For businesses, regardless of size, not all payments partners are equal. Finding the right partner to manage payments can be a key to improving cash flow and simplifying the payments experience, as well as making cross-border payment a piece of cake.

In a PaymentsJournal podcast, Rupert French, Product Lead at Worldpay from FIS, and Daniel Keyes, Head of Merchant Services at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed what businesses can expect from a high-quality payments partner and how they can differentiate the best from the rest.

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Differentiators in Payments Partners

Businesses barely have enough time to manage the core functions of providing products and services, so partnering with a third party to manage and optimize their payments is a wise move. It’s an opportunity to outsource a level of complexity to a third party and make sure that there’s as little friction as possible in payments.

“Your payments partner should be specializing in fund flow and simplifying the payments experience,” French said. “And there’s a huge amount of trust that business offloads to their payments partner, which has to be respected. We’re empowered with managing the primary revenue source in most cases for a lot of small, large, and medium businesses.”

A payments partner, such as Worldpay from FIS, can help with transaction data and cash liquidity in a bank account. As French notes, those two are key drivers behind the success or failure of businesses, particularly smaller ones.

In particular, improved transaction data enables a high percentage of payment acceptance with lower risk.

Payment Flexibility is Prime for Gig Economy

Gig workers often have to wait to get paid, sometimes as long as weeks after they’ve completed their work. The ability to pay gig workers any time, particularly on the weekend, is an important differentiator small businesses should look for in a payments partner.

“The possible competitive advantage presented by being able to pay those gig economy workers on non-business days with funds from online commerce could be enough of a competitive advantage to help keep that business above the waterline,” French said. “For example, consider competition for takeaway drivers on a Friday night. If you’re able to guarantee that you’ve got cash in your bank account to be able to pay that delivery right driver on the Saturday morning o...