Sage Payments is now Paya.
It’s a new chapter for an old company in a legacy industry once known as payments processing. So, perhaps it’s fitting to begin their story with, “Once upon a time…”
In a payments landscape far, far away, maturation was a slow process. There was a single interchange rate. Then, there were two. There was little to no product differentiation – acquirers were simply in a race to snap up as many merchants as possible before the competition got there.
But that was a long time ago.
Today, material changes come quickly in this industry, forcing players to think beyond today’s business and consider tomorrow’s. Priorities like alternative payments, bitcoin mining and product differentiation have taken the spotlight. Oh, and there are over 2,000 interchange rates now.
What changed?
Joe Kaplan, CEO of Paya, said in an interview with Karen Webster on Thursday (Jan. 25) that market saturation turned the race to onboard merchants into a race to the bottom: Without product differentiation, competition became about price point – specifically, who could offer the lowest one.