What’s in a name, anyway?
Sage Payment Solutions Inc. provides integrated payment processing and business solutions in North America, and as of Jan. 30, will operate under the new corporate name of Paya, which marks a shift in the company’s vision and strategy.
In August 2017, the payment business (which is now Paya) of former parent company Sage Software was sold to private equity firm GTCR.
Paya CEO Joe Kaplan says the switch represents the “fresh and progressive company” it is trying to build for its employees, partners, and customers.
“We are creating something special and compelling here. Our mission is to deliver new technologies to the market and offer innovative, integrated payment solutions that will help our customers simplify business complexity and concentrate on growing their business,” he adds.
Greg Cohen, Paya president, says that when GTCR bought the Sage payment business, it committed $350 million USD of equity dollars to developing and upgrading the commerce platform. So far, Paya has only spent about a quarter of that, meaning big things are still yet to come.
“We’re going to organically invest in tools and technologies and things of that sort, and we’ll have many opportunities as well to inorganically invest with buying capabilities, buying distribution, buying things to just make the overall platform and the overall experience much more robust,” he continues.
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The North America rebranding also means there will be newfound investment to grow Paya’s channel partner program. Paya’s partner program plans to target participation from technology providers, referral organizations, and ISOs to leverage the program’s assets and benefits of its omni-channel solutions platform, the company says.
Cohen, a former Moneris executive, expands on this while speaking to CDN about what to expect from Paya, saying the new company is truly going to be “partner-centric all around.”
“We want to make things easy for our channel partners,” he tells CDN. “When we think about partners in our world, we think about the technology providers, the ISVs [independent software vendors], and the VARs [value-added resellers]. In the payments ecosystem, we think of ISOs and payment facilitators, and we think about how we can extend our technology. It’s not just around running a transaction. It’s around data and information exchange to create better customer experiences for not only the end user business, but also the partner itself, and how they can add a lot of value out towards their customers. That’s what our new public launch is really about.”
The upgraded channel program will offer several different participation models for partners – although Cohen could not provide more details – as well as the new ability to plug into Paya’s service ecosystem and infrastructure.
“A lot of times, people would partner with a payment provider and do what I call “send it and pray.” They would just plug in and leave it alone for you to deal with,” Cohen explains. “Today, we have the ability to stay engaged throughout not just the sales cycle but the service cycle as well. If we’re not sharing data in two directions on the service side, often you wind up in conflict with your customer. It winds up being a joint business, and if you can’t communicate with your channel partner in a succinct way to your client, it creates for a bad experience. We want to make sure that never happens.”
Looking ahead, Paya’s president says the next two to three years is all about driving growth within the market and staying focused on its core competencies of card processing and data exchanges.
“When you deal with an accounting package, you’re not just running a payment transaction, you’re posting back into the ledger and you’re pushing out the invoicing. You’re doing all these things that create a two-way flow of information between you and the technology provider to create a better experience for the customer. And so we’re going to continue to drive down that product roadmap and put marketing and distribution into full gear in those segments,” Cohen says. “We can support retail and restaurant and similar sectors, but we find ourselves much more into businesses and biller segments and areas like that, because they’re the ones who really can take advantage of all of our core competencies.”
