Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Having doubled its merchant base via portfolio acquisitions last year, Dallas-based processor TransFirst has created a product division aimed, it says, at introducing new services to help retain merchants and give independent sales agents more ways to relieve pressure on pricing. The first new products, which will go live in the next few weeks, include processing for checks, prepaid cards, fleet cards, and insurance elgibility. The company is also rolling out a new Web portal, called Transaction Central, aimed at merchants. TransFirst, which has been an aggressive acquirer of merchant portfolios for the past several years, closed three deals last year that increased its merchant base from 80,000 to 160,000. The deals have also brought the processor into contact with more than 100 independent sales agents and another 500 or so street-level sales agents. Until last year, TransFirst had done little business through ISOs. But now the additional merchants and new ISO relationships have created the need for new products to ensure merchant retention and to help the ISOs and sales agents sell and upgrade merchants without having to yield on the price of basic credit card processing, TransFirst says. “The [new] products are all new or restructured to suit our base of resellers,” says Christy Corey, president of the newly created product division. “This has become a very competitive business. You get into price wars if you don't have something to differentiate yourself. [With the new services], there are so many things a well-trained salesman can point out to a merchant to take the pressure off the price point.” To back up the new services, TransFirst is marketing new, multifunction terminals capable of such functions as check scanning, PIN debit, and insurance eligibility checks. Though most of TransFirst's merchants are small and mid-size operations, Corey says in many cases terminal vendors will subsidize the cost of the devices to get merchants to install and use them. TransFirst also hopes the new services will give merchants more reasons to stay with the processor, reducing churn. “Part of the strategy is to maximize the merchant relationship, to create additional stickiness to make it harder for them to move away,” says Andrew Rueff, senior vice president for mergers and acquisitions at TransFirst. In that vein, the company is getting set to roll out a new Web-based service that will allow both physical and Internet merchants to create pages customized for the products and services they have set up. “It's great access to data, and simple to use,” says Corey of the portal, which is dubbed Transaction Central. The service came to TransFirst as the result of one of its acquisitions last year, Payment Resources International. Of the company's merchant base, approximately 5% do all or some of their sales on the Web.
