{"id":6257,"date":"2021-04-13T06:57:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T11:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/?p=6257"},"modified":"2021-04-13T06:57:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T11:57:16","slug":"if-merchants-are-too-dumb-to-care-about-product-why-invest-in-rd-the-payments-stranglehold-thesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/13\/if-merchants-are-too-dumb-to-care-about-product-why-invest-in-rd-the-payments-stranglehold-thesis\/","title":{"rendered":"If Merchants Are Too Dumb To Care about Product, Why Invest in R&#038;D? The Payments Stranglehold Thesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Payments acquirers are swallowing offline technology, whether it's the restaurant POS rollup by Shift4, the restaurant POS rollup by Global Payments, or every technology company trying to become a payments company (which we don't blame, because payments is easy and generates pure margin while software is much more difficult). Tech distribution, in other words, is being consolidated by merchant acquirers.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/2019\/05\/21\/payments-companies-will-never-be-software-companies-absent-cultural-overhauls\/\">Payments companies don't invest in R&amp;D <\/a>because they really have no reason for R&amp;D: commoditized product (and calling it a product is being <em>really<\/em> generous) + guaranteed demand = zero required innovation. Not a bad spot to be in except that there's a good amount of churn due to the lack of differentiation.<\/p><div class=\"leaky_paywall_message_wrap\"><div id=\"leaky_paywall_message\"><a href=\"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/subscribe\/\">Subscribe<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/log-in\/\">log in<\/a> to read the rest of this content.<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Payments acquirers are swallowing offline technology, whether it&#8217;s the restaurant POS rollup by Shift4, the restaurant POS rollup by Global Payments, or every technology company trying to become a payments company (which we don&#8217;t blame, because payments is easy and generates pure margin while software is much more difficult). Tech distribution, in other words, is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solutions","category-merchants","category-pos","post_format-post-format-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p81nA2-1CV","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/reformingretail.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Screen-Shot-2020-01-16-at-4.29.18-PM.png?fit=966%2C834&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6257"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9980,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6257\/revisions\/9980"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}