For many merchants – whether they be enterprises or SMEs – creating simple, seamless checkout experiences that meet the needs of a diverse set of customers in different geographies is a challenge that only seems to get more complex. 

For online merchants, the value of investing in payments is well recognised. Payments are the gateway to their customers, inextricably tied to the growth of their business.

The long and winding road of payments

But the payments roadmap is also notoriously long and expensive. It kills innovation by diverting resources from strategic business objectives to operational functions. 

In the face of a looming recession, merchants increasingly face another problem: staying competitive while adjusting their business expenditures to the current economic environment. 

If there is anything to be gained from weathering the storm of an economic downturn, it’s learning how to do more with less. It forces us to ask: are we optimising our business? Are we incorporating the resilience and flexibility to pivot (again) if we need to?

Also Read: Year of the rabbit: Leaping into a bumper year for digital payments

You would think that we’d have learned about resilience, having just emerged from the pandemic. But with parts of the digital economy enjoying the tailwinds of the pandemic online boom, many in the sector are only now feeling the pinch.

There’s one area that’s not set for a downturn: digital spending. In fact, recent forecasts from Gartner expect tech spending in 2023 to rise by more than six per cent from last year. 

There’s a reason for that. Essentially it’s about digitising to optimise: automating processes to accelerate sustainable growth and create efficiencies. I have seen this firsthand, particularly how automating payments has streamlined and simplified our clients’ processes, enabling them to focus their development resources towards building their core business.

So, why payments?

Firstly, payment tools are expensive and notoriously difficult to implement. This is particularly the case in the Asia Pacific, where the network of payment providers is fragmented and spread across geographies.

Payments automation  – like the solution offered by Primer – has come a long way in a short time. And the benefits have been game-changers.

More than just cross-border functionality, incorporating and offering new payment methods like e-wallets, bank transfers, or BNPL allows customers to have more choices according to their personal preferences.  Expanding the breadth of payment options immediately increases a business’ addressable market. 

When your business goes global (or perhaps it already is), consolidation of all the payment methods on a platform that is automated to meet customers’ preferences can kill the integration roadmap, helping businesses go to market faster. Smoother and easier payment processes help to see through the checkout process, eliminating redundancies like complex reconciliation and risk management.

Also Read: Navigating the payment regulations in Singapore

Further, in the context of a dynamic fintech sector and its constantly changing landscape (think crypto and its volatility), building resilience is also about incorporating flexibility into your payments infrastructure.

Importantly, resilience is also about utilising what automation provides you with – data. The Primer team has helped businesses of every size integrate infrastructure to help them customise payments based on powerful insights from their data. 

To automate or to not

But payments are just the beginning. Establishing a simple e-commerce offering is more accessible to small businesses than it ever has been before. But historically, integrating all of the functionality and efficiencies that commerce tools have to offer has not been so simple. 

Multiple payment options, automating sophisticated, professional commerce functionality like fraud detection, shipping and returns and customer loyalty tools are no longer limited to large enterprise merchants with swathes of developers at their disposal. 

Now, automating these tools can help a business of any size to create the foundations to scale quickly and efficiently – and to achieve more with less. 

Having an open, agnostic infrastructure for easy integration of payments and commerce tools is not just about saving time on back-end costs. It’s about getting access to services that businesses may not know they need today.  In this sense, it’s built-in future-proofing.

Automation of payments and commerce is levelling the playing field by enabling companies to do more with less. I have seen clients with small teams achieve things that were previously the domain of much larger organisations. In the years to come, even as recessionary pressures ease, more businesses will learn to operate with this principle in mind, freeing up their resources to focus on the important task of accelerating the growth of their business.

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