ISOs Must Evolve beyond Pricing to Thrive in Modern Payments

Independent sales organizations (ISOs) helped build the modern payments business by doing the unglamorous work: knocking on doors, swapping out terminals and winning accounts on pricing.

But that playbook is running out of road. merchants now expect processors to act as strategic partners, offering guidance and helping them choose solutions that fit their business needs. They are increasingly willing to switch when onboarding is clunky or when a processor can’t support their growth.

That shift is forcing ISOs to modernize how they sell,what they sell and how they run their sales teams. In an interview with PYMNTS, Jonathan Aguilar, associate vice president, partner experience at Maverick Payments, argued that the winners will be those who stop treating payments as a commodity and start treating it as a platform for delivering services merchants can feel in their day-to-day business.

“The modern ISO is solution oriented, tech-enabled and focused on delivering value beyond price,” Aguilar said. “I think of the challenge that modern ISOs will have with converting from a standard sales process they’ve done for quite some time to something new, is getting away from that hardware first or price-driven sales model. They want to move toward offering integrated solutions that drive growth and add value.”

That transition is not only about adding new products to a pitch deck. It starts with updating the sales process itself. Aguilar pointed to a basic but telling signal: many agents still lean on paper,even as merchants have grown accustomed to digital onboarding everywhere else.

Maverick has a dashboard where partners can submit data digitally, he said, but “we still see quite a few agents that want to use a paper app.” Some merchants will prefer that approach,he added,and sales organizations need to accommodate it. Still, he said moving merchants toward digital onboarding can remove unneeded friction.

“Moving them towards a digital application using e-signature, having the tools available to make things effortless are really going to help them get through that sales quickly,” Aguilar said. “It makes the experience better.”

Modern Selling

the broader point is that “modern selling” increasingly looks like modern operations: fewer manual steps, better visibility for managers and faster time-to-live for merchants. In the same way merchants digitized inventory and payroll,ISOs are now expected to digitize how they prospect,qualify,onboard and support accounts.

That operational upgrade reflects a deeper change in what merchants want from an ISO. in the early days, an ISO could win business by offering a slightly better rate or a more attractive terminal.Today, merchants can shop online, compare offers quickly and change providers with far less hassle than they once could. the value of the in-person relationship has not disappeared, but it has shifted toward advisory work: helping a business choose solutions that fit its workflow, and then sticking around to make sure th