Commercial Payments

Our Commercial Payments practice area helps our clients capitalize on the 20%+ growth available in the commercial card marketplace. We complete close to 30 commercial payments client engagements each year and understand the business, purchasing, corporate, and fleet card products, including each product’s performance characteristics and unique set of opportunities and challenges. We also recognize that the spectrum of commercial payments is broader than cards and have assisted many clients with e-procure-to-pay related assignments.

Services Offered
Our services build upon strengths of our Card Issuing, Merchant Acquiring, and other practice areas in strategy, market research, partnership marketing, and M&A advisory assistance.

Strategy Development: Clients value First Annapolis’s rigorous research and analytical approach to assessing opportunities in commercial payments. Within this specialty, we concentrate on helping our client ask the right questions, explore potential answers, and synthesize findings into recommendations. Recent engagement work has included:

• Evaluating new commercial payments market opportunities domestically and internationally
• Assessing sales and marketing strategies including how to optimize the bank and branch channels
  
• Performing card program diagnostic reviews
  
• Evaluating card program re-launch strategies
  
• Exploring card program delivery models along a continuum of full insourcing to full outsourcing

We are proud that many strategy engagements lead to requests for follow-on work due to clients’ confidence in and comfort level with our approach.

Partnership Marketing: While the commercial card markets grow at double digit rates, we are witnessing even higher growth in commercial card partnership arrangements as issuers, recognizing the value partnership strategies have brought to consumer cards, seek to achieve similar results with partnerships customized for various commercial card products. Within the agent bank and co-branded business card markets, we use our market knowledge to help clients explore new sectors and select partners. In conjunction with this work, we bring our expertise in managing RFPs (including working closely with our clients’ sourcing and procurement professionals), performing scorecard assessments of potential providers, and negotiating term sheets and contracts.

Clients Served
We work with financial institutions, payment associations, and vendors as well as organizations that partner with financial institutions to offer commercial payment products.