting everything baked into our existing sales and onboarding processes was so easy. It’s really a standout part of the experience for me.”
Great Support Enabling Great Support
With NMI Payments, Next Choice gained additional access to one of the industry’s best support teams. Along with Next Choice’s amazing support staff, the NMI team ensured that every merchant issue was dealt with as quickly and successfully as possible.
“We pride ourselves on having in-house, local experts that know all of our products inside and out,” continued Alfonso. “I can’t overstate how important it is for us to offer that to our merchants. And, to be at our best, we need our partners’ support to be at their best, too. With NMI, their team is exactly as dedicated to customer service as ours is, which I love. If any question comes up, anytime I send them an email, I’m never left waiting for a response. That makes everything go very smoothly, not just for us, but for our end merchants too.”
“With NMI, their team is exactly as dedicated to customer service as ours is, which I love. If any question comes up, anytime I send them an email, I’m never left waiting for a response.”
Michael Alfonso
Next Choice Director of Operations
The Results
As an NMI Payments partner, Next Choice Advisors can now offer merchant account sign-up as a fully integrated part of the Lynqd experience. Merchants starting with Lynqd can visit the microsite, see their transaction pricing, select their hardware and enter all their details. That information is then passed to NMI, whose expert underwriting and onboarding teams can approve merchants in just a few hours. After approval, merchants can immediately begin using Lynqd to power their sales and payments without having to go through the hassle of applying for a separate merchant account.
With NMI Payments, Lynqd’s value proposition — fast, frictionless, one-stop access to omnichannel sales and payments — has become even stronger.
For Next Choice’s merchants, that means a frictionless sign-up process that rivals the speed and convenience of huge competitors like Stripe and Square. That means even happier clients, faster time-to-revenue and less effort than before. A winning combination.
A Lifetime Partnership
Beyond the lightning-fast, frictionless onboarding and extreme ease of integration, choosing NMI Payments also deepened NCA’s relationship with NMI, a partner it knows can serve its needs as it grows, no matter how its business may evolve.
We’re not looking to have 15 different integration partners with 15 different sets of code and 15 types of firmware,” Mike Beedles, co-founder and CEO of Next Choice, said. “We need one partner that can do it all. And when we sat down and looked at this strategically, NMI checked probably 90 out of 100 boxes for us, which is astounding. That’s extremely important because having that kind of partner ensures we can get things to market a lot quicker than if we had to do everything by ourselves. It’s a great relationship for us to be a part of.”
“We’re not looking to have 15 different integration partners with 15 different sets of code and 15 types of firmware. We need one partner that can do it all. And when we sat down and looked at this strategically, NMI checked probably 90 out of 100 boxes for us, which is astounding.”
Mike Beedles
Next Choice Co-founder and CEO
About NMI
NMI is a leading global full commerce enablement platform, processing more than $195 billion in payments annually. We enable payments for over 3,300 partners and over 267,000 merchants around the world and across the entire commerce ecosystem: online, in-app, mobile, in-store, unattended and whatever’s next. We’re constantly innovating in order to power the next era of payments, building in the latest technology so ISVs, ISOs, Banks and Fintech Innovators can focus on what they do best. NMI has offices in the US and UK and serves global customers.