Global CEO on Raising Prices: Liar Or Incompetent? You Decide

As companies grow in size, those at the top get farther removed from the day-to-day.

So it’s not unexpected when asking the CEO about the goings-on of some new project that they’re unable to accurately form an answer.

But when you’re the CEO of a company that’s propagated legalized racketeering for decades, at all levels of your organization, it’s kinda hard to say “gee, I dunno” and expect people to believe you.

Like literally, this is the core of what you do: induce customers, then fleece them.

Would you honestly expect Tony Soprano to be ignorant about how his outfit makes money?

Please.

Yet that’s what we observed in hearing Global Payment’s new CEO, Cameron Bready, talk about RE price changes.

Global, it seems,

“isn’t ruling out the possibility of price increases to drive revenue, should the economic climate become more challenging, CEO Cameron Bready said this week.”

Let’s stop right here.

Are we living in Neverland?

First, every payment acquirer is literally pegged to move in tandem with inflation, 1-1. So tightly, in fact, that we’d bet the r2 of inflation and payment revenues are 99.9999999999999999%

Why?

Because payment acquirers take a flat percentage of all payment volume that passes through their victims customers.

If a merchant increases the price of their good by 10%, the payments company earns 10% more as well.

Here’s some basic f*cking math for Global Payments:

Merchant sells a scuba mask for $10.

For all their hard work, Global Payments gets 2% of the sale = $0.20.

The merchant increases the price of the mask by 10% to $11 to help with inflationary pressures.

Global Payments still gets 2% of $11 or… drumroll… $0.22.

$0.20 -> $0.22 = 10% increase which is the same rate of increase as the merchant made.

What is this sorcery?!

Second, Global Payments is constantly taking price through bullshit fees.

Constantly.

Just go to the search bar on the top right of this periodical and search for global payments.

You’ll see countless instances where they’re getting caught ramming through bullshit fees.

Not a day goes by where a Global merchant isn’t getting screwed.

Cameron should readjust his quote to say,

Yea, we’re corn holing our customers on the daily. Since we’re getting our asses handed to us by software companies, we’re really needing to increase the girth of our instruments to extract an amount of blood necessary to make earnings.

The implied idea that Global Payments hasn’t already been taking price is just disingenuous.

Lastly, and this isn’t aimed at Global insomuch as it is as testament to the scam that is the payments complex, is the quote from Fiserv’s CFO Bob Hau.

“We look at prices regularly,” Hau said. “We’re a big proponent of value-based pricing. If we think we’re providing value for our clients, we’ll talk to them about that value, and how they’re seeing the benefit of using our solutions. And we try to get paid for that.”

What a knee slapper.

There is ZERO value in payments.

It is a race to the bottom.

There is no such thing as “value based pricing”.

What’s even better, these outfits never talk to their customers about price increases.

It’s always the payments company adding some bullshit fee in size 0 font in white text against a white background on a monthly statement.

That’s the true extent of “talking to clients about value”.

Global is in trouble.

So is Worldpay.

Fiserv has Clover, but if not for that they’d be in the same position.

Just hurry up and merge so we can usher out the era of legacy payments.