THE DIGITAL PLATFORMS THAT WILL SUCCEED IN THE FUTURE OF THE COMMERCE AND SERVICES SECTOR

THE DIGITAL PLATFORMS THAT WILL SUCCEED IN THE FUTURE OF THE COMMERCE AND SERVICES SECTOR

Digitalization is shaping the new economy. Now there are more than 20,000 software companies globally, this market is highly fragmented, with specialized offer for thousands of lines of businesses and industries of all sizes that nowadays manage their operations using software created in recent years. But are all software well adapted for each business ? Certainly no.

Customer acquisition and retention are more and more challenging, so successful software providers are those who find ways to differentiate and deliver more value to their customers, boost retention and create new revenue streams. Many software and platforms are just a copy of other previous solution and don’t add any value. They just do exactly what others do with a different label. The best example is payment or transfer solutions that are efficient to move cash from one account to the other but don’t offer any kind of other services a normal business need for its daily management.

In the payments segment, as in many others, it is necessary to avoid costs of outdated methods and costly and avoidable fees, so the best software solutions are those that have turned to the integration of secure and easy payment system with other value added solutions that improve conversions, customer loyalty and retention. Nowadays more and more businesses no longer accept to have one isolated method of payment – even if they are traditional like Visa or Mastercard – as they prefer to have their payment acceptance model integrated with software tools for invoicing, accountancy, e-commerce, stocks management, customer data base, etc. The competition nowadays is such that platforms and software solutions that don’t stay ahead of industry trends will tend to disappear because they are expensive and inefficient, especially in a period of reduction of consumption due to recession and inflation. Many companies, including some fintech giants that used technologies that were no longer the state-of-the-art are seeing their valuations going down.

The time when just the name “fintech” attracted venture capital are over and funding for any company that might look like a fintech is now going down in 2022 and afterwards, unless they have products conceived for the future. This is a good natural selection of the real good platforms that add value for companies and customers and not only for the owners wishing to become unicorns and sell shares in initial public offerings of billions.????

This is true in every sector but it is more evident in the wholesale and retail commerce, a critical sector composed of millions of small and medium street shops, as well as of large department, retail and outlet stores, hypermarkets?and?shopping centers, where millions of consumers buy goods every day. In the very competitive market of software for the commerce and services sector only enhanced platforms that offer integrated diversified payments solutions with management services that are “all-in-one” solutions to help companies grow and run their businesses and also give more advantages to the consumers will survive.

Nowadays consumer spending is crashing and fintech companies that look best equipped to attract investors and venture capital are those that have a digital platform that reduce unnecessary costs (as banking fees and non-direct marketing campaigns) of the businesses, that help to generate new revenue lines and provide efficient tools for managing data base of customers needs, preferences and behaviors and add value by investing increased revenue in tokens expected to increase value. Only the best will succeed, ?such as Beam Platform, that was launched in Dubai in 2013 and expanded to several countries and is now developed from Portugal and expanding to other countries. Beam Wallet is a digital platform integrating any payment debit and credit cards with effective marketing tools for the merchants based on an innovative system of cashbacks paid to the consumers in every transaction. In spite the delay caused by the pandemic, Beam is no longer a start up and is expanding in number of shops, users and volume of transactions, attracting new investors that are betting in the future of the retail business.

www.beamwallet.com