How to unlock efficiency with seamless integration.
By Penny Townsend
One of the toughest challenges that remains across the waste management industry today is payments. Like most other legacy industries, waste management leaders have opted for a “best-of-breed” approach. Best-of-breed refers to the implementation of software and technology from different individual vendors that are considered to be the best offering in their respective categories. For example, an enterprise may adopt one solution for recurring billing, different software for invoicing, and a third, and separate offering for a reporting experience.
While best-of-breed technologies certainly have been successful in allowing businesses to build their own individual tech stack, it is often clunky and disjointed, lagging in efficiency, and—more often than not—solutions are piecemealed together. For the waste industry specifically, this is largely the result of a growing need across the industry to adopt new, innovative technology to plug holes in resources and deploy new solutions.
Why Best-of-Breed is not Always the Best of Breed
Like most industries, the waste industry has turned to best-of-breed systems to prioritize innovation and solve system challenges across the organization, including payment processing. With best-of-breed, waste management businesses must work with multiple vendor partners to gather the necessary data needed to not only run the business, but also understand how to match transactions from the initial customer sale to the final deposit in the bank account. This requires internal resources on the backend to review the data and insights, compile it within the organization’s systems, and reconcile payments—all while providing customers with multiple payment options. To then implement any changes or updates, businesses are forced to work against the fixed schedules of their vendors, which would take days, if not weeks, for any changes to be applied. Not only does this consume resources, it also creates friction and slows down the payment process considerably.
Efficiency in a Fully-Integrated Payments Solution For Waste Management
Instead, the waste industry should consider an all-in-one payments platform solution that provides a comprehensive suite of tools and services that help businesses process payments more efficiently. Nationwide and local waste management businesses have implemented the single operation platform to manage their payments better, saving time, money, and resources while streamlining back-office operations.
A critical advantage of using a single platform in the waste industry is the ability to achieve end-to-end visibility of a transaction to payment, to a refund or a dispute, with full control over the entire payments lifecycle.
When relying on best-of-breed technologies, companies often face challenges in reconciling data, including making credit card purchases possible. Credit card purchases involve multiple moving parts, from merchant accounts to payment gateways, acquiring banks, and credit card brands. This results in fragmented information and a lack of comprehensive insights for the business. The advantage of a payments provider that integrates these aspects becomes apparent when issues arise. With seamless integration, problems can be quickly identified and resolved, safeguarding against potential lost sales and mitigating the need to involve multiple vendors for analysis and solutions.
Ongoing Support and Resources: Keeping You Informed
A core differentiator of an all-in-one payment platform versus best-of-breed, which can often be overlooked, is quality customer service. Quality customer service is paramount, and a fully integrated payments processing system, with end-to-end visibility, enables businesses to find swift resolutions, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty. When the reconciliation process is optimized, time spent on tedious accounting activities diminishes and allows waste management businesses to focus on delivering exceptional service to their customers.
Additionally, an integrated payments solution should include regular, if not automatic, updates, such as platform improvements or changes in regulation requirements. This differs from best-of-breed solutions, where updates or software modifications are triggered on a piecemeal basis.
As the saying goes, “Time is money,” and in the waste industry, time is a precious resource. Adopting a fully integrated payments processing system liberates valuable time and resources, allowing businesses to focus on core activities rather than relying on multiple solutions to fix and update payments issues. Waste companies can confidently focus on their mission, knowing they have the right tools and technologies to thrive with an integrated payments provider. | WA
Penny Townsend is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Qualpay. With more than 20 years of executive experience in the payments industry, Penny leads Qualpay’s product, operations and strategy teams in their mission to build a modern-day payments and embedded finance platform for businesses and merchants in the energy, waste, ISV, and finance industries. Penny drives the development of products and features to meet the evolving vertical payment needs of businesses today. For more information, visit www.qualpay.com.
Reference
• www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/best-of-breed