Payments Dialog: Adding Necessary Gateways Quickly and Efficiently to Keep Customers Transacting

Differentiate your business from competitors when you add a Payments Orchestration layer to your payments stack, equipping your business with the ability to add required gateways seamlessly. Leverage Spreedly experts to assist in implementation to remove the heavy lifting from your internal development team. This not only increases your overall transaction volume but also addresses regulatory requirements when expanding into new regions.

Want to learn more about how Spreedly can help your organization adapt and grow your payments? Reach out to us here.

Payments Dialog Full Transcript:

Peter Mollins: Hi everybody. This is Peter Mollins with Spreedly, really excited to have you here for another payments dialogue. Today, I'm joined by Brian Lindsey, who's senior product manager with Advanced Solutions International or iMIS really excited to have you here, Brian. So welcome to this Payments Dialog.

Brian Lindsey: Well, thank you. Glad to be here.

Peter Mollins: Absolutely. So maybe if you don't mind, perhaps if you get a start by letting our listeners know a little bit about organization and a bit about your background. Maybe we'll start with your background first if that's okay.

Brian Lindsey: Sure. Well, I've been in the nonprofit industry for quite some time, over 25 years, and working in associations, trade associations, professional associations and charities. And that's how it came to be with ASI, with iMIS. And it's been a fun ride since.

Peter Mollins: That's great.

Brian Lindsey: Yeah.

Peter Mollins: Well, tell me what iMIS... What is it that you all do?

Brian Lindsey: So, iMIS is a purpose built application for nonprofits charities, unions. Primarily engaged in helping our clients engage with their members. We want to know everything that there is about them so we can help them achieve their goals. One of the things we do of course is the CRM type stuff. We keep track of the names and addresses and all that type of thing. But then we also help them raise revenue for their organization. So if you're a charity, we want to help you collect those donations so you can further your mission. If you're an association, we do the billing for your membership so you can make sure you can pay the bills at the end of the month and further their cause as well. We also work with unions, big organizations, any kind of organization that has membership is what we're going to work with and is primarily going to be in that nonprofit area.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Yeah. That must be really exciting to be able to support these kind of mission driven organizations. So when you think about those kinds of customers, what do you think about like their top two or three payment related challenges that they're facing?

Brian Lindsey: Yeah. So it's a challenge, there's a lot of payment options out there for them and we want to be cost effective. And what we run into a lot of times is they have requirements. So every non-profit has a board and perhaps that board has some sort of requirement that they use a certain payment vendor or they're in a different country. Our big growth area is in international. And so they need a gateway or some sort of way to collect those dues or that donation. And that's been one of the nice things about working with the Spreedly is you have a lot of options out there for us to use. We've been working in payments for 25 years, of course, but being able to quickly add one that we don't support or have not supported in the past has been fantastic.

Peter Mollins: That's great. And then how does iMIS help these customers of yours to address the payments challenges that they face?

Brian Lindsey: So what we do is we work with them and get them set up on their payments. And so they can do it quickly. Payments can be confusing to, especially a lot of nonprofits that don't have the staff expertise iMIS is going to handle that for them, help them get set up, start taking payments quickly. And that's really how we're helping our clients do that. One of the things is we want to collect that dues revenue, but we also want to help them also collect non dues revenue to further their mission, and payments is a part of that of course.

Peter Mollins: Great. Now you mentioned before about being able to add different services, which is sort of the model of payment orchestration. How do you leverage payment orchestration within iMIS's payment stack?

Brian Lindsey: Of course, we are a for profit company and so our enterprise guys love the ability to say, hey, we don't have that now, we can add it very quickly. I will say that I was telling others that the API documentation you'll have is fantastic. So we had a requirement to use a certain vendor or a certain gateway, and we needed to get it in quickly. And so we contacted Spreedly, we worked with your development team, your onboarding team, and we were able to get those two gateways that we did not have before in a very short matter of time and address those regulatory requirements for that particular charity or that education group such as that.

Peter Mollins: That's great. So, it's essentially like a differentiator for you and for your sales team to be able to say-

Brian Lindsey: Absolutely. Yeah, payments are difficult and we want to make it as easy as possible, which is what speeding's helping us do. But it also gets us in the door. Perhaps for whatever reason, we might have been disqualified in RFPs for a certain organization but now we say, no, we do have that. We do have that option for you. So it's definitely a help.

It's also very helpful for us in the international. We see growth in the international area as our biggest growth area. And one of the things is we have a client in Singapore... We serve people in over 28 countries. And not all gateways go to all countries, to be honest with you. And so having the option to say, well, I think we have the ability to add that has really helped us grow as an organization.

Peter Mollins: That's a great point. So then now even these larger organizations that are, that are spread around the world, they're seeing iMIS as being the right choice for them. That's [inaudible]-

Brian Lindsey: Right.

Peter Mollins: Yeah. And I one thing I've often heard from platforms is also like the ability to get time to transaction, time to first transaction must be faster. Because unlike a competitor that doesn't even have that connection to the preferred payment service, you can get in and, it sounds like, get them up and running quickly so they're operating quickly.

Brian Lindsey: Absolutely. In the past we were adding a gateway and may take us three to six months or something like that to get it in. And now we can do it in the of a month, if less. You've got test it and all that, of course. But yeah, it's pretty quick.

Peter Mollins: That's great. So maybe stepping back to talking about some of the KPIs and metrics. How does your team and your colleagues, how do they monitor success when it comes to payments?

Brian Lindsey: Well sometimes on the people side of it, how easy was it for a client to get started? Like I said before a lot of these charities, they don't have the most complicated IT people and just being able to get them up and going quickly has been a big benefit. Of course, we monitor things such as successful payments, failed payments, that type of thing. And that's all kind of behind the scenes.

Peter Mollins: Right. Yeah. That's great. Let them focus on what they do best, which is managing these nonprofit organizations or the mission itself.

So, maybe to wrap it up, what are you seeing in terms of like the next opportunities as iMIS continues to grow and scale?

Brian Lindsey: Well, like I said before, international is probably where our biggest growth area is. Being able to have a payment option for those clients that we sell into Africa or into Singapore or wherever it may be that we have not done traditionally, that's really going to be our growth area.

Peter Mollins: That's terrific. Well, Brian, this has been really interesting, really glad to get a chance to hear about your story and about iMIS's growth and how Spreedly's been able to help support that growth. But very exciting to hear also how you're helping to drive that success for those mission driven organizations. So, congratulations.

Brian Lindsey: Well, thank you. Appreciate it.

Peter Mollins: Absolutely.

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