How the Payments Experience Improves Your Partner Ecosystem
There’s a secret about the payment experience that many don’t dare to mention: If you prioritize creators, influencers, and other digital-first global industries, you’re prioritizing the end-to-end payments process.
But finance and operations teams focus too much on the transactional aspect of “payments” and not enough on the payment experience itself.
High-level executives know to look beyond the money exchange—there are many checks and balances through manual efforts. They also know that checks and balances define the payment experience.
The Story of Global Partner Payments
Global Partner Payments came into fruition with the emergence of the Creator, AdTech, Marketplace, and Sharing economies. These unconventional industries are here to stay, and there is an increasing demand to partner with them. A straightforward payables experience is invaluable; a simple, transparent, and efficient payment process is what keeps partners happy.
An insufficient payment experience could wreak havoc on partner relations. 74% of partners across creator, AdTech, marketplace, and sharing economies would leave a platform due to an inadequate payment experience. These partners are unsatisfied with manual onboarding processes, which are inefficient, hectic, and risky.
As companies scale rapidly, maintaining strong ties with their partners is an increasing challenge and exponentially vital.
Reliable and risk-free partner onboarding is the steppingstone to attracting and retaining partners. By implementing an automated onboarding solution, your company and partners can create a world-renowned friendship.
Current Trends in Partner Onboarding
In business, we know time is money. EPIQ disclosed that manual onboarding takes an estimated 388 hours, whereas an automatic solution takes 27 hours.
We also know that it takes money to make money, with EPIQ also determining that companies can roughly save $90 an hour by automating mundane onboarding tasks. Even more gasping, onboarding can cost $2,400 per partner per business. If a company onboards 500 partners, that’s a whopping $1.2 to $17.5 million per year!
Your payments team has the perpetual responsibility of managing and regulating partner onboarding. Inefficiencies in the process can lead to a low net promoter score, decreasing partner retention, and cost issues. Additionally, the correct partner information is critical for payment processing, but individually collecting this from partners is typically not scalable or efficient. Today’s businesses need to ensure that their partners are payable and that their onboarding process is efficient.
High-performing organizations turn to automation to simplify their onboarding experience, all while saving time and money and, just as importantly, improving partner retention rates.
Seamless Onboarding is the First Step to Partner Satisfaction
Digital-first businesses are growing at an exponential rate. At the same time, the current global payments ecosystem requires constant compliance reviews, capturing and updating partner data, verifying checks, setting up payment details, invoicing, and more. A payment and onboarding system backed by robust banking rules utilizes tens of thousands of built-in banking rules (with more rules being added all the time) to proactively eliminate payment errors before they happen and ensure partners are onboarded and paid fast, without any unnecessary delays or hiccups.
Adopting best-in-class technology can drastically mitigate the time spent building your own onboarding solution. With self-service capabilities and clear transaction visibility, global partners can choose how they want to be paid and their preferred currency—all while maintaining tax and regulatory compliance.
To elevate the partner experience, companies need to attract and delight partners to increase retention, and a positive onboarding experience inspires partners. Partners are not only looking for fast and accurate payments—they want the entire experience of being paid to be painless. By eliminating manual processes, complexities are kept in check so creatives can focus on firing their imagination and concentrate on what’s most important; their skills and talent.