It’s Just Not the Same Game

When my career first began in Acquiring, we simply sold electronic payments to merchants who were otherwise just focused on cash and checks.  It was a reasonably easy business.  But, as an industry, we’ve never really stood still for long. 

There has always been technology driving all these changes.  Some have been cultural, like country specific payments.  But the trend I see most interesting now is the “back-office” of merchant acquiring. Acquirers must invest in agility, partner ecosystems, and analytics-driven merchant onboarding, underwriting, and fraud mitigation.

Machine learning and AI are moving beyond just fraud into routing, authorization optimization, underwriting merchant portfolios etc.  Even interchange concerns. 

So, what are we to do?  Get in the game.  Study the situation for each of your companies.  And don’t assume that someone else smarter will figure this out.