A long awaited opportunity
PayWithUs sold credit card acceptance solutions for small businesses that included:
- POS terminals
- Mobile apps with a credit card swiper
- Web application for manual credit card entry, invoicing and subscription plans
- APIs and website plugins for eCommerce and mobile storefronts
Though a partnership with a major Canadian bank, PayWithUs was able to generate a regular monthly call list that accounted for 50% of new, closed deals with customers. This partnership was of great importance to PayWithUs and included an exclusivity clause that prohibited PayWithUs from entering into any new referral partnerships until two years passed.
Conversations to bank on for the value of a brand
With the end of the exclusivity term, PayWithUs had the opportunity to establish new referral partnerships and grow their top of funnel. Approaching credit unions was the clearest opportunity for new partnerships and the two year wait period had given the management team ample time to develop out new concepts with the current bank partner that could be later sold to the new credit union partners.
A better set of product features than PayWithUs competitors along with the ability to have the credit union brand front and foremost for the referred customers gave the PayWithUs a strong competitive advantage to attract the referral partnerships.
Internal coordination and launch
Given the complexity of the product suite provided by PayWithUs introduced a interesting challenge to enable a white labeled solution. To anchor the first credit union partnerships, the team developed and delivered the capability to white label the web application with the promise that further white labeled opportunities for the other products would follow.
This decision was based off the metric that 70% of the current PayWithUs customers used the web application and the acknowledgement that the sales team who received the referral leads to call the potential new customers used the web application to demo the PayWithUs product features.
New partners and new deals
Within 1 month of launching the white labelled web application, the business development team closed 3 new partnerships with the larger credit unions in Ontario and British Colombia. These relationships had been nurtured over the year before to ensure that developing this new feature would result in the close of some amazing deals to benefit both PayWithUs and their new referral partners.
