Conquering Payment Acceptance Challenges is the Key to Fast-tracking Merchant Growth

New paper reveals how demographic shifts and technological advances are transforming the digital commerce opportunity.

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment solutions, has collaborated with First Annapolis to publish a new whitepaper that highlights the pivotal role of payment acceptance in enabling merchant growth strategies. The paper, Fast-track merchant growth paths in eCommerce, sets forth a new framework for understanding key digital commerce growth paths, illustrated through merchants that have mastered the accompanying payments challenges.

The whitepaper defines five principal growth paths for merchants: selling online for the first time, optimizing a domestic eCommerce business, expanding cross-border, investing in mobile, and delivering on omni-channel. While these growth paths often intersect, each presents specific payments challenges that need to be overcome.

As digital commerce booms, payment is increasingly seen as an integral part of the full shopping experience, rather than simply the final step in the sales process. Consequently, finding solutions to the payment challenges of each of these strategies is critical to capitalizing on the $2.2 trillion global eCommerce opportunity.

“Payments, and the role they play in converting shoppers into buyers, is increasingly central to merchants’ growth trajectories,” explains Mike Braatz, chief product officer, ACI Worldwide. “Savvy merchants know that payments are essential to a great shopping experience, and understand that they can often be the differentiator. We hope this paper enlightens readers regarding payments’ potential role in significant merchant growth within a shifting environment of expanding opportunities.”

“Merchants and their partners must evolve over time from prioritizing speed to market to optimizing the trade-offs between conversion and fraud,” said Joel Van Arsdale, partner, First Annapolis Consulting. “Leveraging open technologies and building global capabilities are keys to success, as illustrated through the case studies presented in this new paper.”

ACI launched the UP eCommerce Payments solution to empower top tier merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) to fast-track growth based on the trajectories. These are outlined in the whitepaper, which can be downloaded athttp://www.aciworldwide.com/merchantgrowth.
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About ACI Worldwide
ACI Worldwide, the Universal Payments (UP) company, powers electronic payments for more than 5,100 organizations around the world. More than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions and intermediaries as well as thousands of global merchants rely on ACI to execute $14 trillion each day in payments. In addition, myriad organizations utilize our electronic bill presentment and payment services. Through our comprehensive suite of software and SaaS-based solutions, we deliver real-time, immediate payments capabilities and enable the industry’s most complete omni-channel payments experience. To learn more about ACI, please visitwww.aciworldwide.com. You can also find us on Twitter @ACI_Worldwide.

About First Annapolis Consulting
First Annapolis is a management consulting and M&A advisory firm focusing on the financial services industry, particularly in payment-related products, services, and delivery. Our clients include U.S. and international financial institutions, payment networks, service providers, retailers, affinity groups, manufacturers, trade associations, and government agencies. We offer a full range of services including strategy development, program management, portfolio/risk management, commercial risk management and compliance, and marketing support/execution in areas such as product design, rewards/loyalty program development, and customer segmentation. First Annapolis also offers a suite of specialized M&A advisory services that complements our consulting practice. For more information, visit www.firstannapolis.comLinkedIn, and @FirstAnnapolis.

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