In furtherance of its role in promoting the sustainability and viability of the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), Nigeria’s premier and leading financial inclusion services provider, FirstBank, recently held its SMEConnect webinar on Thursday, 24 March 2022. The event was themed; Leveraging Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) to drive revenue for your business.
The objective of the webinar was to update businesses with current technologies as they concern payments and demonstrate how the adoption of alternative payment methods can play an integral role in driving revenue growth.
At the webinar, different speakers provided insights into how businesses could leverage opportunities presented by Alternative Payment Methods (APMs).
Jeffery Williams, Group Business Head, Managing Merchant Acquiring Business Development, one of the speakers at the webinar, explained the technique of upselling and cross-selling, stating that business owners should aim to improve the shopping experience for existing customers than trying to pull in new ones.
To improve customers’ shopping experience, according to Jeffery, business owners should be able to offer additional or alternative items, should have a good understanding of customers’ profiles, increase the average spend and margin per customer purchase, make visible the additional or alternative items you want to project.
He explained that by providing alternatives, business owners also enable more sales. For alternative payments, they can be applied through simple technology, with such payments being through payment with a card, with POS, with Quickteller, transfer, USSD and so on.
Kolawole Ogunmekun, Head of Digital Innovation Lab at First Bank Limited, gave some insights into the different types of Alternative Payment Methods. He shared that APMs “refer to any form of payment that is not carried out using cash or any major international Debit or Credit card brand”.
He stated that customers need a frictionless payment experience especially for e-commerce transactions to aid seamless checkout and Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) solve this problem by providing a different array of options.
Some reasons for Small and Medium enterprises to leverage APMs include; driving increased sales, expanding the business reach, faster checkouts and improved payment security. APMs promote increased transaction security and a better experience for merchants and their customers.
FirstBank’s APMs products that SMEs can take advantage of include; the FirstBank Wallet, Pay with Bank Account, Pay with QR Code, FirstChekout, Mobile Contactless payment, Buy Now Pay Later, Pay with USSD, and Prepaid Card. All the above-listed products allow for faster, reliable cashless payments and transactions.
