Why your payment vendor is one of your association’s most important vendors.

When you think about your association’s revenue, your first thought may not be about your payment vendor.

But having a solid partnership with the right payment vendor is critically important to your organization.

Consider this: The value of digital payments around the world is expected to reach $3.9 trillion this year, an increase of 14% year-over-year. This means that digital payments will continue the trend as the preferred and standard payment solution. Your payment vendor provides the technologies that bring these new standards to your fingertips.

At the same time, as new digital payment options like Apple Pay and other “digital wallets” emerge as the new norm, it will be increasingly important to partner with a payment vendor that can ensure secure and seamless integration of these new technologies into their payment platforms.

Beyond supporting these forward-looking trends in digital payments, payment vendors support improved efficiency in day-to-day processes for your staff and members as well as provide the latest in security and compliance standards when it comes to collecting payments for your association. For example, your payment vendor allows you to:

• Offer members the convenience of paying for memberships via credit card or ACH electronic payments.
• Digitize manual processes – including paper invoicing and receiving and recording check payments.
• Reduce security and fraud risks associated with storing, handling and processing paper checks and invoices, and eliminate the possibility of check payments being lost or stolen and the cost related to check reissuance.
• Further ensure that your members’ payment information is safe with tokenized payments, which greatly enhance the security of your credit card and ACH transaction through the passing of secure digital tokens instead of your credit card or account information.
• Reduce lapsed memberships by offering an option for members to automatically renew their membership, with the membership fee charged to the member’s credit card. This approach also reduces the need for your staff members to send renewal reminder notices.
• Automatically update changes to credit card information (such as expired, lost, stolen or upgraded cards), reducing the need for your staffers to contact members for updated credit card information for automatically recurring payments.
• Reduce staff time spent on reconciliation through enhanced reporting with improved visibility into the status of payments.

Your payment vendor is a critical part of your revenue stream. As the direct connection to your digital revenue, your payment vendor helps you collect payments more easily, quickly, and securely.

Learn more about YourMembership’s enhanced partnerships with Affinipay and BluePay and how these solutions can help you move toward securely digitizing your revenue. Request more information today!

By Kyela Bishop, YourMembership Marketing Coordinator, Community Brands