4 Reasons Why your MPOS Strategy is Failing

Are you tired of hearing that MPOS is the future of payments while your business is incapable of scaling its MPOS offering? Or are you seeing that your MPOS portfolio is made up of nothing but inactive or low volume merchants? Here’s 4 reasons why, and some things you can do about them.

Reason for Failure	Explanation	What you can do
Because you have an MPOS strategy.	Good product strategies end with solutions, they don’t start with them. If you are merely adding products to your portfolio as a reaction to Square and others, you have short circuited the entire product management process. It’s a prescription for product failure.	Get to know your customers, prospects and competitors. Stop focusing on reactive strategies and get back to the 4 Ps.
Because you don’t really know your customers or prospects.	If you are listening to your customers, understanding their problems and offering solutions, you might have a chance. Keep in mind that not all customers have the same problems, and not all problems have viable solutions.	Segment your customers and prospects by vertical, by size, by profitability, and by your organizational expertise. Identify the segments where financial opportunity and core competencies overlap, and focus there.
Because you don’t really know your competitors.	Few financially valuable ideas are new, so don’t think of yourself as a genius for having an idea. The magic will be in execution and in differentiation. You must know your competitors and offer a more valuable solution, and continue to stay ahead over time.	Reinvent your competitive outlook. POS is not a payment product, it’s much more than that. If your list of competitors includes a bunch of payment companies you need a new list. Once you have that list, get to know the companies on it, and their products, extremely well.
Because your products and channels don’t fit.	Products and channels need to go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you’re mixing peanut butter and tuna, you won’t get far.	Create an MPOS channel strategy. Assuming that payment channels will suffice is a pipe dream. They need to be either transformed or replaced.

Payments is a universal merchant need and a commodity, MPOS is neither of those things, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that payment companies are struggling with it. POS is a highly differentiated, value-added service, so a whole new set of rules apply. It will be product teams, not distribution teams, that will make or break the payments companies of the future. Is your business ready?

This blog post was inspired by a recent report by Double Diamond Payments Research. For more information about the report please visit To Be or Not To Be an ISV? Integrated Payments Strategies for Merchant Solutions Providers, or email research@doublediamondgroup.com.

ETA Transaction Trends, July 14, 2015
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