This is NOT an indictment of TSG, who produces solid content.
This is about the total lack of self-awareness the payments industry has of itself.
Legacy acquirers have no idea how or why Stripe and Adyen kick the crap out of them then a report like this comes out, shows exactly why, and the legacy idiots are somehow still baffled.
Worse, they think they’ve solved the problems.
Dear Lord.
The first rule of any problem solving is to admit you have a problem, as Steve Blank pointed out.
We have never seen a piece of material scream so loudly at the industry’s problems yet fall so flatly on deaf ears.
Here’s the report we’re referencing
We’ll go through the relevant pages to show you what we’re talking about.
The intent of the report is to show how 150 software companies (ISV) think about embedding payments.
The first page that gets into relevant content is what matters when choosing a payments partner.
Guess what’s number one?
Hmm, if only someone might have told the legacy processors, like Fiserv in particular, why they’re playing 80th fiddle to Stripe…
IT’S THE DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE, STUPID.
The other six reasons on this page aren’t event relevant if you APIs are so shit the ISV won’t integrate with you to begin with.
But to add insult to injury, the SAME pain point shows right back up, masked under a different heading.
Think about how low this bar is.
Honestly.
All the legacy acquirers would need to do is hire a team of people and spend 6 months unf*cking their ISV onboarding process.
But, you know, that sounds like R&D, and payments bros can’t invest in that.
Moving on.
ISVs rate their current payment partners terrible: an NPS of -8.
You mean to tell us lying payments bros with nonexistent support and shit for APIs aren’t a software company’s dream?
Say it ain’t so!
And this is hilarious: look at how many times the developer experience – or the PTSD-inducing torture “experience” – is cited as a critical metric for software companies.
We’d also like to note that ISVs want portability.
Why?
Because they’re tired of getting f*cked over.
It’s like we told Fiserv in a prior article: build a great developer experience ON TOP OF a vault so the ISV can move.
If you provide good support, features, and economics, then the ISV won’t ever have to leave.
TSG summarizes the issues by making the developer experience front and center on the following page discussing trends.
And to really drive it home, let’s read the final page of the report before the fluffy self-promotion:
Now for the irony.
On the very next page Fiserv stands up and has the balls to tell us that they have “developer-friendly integration tools”.
Can you smoke more crack?
They are so. far. removed from reality.
You literally just funded an entire report telling you what your problems are and then you close the report by stating that you have none of these problems?
Okay, so why is Stripe growing 30% ORGANICALLY and you’re not?
Maybe their “Developer-friendly integration tools and sandbox environments” are ACTUALLY developer-friendly and not lip service?
The software market is literally telling you that you are shit and yet you parade this out like “nah, not me”.
Watch this Lonely Island Like A Boss music video from the beginning (NSFW, btw) and then pay particular attention to Andy Samberg at 1:30, where he becomes Fiserv incarnate.
Bro.
Didn’t your stock just collapse because the only growth vector of your company turn out to be a bunch of number-fudging?
Adyen’s integration process is much more difficult than that of Stripe (on the order of 3-4 months given that Adyen views itself as a enterprise merchant-first company rather than a platform company) but it still beats the trauma that comes with trying to integrate Fiserv or any of the legacy payment providers.
This whole market is going to zero.
Short them all.
That they can’t even figure this out but FUND A REPORT SPELLING THEIR PROBLEMS IN PLAIN ENGLISH is nothing short of alarming.
The level of stupidity – or maybe hubris? – is frankly on a whole other level.
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