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TSG, a payments advisory firm, released a service to help merchant acquirers and software vendors optimize pricing for merchants. Dubbed the Embedded Pricing Tool, it can help acquirers and software vendors get pricing right without over- or under-pricing merchants.
Pricing data comes from the TSG database in its Acquiring Industry Metrics platform that has data from more than 4 million U.S. merchants. Users must have an AIM subscription.
The tool can help acquirers address several issues, says Jared Drieling, chief innovation officer at Omaha, Neb.-based TSG. “The issue we hear from acquirers and software vendors themselves is the difficulty of setting go-to-market pricing,” Drieling tells Digital Transactions News. One of the biggest struggles for software vendors is understanding how to price merchants. “The challenge is trying to understand how they should be priced,” he says. “They can leave a lot on the table and can’t go back to adjust that.”
Pricing support is one of the top three issues software vendors perennially have with their merchant acquirers, he says. The other two are general support and transparency regarding pricing and changes to pricing, such as interchange adjustments.
The Embedded Pricing Tool enables acquirers to share optimal rate data with software vendors and others. Acquiriers could even resell it as a value-add service to their clients, though some acquirers are including it at no additional cost as an incentive to attract and retain software vendors, which have become a much sought after client base in recent years. AIM subscribers can offer the pricing data to financial institutions, independent sales organizations, and agents, too. Pricing benchmarks can be based on industry, account size, vintage, and geography.
TSG offers an API code to provide access via existing partners or white-labeled Web portals.
The big opportunity is with software vendors. Drieling says most of them are not happy with their acquiring relationships. “It’s a very competitive market and the software vendors are only getting smarter day-by-day-by-day and they’re expecting a lot of these tools that are critical to their businesses,” he says. Helping software vendors set appropriate pricing could help with retention, observers say.
