Payments companies often evaluate which new verticals to target for their sales, marketing, and product initiatives.
Many verticals require specific knowledge, features, and approaches. For example, a dentist’s payment processing needs vary from a nonprofit.
Deciding which vertical(s) to enter and gearing up for it takes careful planning. Below is a step-by-step guide on how TSG’s bundled service offering, PaySights, can help. PaySights combines TSG’s most popular solutions into one easy package:
- Analytics via TSG’s AIM platform
- Research reports via TSG’s eReports platform
- Tailored consulting & intelligence via TSG’s subject matter experts
This guide follows the fictional perspective of “Jane,” a leader in an integrated payments division at a merchant acquirer seeking to create a best-in-class offering for vertically focused ISVs.
1. Target the right vertical
Jane starts by using TSG’s AIM analytics platform with monthly updated data on millions of merchants. She quickly pulls benchmarking data on 250+ verticals, filtering for merchants boarded via the ISV channel. Jane defines an attractive vertical as having low merchant attrition and higher-than-average net revenue to the acquirer. Using AIM’s pre-built tools, she finds the average net revenue for the merchant size her company serves best. Then, she filters the data to see which verticals have the best mix of these attributes.
Jane selects concrete contractors. She feels confident in this choice because of AIM’s significant dataset, which spans a variety of merchant types and goes beyond what she can see in her portfolio alone.
2. Determine the vertical’s size
Now that she has a vertical target, Jane wants to estimate her volume share opportunity in the space. She logs into TSG’s eReports portal, which contains 50+ industry reports, to access the Card Accepting Market Size report. This shows her total U.S. card volume, transactions, and merchants in each merchant category code (MCC).
3. Understand prospects & competitors in the vertical
With her background work mostly done, Jane meets with TSG’s market intelligence team to request a list of ISVs that serve concrete contractors. After discussing the details she would like included in a custom list, Jane decides to have TSG gather the estimated number of merchants served by each ISV and the names of any payment processing partners they may have.
After receiving the ISV list, Jane sees that many of these ISVs partner with two specific competitors. She then asks TSG to develop profiles of these competitors that cover their strengths and weaknesses in the ISV channel. This helps her sales and marketing teams craft the right messaging.
4. Brush up on relevant trends
Jane’s tactical strategy is coming together, but she still wants to learn more about key ISV trends to ensure she isn’t missing something. Jane logs back into TSG’s eReports portal and reads the ISV Conversion Rate Study. This study contains survey data showing the average rate at which merchants connected to an ISV will adopt the ISV’s payment program managed by their processing partner. This helps Jane hone her business development goals. While in the portal, she reads the Embedded Finance Snapshot to consider the applicability of this technology for ISVs serving concrete contractors.
5. Finalize a go-to-market strategy
The next day, Jane jumps on a 60-minute call with Mark Waring, a TSG senior associate specializing in the ISV space. Jane asks Mark about common practices and recommendations on product stack and contract policies for ISVs. After the call, Jane meets with her operations leader and comes out of the meeting with questions on risk processes. TSG Senior Associate Susan Horne is a risk expert, and Jane was able to call Susan for advice that same week.
The big picture
With PaySights’ flexibility to eliminate procurement delays, Jane quickly developed a successful integrated payments strategy, leveraging TSG’s trusted data and expertise.
Contact us to see how PaySights can help your strategy.