Getting with the Program

 

A new certification program could offer merchant-acquiring professionals and their employers some much-needed credibility. A fundamental industry mindset might need to change for the program to succeed, however.

 

bY Karen Epper Hoffman

 

When it comes to standards for employee qualifications and knowledge, the merchant-acquiring community is very much still the Wild West. Closing the deal is value No. 1 for independent sales organizations.

 

But now, there’s a new sheriff in town.

 

At the end of last year, the Electronic Transactions Association, the acquiring industry’s leading trade group, introduced its long-awaited Certified Payments Professional program.

 

The voluntary program, which culminates in an assessment exam, aims to ensure that industry professionals who pass it “have demonstrated a thorough, well-rounded knowledge of their profession that is easy to verify,” the Washington, D.C.-based ETA’s interim chief executive, Pamela Furneaux, said in a prepared release in January.

 

“I truly believe the CPP test will separate the skilled individuals from the rest of the street, and give validity to people who pass the test,” says Michael Gavin, vice president of third-party sales and the agent channel for Merchant Warehouse, a Boston-based ISO that paid for several employees to take the exam.

 

More than 220 individuals took the first CPP examination when it was offered in November 2011 at nearly 400 testing centers throughout the United States and Canada, according to Rori Ferensic, the ETA’s director of education and professional development.

 

Applicants needed to have a minimum of one year of experience in the industry plus a college degree or three years of industry experience.

 

The three-hour test was weighted evenly to cover not only sales, but also such areas as pricing and interchange, business processes, operations and workflow, products and solutions, risk and regulation, and compliance and security issues. Roughly 80% of those who took the test in that first month passed it, says Ferensic.

 

Furneaux called the announcement of the CPP’s first “graduating class” in January a “historic milestone for ETA and the payments industry.” The ETA will administer its next CPP exam in May.

 

Like some other executives at Merchant Warehouse, Gavin took the test. (He passed, as did more than two-thirds of his fellow employees who took the exam.) Gavin says he was “pleasantly surprised” with the difficulty of the test and the range of knowledge it surveyed.

 

He believes that the CPP fills a need in the industry—serving as an instrument to determine that salespeople and other employees have a solid and broad range of knowledge.

 

“In the past, there was no real test or regulations to prove that you knew the business,” he says.

 

Gavin’s colleague at Merchant Warehouse, vice president of marketing Dan Dufault, says that the exam is a “meaningful exercise for participating organizations.” He adds that, “from a corporate perspective, [the CPP test] shone a light for us on helping each of our employees in each functional area to be more well-rounded.”

 

‘Batted Around’

 

The CPP program was born out of years of research and planning by the ETA and a perceived demand in the industry for standards setting. It’s no secret that the ISO industry, especially in its formative years in the 1980s and early ‘90s, developed a somewhat tainted reputation when some unethical rogue agents, over-zealous to make sales, would dupe small businesses into paying high lease fees for point-of-sale terminals.

 

The board of the ETA began discussing a certification program nearly nine years ago, according to Ferensic. Carla Balakgie, the ETA’s chief executive, strongly supported the program. (Balakgie resigned late last year to become chief executive of the National Automatic Merchandising Association.)

 

“The industry, and the ETA board, felt they wanted something to provide them with more credibility with clients and customers and peers,” Ferensic says.

 

Indeed, the ETA hired Ferensic because of her background and expertise in the area of certification-program management. The process began in earnest three years ago with a feasibility study, conducted by Ferensic’s team, which sought to determine reasonable pricing points and define a need for the program. After surveying hundreds of contacts, from sales people to senior managers, Ferensic says the resounding response was “yes, we want this!”

 

“People have different ideas of what a certification program is … in terms of education and testing and knowledge,” she adds. “But the answer was they wanted a knowledge-based professional program [that was] experience-based.”

 

The ETA hired a testing firm to develop the exam, in order to ensure that it was “legally defensible and statistically sound,” Ferensic says. But she adds that the ETA also gathered input from actual industry practitioners—individuals at merchant processors and ISOs—to determine the content of the exam. The program and exams took several iterations of rigorous review and development, according to Ferensic.

 

Mark Dunn, president of Hartland, Wis.-based Field Guide Enterprises LLC and the treasurer and past president of the MidWest Acquirers Association, a regional ISO group, says that from what he has seen “the central idea is sound.”

 

“This issue has been batted around the community for at least 10 years,” says Dunn. “I applaud the ETA for putting a stake in the ground. It’s headed in the right direction.”

 

‘A Leg up’

 

Some companies, one being Merchant Warehouse, already are so committed to the program that they are not only actively encouraging their employees to take the exam, they are paying for it.

 

“We want to make sure all our in-house staff passes the test,” says Gavin. For the members that did not pass, the company provided an overview of where they made mistakes, so that those individuals could review their shortcomings.

 

Gavin says that while Merchant Warehouse is not paying staff or outside agents more for having CPP status, he hopes that they will take advantage of the program so that they will develop a better, well-rounded knowledge of the industry.

 

The ETA’s Ferensic believes that the CPP designation ultimately will lift the individuals who receive it, their companies, and the industry as a whole.

 

“It’s raising their professionalism, by a little bit or a lot, and showing that they’re committed to their own growth,” she says. The CPP represents validation from a third party, which Ferensic says “should give them a leg up on the competition.”

 

To help meet that end, the ETA has launched an awareness campaign to actively promote the CPP program among merchants, to explain to them why they should want to do business with CPP-accredited agents and executives. The ETA also is budgeting for another 500 people to take the test in 2012, during testing windows in May and November.

 

Not everyone, however, sees the CPP program as something that will fundamentally change the way the industry works or how outsiders view individuals or companies in the acquiring business.

 

‘Brandish the Badge’

 

Long-time industry researcher and consultant Paul Martaus, president of Martaus & Associates, Mountain Home, Ark., believes that while the CPP credential amounts to a nice feather in the cap, certification alone cannot outweigh the long-held value of strong salesmanship and the ability to win over business.

 

In this “incredibly competitive marketplace, where we have no merchant growth, in order for a salesperson to survive, never mind thrive, you have to take a merchant from your competitor or you don’t get paid,” Martaus says.

 

“In that kind of environment, the person who succeeds is the person who can close the deal,” he continues. “I know a lot of sales people out there and a lot of closers. I am not convinced that you can teach someone to close.”

 

In an ideal situation, companies would aim for “closers that are also incredibly well-trained,” he adds. But given the market realities, Martaus doubts that the CPP designation will alter the way business is done.

 

“These organizations are trying to raise the bar. The problem is that until we can find a method to disallow ‘trunk slammers’ [fast-talking salespeople], you can’t mandate training.”

 

Acquiring veteran Dunn agrees that, “one dilemma is that salespeople are judged on results, and results only. Salespeople are judged totally on how many accounts they sell.”

 

He also believes that while the ETA is off to a decent start, there is definitely room for improvement in the CPP program. In particular, he believes the association should offer a formal study course ahead of the exam.

 

He says the ETA provides “various pieces of the puzzle,” but lacks a consistent study course that individuals could use to prepare for the test—especially since the industry can be quite siloed. That means salespeople may not be automatically well versed in what their cohorts in operations do, or vice versa.

 

Dunn also questions the cost of the exam, which runs $325 for ETA members and $425 for nonmembers. He believes that it’s expensive compared to similar accreditation exams that he’s looked into, “which run more in the range of $150 to $200.”

 

While the ETA is working to increase awareness of the CPP program with merchants, Dunn says more work needs to be done in this area. “They’re really relying on salespeople themselves to brandish the badge [of their CPP designation],” he says.

 

Ultimately, Dunn says, the program needs to show a return on investment. “We believe in this, and we’re committed. But eventually someone has got to see some kind of payback.”