Moving away from legacy payment methods such as cash and cheques should be a priority for all businesses right now. For payments to suppliers, staff, and managing expenses, it makes more sense to use solutions such as physical or virtual cards, or mobile wallets.
But doing this is not straightforward. Businesses don't want to become payment providers, or develop labour-intensive payment processes within their organisation. Fortunately, new players in the payment ecosystem called card programme managers have emerged, playing a critical role in helping businesses to cater for their diverse payment needs without having to manage these activities internally.
A card programme manager acts as a hub for the company, managing all the necessary relationships and processes needed for a successful card programme. They handle the communication and interactions with all partners in the payments value chain from card issuers and payment networks to card manufacturers and settlement banks.
Additionally, the card programme manager is responsible for all compliance matters too, ensuring all industry standards and regulations are adhered to. This saves organisations the headache of having to think about settlement processes, reconciliation, dispute resolution, fraud protection and the like.
By establishing a card programme with a trusted partner, businesses can not only meet the demands of their suppliers, staff and customers for secure and seamless payments, but drive internal efficiencies too.
They can retain their focus on their core activities, while outsourcing all of their payment needs to the expertise and infrastructure of a specialist. The card programme manager can even contribute to marketing initiatives, customer acquisition strategies, and the implementation of loyalty solutions.
While card programme managers are a relatively new player in the payments ecosystem, their impact can be transformational. Paymentology is a next-generation issuer processor that has an entire department dedicated to card programme management, and has helped brands such as Avis, Europcar, Reebok, Mukuru and Spar set up their own card programmes.
To find out more about how card programme management can help your organisation handle payments for a wide variety of use cases, download Paymentology's guide to card programme management today.
And your business needs the assistance of a card programme manager, get in touch to speak to one of our card programme management experts to find out how Paymentology can help you get your card programme off the ground.