Why Even Enterprise Merchants are Moving Processors: ParPay & Aben Strategically Partner to Create ROI with Payments Data

Payments processing is about as commoditized an offering as it gets. Add in the fact that the payments processing industry has zero organic growth, and merchants can quickly become the proverbial whipping boy to help a processor meet their quarterly projections. 

The sad part?

Merchants don’t even know they’re being whipped.

Ah, the beauty of hidden payment fees. 

Which is why we’re generally not fans of payment processors. 

Before we get into specifics, here’s a decent litmus test every merchant should apply.

Are you processing directly with a large, public processor?

When was the last time you audited your statements?

If your answer is yes, and more than six months ago, you’re probably getting screwed.

As Aben has been helping larger merchants generate more sales by leveraging data from the card networks on top of data from payment processors, two things became increasingly obvious.

First, nearly every merchant is being fleeced on payments. See above for rationale.

Second, payment processors are charging merchants for access to their own payment token data. As some merchants have realized the need to leverage card data to track unknown customers, processors will often charge $20 (see here) to $25 (see here) per month per location to “enable” access to the data. 

If you have a few hundred locations, these costs can get pretty steep pretty fast: for every 100 stores we’re talking about an extra $30,000 at a minimum.

Global Payments, for a specific example, quoted a sub 1,000-unit merchant $300,000 a year to access their token/PAN data.

Yea….

Well, this wasn’t workable for Aben customers for a ton of reasons.

Enter ParPay.

Fresh off a payfac that leverages Infinicept’s technology with full token ownership, ParPay promised to (wait for it…) adhere to their processing contract. 

Just as importantly as far as we’re concerned, ParPay has been protecting payment data integrity with Aben, enabling marketing, finance, and operations teams to track business progress through Aben.

See here for a notable example of what’s possible when you create tangible ROI with data. 

Which is why we’re announcing Aben’s partnership with PAR.

Savneet Singh, PAR’s CEO, said: “Aben has been instrumental in helping our customers understand the value of ParPay by leveraging ParPay data in Aben’s solution. Together we’re generating positive ROI for our customers and clearly demonstrating the value operators can achieve when they choose the right partners.”

Tammy Billings, Aben Co-founder and Head of Restaurants, said: “Restaurant marketers are finally starting to care about the highly valuable piece of data that comes from processors but they still have a challenge in getting to it, and often times it’s only available a go-forward basis, so time is of the essence. ”

How do we do it?

Well, Aben is the only entity that has a legitimate claim to the payment processing data. 

Why?

In mashing up the local payment tokens with the payments data we get from the card networks, Aben can identify, target, and prove 1-1 marketing attribution across digital platforms.

Really.

But we’re not here to self-aggrandize.

Instead, we’re here to let the industry know that data science + big data is teaming up to produce tangible ROI, with a bullseye on recalcitrant payment providers that refuse to share the  necessary data to help their customers succeed. 

And because Aben’s been built with an insane volume of proprietary data from direct card network partnerships and item level data from POS partners like PAR, it’s incredibly defensible, and will undeniably change the way merchants allocate capital. 

Marketing. Finance. Operations.

At the end of the day the logic is inescapable. 

You can’t continue to be a payments bro.

And if you need help, drop us a line.