4 Steps to Make Your ISO Business More Profitable in 2023

As headlines warn of a potential recession, consumers are tightening their belts in preparation for a challenging year. While so much negative buzz can be daunting, it’s important to remember that tighter market and economic conditions can open the door to new opportunities.

With the right tools and strategies, you can carve out market share from less adaptable competitors and position yourself as the ISO merchants lean on for success. Below, we explore four steps ISOs should follow to grow their business in 2023, including:

• Expanding your offering
• Enhancing productivity
• Prioritizing fraud prevention
• Leveraging CRM technology

Even as they cut back on spending, consumers demand more than ever from merchants. By redefining your go-to-market strategy and giving your merchants the tools they need to exceed expectations, you can future-proof your business and maximize growth.

Expand Your Offering to Unlock Latent Revenue

One of the best ways to get ahead is by generating more revenue from your existing customers. Consider the services you offer your merchant partners. Can you fill any gaps to improve their experience and unlock higher profits?

Giving your merchants more choice in how they accept and process payments allows them to optimize the shopping experience for their end customers. Offering a robust suite of offerings, such as payment gateway resales and mobile payments, will make your merchants happier and allow you to capture a greater share of wallet.

Payment Gateway Reselling

If your merchants sell online or in-store, they need a reliable payment gateway. If they aren’t already getting it from you, you’re leaving a great source of monthly revenue on the table and making your merchants’ lives more difficult.

Becoming a gateway reseller is a great way to overcome this challenge. Becoming a reseller enables you to package gateway services from some of the industry’s top providers - under your branding and style. There’s no upfront cost involved - you only pay the wholesale rate once you’ve made a sale. Because you have full control over how you resell the gateway, you can pass along a rate that’s affordable for merchants and profitable for your business.

Your merchants will benefit from the conveniences of a one-stop payment gateway processing service, and you will open a valuable revenue stream that’s fast and easy for your agents to sell.

Mobile Payments

In today’s economy, mobile payments solutions are a necessity. Consumers love digital wallets that enable them to make lightning-fast, secure payments with their devices. For merchants accepting mobile payments, this provides an opportunity to improve the buying experience and generate more income.

Tap-to-mobile lets merchants turn any smartphone or tablet into a mobile payment terminal. By offering mobile payments, you can service merchants who want to accept credit card payments on the go without being tied to clunky, traditional payment terminals.

Enhance Productivity

How much time does your team spend on manual tasks? Merchant onboarding and underwriting require hours of paperwork and data entry. For high-risk accounts, this process could take days. Slow, manual processes frustrate merchants who want to start accepting payments quickly and take valuable time away from your team.

Thankfully, solutions are available that will automate much of your team’s onboarding, underwriting and risk-management workflows.

For example, automated underwriting and risk assessment solutions will conduct in-depth background and credit checks on your behalf. Some solutions will even crawl the internet to look for red flags such as negative reviews or fraudulent activity. After reviewing this data, the software will recommend approving, denying, or reviewing the application. With AI-powered automation, your team can underwrite contracts up to eight times faster.

Customer resource management (CRM) solutions with built-in data entry capabilities will also improve your team’s productivity. Once a merchant account is approved and underwriting is complete, your CRM should automatically plug their information into your database - saving your team countless hours of manual data entry. In addition, robust residual tracking, workflow automation, detailed analytics and merchant-level metrics will give your team the tools to make highly-strategic, data-driven decisions.

Prioritize Fraud Prevention

Each year, new payment solutions become available to consumers. While these innovations give consumers and merchants more ways to buy and sell, they also create new avenues for criminals hoping to take advantage of weak security systems and unsuspecting merchants.

With online payment fraud expected to exceed $206 billion between 2021 and 2025, providing merchants with built-in fraud protection and tokenized customer data storage will be table stakes in 2023.

Cutting-edge fraud protection services are a great way to help your merchants combat bad actors in an affordable, low-friction way. The right fraud prevention tools will provide artificial intelligence and advanced scoring rules to stop fraudulent transactions at the payments stage before they can do any damage. These solutions will also flag or decline transactions that deviate from pre-set rules, making it easier for merchants to minimize risk.

In addition to providing your merchants with built-in fraud prevention, you must also consider how you will store sensitive customer information. One way to navigate this challenge is by offering off-site storage options. By tokenizing a customer’s payment data and storing it on a secure third-party server, you can:

• Eliminate risk for merchants
• Streamline the buyer experience
• Enhance end-to-end security.

Off-site data storage enables merchants to offer recurring and saved payments while minimizing their PCI compliance requirements and shifting liability to the service provider. Over time, this will improve the customer experience and strengthen merchant loyalty.

Leverage CRM Technology

From prospecting, sales and onboarding to wholesale underwriting, residuals management and beyond, your software should support and enhance business processes. If you don’t have the systems to acquire more merchants, provide better service and boost productivity, it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack.

For example, a robust CRM can help you manage leads, track referrals, keep up with sales opportunities and bolster employee productivity. That’s because CRM systems are designed to centralize, streamline and automate all customer-facing aspects of a sales organization.

Payments CRMs take these benefits a step further by solving ISO-specific problems like slow, inefficient merchant onboarding and time-consuming manual residual calculations. With the right payments CRM, you can:

• Improve the efficiency of your sales funnel
• Improve the quality of your sales process and service delivery with a more personalized, targeted merchant experience
• Reduce merchant onboarding from hours to minutes
• Unify residual reporting across processing partners and automate calculations

ISOs with industry-leading software solutions are better equipped to overcome economic challenges. With the right tools, your business will weather the storm and come out on top.

The Power of Full Commerce Enablement

Full commerce enablement helps ISOs do more with less. Teaming up with a trusted payments partner allows you to minimize time-to-processing, maximize revenue-per-account, improve the customer experience and streamline operations.

NMI and our partners offer a robust suite of payment solutions made specifically for your industry. When you partner with us, you gain access to everything you need to compete in even the most demanding markets.

Our solutions give you access to everything you need from sign-up to pay-out and include features like:

• Access to over 200 payment processors
• NMI’s industry-leading gateway services
• A full suite of payments options for merchants of all types, including in-store, ecommerce, unattended retail, mobile payments, and more
• Fully integrated payment processing and gateway onboarding through IRIS CRM (an NMI company), including one-click web-based merchant signup
• IRIS CRM’s full suite of time-saving sales, productivity, and administrative tools
• 8X faster underwriting and risk management with Agreement Express (an NMI company) Merchant ScanXpress
• AI-powered fraud prevention tools
• Private-labeled branding on payment gateways and merchant support systems
• Unified residuals reporting and automatic residuals calculations
• Simplified account management and automated billing

Most importantly, we offer the control and flexibility to create the ideal payments solution for your business, with end-to-end merchant lifecycle coverage.

If you’re ready to future-proof your business, we’d love to talk. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or talk with one of our team members about everything our full commerce enablement solution has to offer.