Posted by Jeff Gardner

I’ve spent the last couple of days at NACHA Payments 2008 meeting a variety of industry leaders in the payments space as well as doing my fair share of learning. The conference–hosted by NACHA, a non-profit organization that oversees the ACH Network–offers an abundance of sessions, many of which were highly appealing. It is one of the biggest conferences of the year in the payments space, and it was great to be in attendance as both a student and a representative of PaySimple.

I also had the pleasure of leading a session on small business payment preferences and trends. The basis for the presentation was the findings of a recent survey on small business payment behavior commissioned by PaySimple, and conducted by Market Platform Dynamics. My co-presenter, Karen Webster gave an excellent overview of the state of electronic payments within small businesses today. We were able to glean some very interesting nuggets of information from the study. Among them:

• Collecting online payments is a top strategic business priority for many small businesses
• 52% of those surveyed would give up coffee for a week if they could collect payments from customers faster and less expensively!
• Tech savvy businesses are more likely to accept electronic payments
• 61% of respondents have a Web presence; only 26 % accept payments on their website
• Less than 13% use electronic means to generate and send customers invoices
• Small businesses that accept electronic payments want a better solution and are willing to switch providers to get it
• Roughly 70% of the survey sample believe that within the next two years 50% of their payments will be via electronic methods

You can download the full results of the small business payments survey here. All in all, NACHA Payments was a fantastic event and I’m glad to have attended the last couple of years. PaySimple is forging a new path in payment processing for small businesses and we look forward to continuing to be both a value added provider as well as an industry resource for years to come.

Popularity: 19% [?]