An open letter from the Co-Founders (Nathan Watkins & Kathryn Miller) of the SaaS FinTech that’s caught the payments industry sleeping.

LEEDS, WEST YORKSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, May 15, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Templar Payments, a software company, has the industry watching as it launches its merchant onboarding product into BETA. Templar told us that 80% of merchants in the EU market who accept Card Present and Card-Not-Present e-commerce or Point of Sale payments pass through brokers, who introduce merchants to well-matched financial institutions or payment service providers. And yet for most ISO’s (independent sales organizations - brokers), the merchant onboarding process is cumbersome and time-consuming, using archaic processes such as email attachments & threads, and even hard copies and wet signatures. There is no wonder that the FinTech giants are slowly making their way through the market to eat into this 80%. 

Templar Payments Ltd, a software company is releasing to market a standalone, white-label onboarding web application. Standalone meaning it doesn’t interfere with any other internal systems (such as CRM’s) and doesn’t change any internal processes (the web application sends all necessary documents via email and API to the ISO’s existing book of financial institutions (acquiring banks)). White-label meaning the web app is completely branded as the ISO's - the merchant shouldn't know Templar exists.

However, while views, connections, and direct messages asking random questions have been through the roof, the scale-up's LinkedIn engagement has been dead silent. Along with customer feedback, the message is clear: the industry is non-plussed. “If it’s this easy, why has no one done it before?” “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Right?” But most importantly: “These guys incorporated in August last year and now they’re launching, and yet we’ve never heard of them. Who are they?”
 
Here is the open letter from the Co-Founders, detailing the impact the business hopes to achieve in a post-Covid economy:

To whom it may concern, 

Templar Payments, a B2B software company, has been in stealth mode since August 2021, performing extensive market research, finding the right technology partners, choosing the right technology stacks, and building and upskilling our internal and external development teams. We launch into BETA at 4 pm 17th May after our LinkedIn webinar launch at 3 pm. Below details the 'why' behind the business. 

"We saw the gap in the market for a smooth onboarding process for risk types outside that of those hoovered up by the FinTech Giants, such as Stripe and PayPal in the merchant e-commerce space. It makes commercial sense for Payments brokers to ensure optimized onboarding on their current verticals and open up the ability to support smaller merchants, who would welcome the personalised account management that many FinTech Giants struggle to provide. In addition to this, merchants should actually save money compared against FinTech Giants, giving SME’s an extra boost post-Covid. Templar’s web app is free to merchants and empowers merchant services brokers (ISO’s) to offer the same easy, fast access to card payment processing to merchants who are rejected or have their accounts frozen by the low-risk-centric FinTech Giants.

“We anticipate that 80% of our customer base will be in the UK, and estimate that this will lead to the creation of circa 10,000 jobs across the UK & EU via our web app users - both ISO’s and merchants. The importance of this is evidenced by the current government employment drive, seen in the Apprenticeship Levy, Kickstarter Scheme, and Boris Johnson's recent cry of “live local and prosper”.

“We have already seen positive signs within the ISO community post-Covid with 100’s of ISO’s currently recruiting or considering recruiting further staff. We want to get people back into jobs by empowering merchant services brokers in the UK and EU to create further sustainable roles post-Covid. To achieve this, we have made our web app as accessible as possible to all levels of the merchant services broker market. We have enabled part payment, priced the software affordably to ISO’s, released a free BETA trial, along with special start-up and early growth options on a case by case basis. 

“We plan to utilize the same government schemes to get people back into work within Templar and expect to create 400 jobs including 250 developers and a continual upskilling program via our partnership with North Coders initially within the Leeds and Manchester regions.”

"We would actively encourage local people to explore North Coders and other coding boot camps throughout the UK"

Yours Faithfully,

Nathan Watkins & Kathryn Miller

The tech gap in the payments industry will be addressed by Templar Payments in more detail in the Webinar, The Digital Chasm: How to level the tech playing field between FinTech Giants and Everyone Else., 3 pm-4 pm Monday 17th May.

Nathan Watkins
Templar Payments Ltd
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