The untapped potential of payments: why your customers want more than payments
From moving money to creating extraordinary experiences, payments has evolved
Last month we announced our new name and new look — Assembly (if you’re interested in the back story you can read more here).
For us, changing our identity was more than a new name and fresh lick of paint, it was designed to reflect and embody our entire mission: to break down the old payments systems and re-build it in a way any organisation can use payments, to not just move money, but deliver extraordinary customer experiences and power new business models.
Firstly, to understand how we all found ourselves in a world where payments is such a mess, I want to share a little history lesson on the evolution of payments, why they became so broken, and why we’re rebuilding them.
Payments 1.0
Ancient marketplaces were a classic payments 1.0 environment. People bartered or traded, they took home their coins at the end of the day and put them under the mattress, or straw matt, or in a terracotta pot. You get the picture — it was simple! The only thing that stood between a seller and their money was the ability to sell.
Then came along banking, and with banking came credit and institutional processes, fees, charges and a few points of friction. But banking and credit make the world go round, so this friction was simply accepted as a cost of doing business.
Payments 2.0
A few hundred years later came electronic banking, followed shortly by the e-commerce and the mobile commerce revolution. And now online marketplaces.
Then came a wave of new payment providers. Each tried to remove some of that friction but the reality was they were simply continuing the systems of the past.
Each new solution may have been a little easier to build with, or a little faster, or a little cheaper, but everything was held back by the fact they all did the same thing — they took a payment from a buyer. That’s it. All payment systems were designed to do that one thing. No detail, no flexibility, no options.
Payments 3.0 — more than moving money
But what if you want to do more than just take a credit card payment online? Or if you didn’t want the compliance obligations of the funds running through your account? Or if you wanted disputes and fraud taken care of? Or you wanted to split a payment between multiple parties? Or you wanted to hold funds until both the buyer and seller confirmed the exchange had satisfactorily taken place? Or you wanted funds held in a digital wallet and then reconciled against every purchase?
In fact, what if you could separate each of the options and actions and make them simple to piece together so you could assemble payments flows in any way you wanted? Wouldn’t that help you create exceptional customer experiences and add new value to your business?
Rebuilding payments
So we did exactly that. It took a couple years, some serious licenses and compliance regimes and a whole lot of code, but we basically tore all the things that you might want to do a with a payment — take money, send money, or enable the movement of money between others — and made it so anyone could build any flow they wanted.
With a suite of 100+ APIs and an end-to-end service that removes the headaches of fraud, security, compliance and customer service, Assembly lets businesses accept, manage and disburse payments in any way they imagine.
In summary, we made it flexible, simple and do-able. And we are learning that millions of businesses worldwide — from startups to enterprises — need a solution that offers more than payments.
For example, Airtasker, with its trusted on-demand services marketplace; hipages, with seamless online and mobile payments for tradies; and Flippa, with the world’s largest global marketplace of web businesses. And now Gumtree.
Why?
For two very core reasons.
- Customer experience is king
Companies simply need to offer better experiences. Whether it’s removing friction with invisible payments, or creating trusted exchanges with escrow and dispute resolution, payments sit at the centre of a great experience. (To learn more about the power of payments for customer experience, we’ve written about the topic before here.)
2. Unlock business value
Flexible payments offers the ability to unlock huge additional value for the organisation — whether it’s the additional revenue from facilitating the payments, the data that comes with it, or whole new business models.
Today, we power flexible payments for more than 100 platforms across North America, AsiaPacific, and Africa, serving some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world.
For us though the journey has just begun. We think the world needs a new payments backbone — one that’s fully automated, flexible, detailed and powerful.
We will be exploring more about the limitless ways your business can use payments to drive value and create extraordinary experience, so stay tuned.
