How Lightspeed takes control with integrated payments

Every platform’s journey to integrated payments is unique. Some want to unlock new revenue streams, others want to enable better user experiences, while for many, streamlining operations before growth is a must.

Why platforms decide to take payments in-house:

For one-stop commerce platform Lightspeed, the motivation has always been to better serve users and the small and medium-sized businesses they run. We sat down with Jona Georgiou, GM of Payments and Financial Services, to chat about the platform’s journey to taking payments in-house. Here are three learnings from our session at Payments Decoded.

When Lightspeed was founded in 2005, the payments space was massively fragmented and independent businesses severely underserved. Seeing these challenges as opportunities, the company had a clear vision of where it wanted to go and knew the technology would catch up.

“The idea has always been to provide a single solution for our customers,” says Jona. “When we first realized the opportunity of bringing payments [in-house], it was really when we looked at Lightspeed overall — we wanted our customers to have a seamless experience with us.”

The journey to integrated payments took many years for Lightspeed and spanned three phases:

With the launch of Lightspeed Payments, the platform is now able to customize its offerings to SMB merchants individually, based on factors like industry, location, and customer experience. Here’s how having this end-to-end control helps create more value for Lightspeed and its users.

Payments continue to be fragmented for retail and hospitality brands. And since each industry is so unique, it can be hard for SMBs to get what they need from one provider. Looking to solve for this challenge, Lightspeed saw payments as vital in bringing that all together in one solution.

“With Lightspeed payments, we can truly create a custom solution” says Jona. “For example, pairing a card reader with an iPad or another device or pay at your screen, pay at your table, table side. This lets us make more bespoke options for our merchants, and allows us to integrate at every point. It all runs through a single engine, and that's our edge.”

Big brands are normalizing effortless buyer journeys and cross-channel experiences for consumers, making it even harder for SMBs to keep up. Helping users adapt has been a major benefit of integrating payments for Lightspeed, creating additional stickiness with the platform.

“Lightspeed helps streamline business processes overall,” says Jona. “The value and the impact of that was definitely amplified during turbulent times. For example, our restaurant customers were able to offer order ahead, curbside pickup, basically different ways to run their business when everything jumped to ecommerce. Signing up with Lightspeed Payments or even just Lightspeed POS and Payments, all these offerings are in one spot.”

Every decision Lightspeed makes puts their users front and center. So it’s no surprise that during the pandemic, the platform went off-roadmap to provide cash advances to users. Doing so built even more trust with merchants and created new avenues of growth for the business.

“We completely pivoted our roadmap during COVID,” says Jona. “We never had offered merchants cash advance, which we call capital. It was designed simply to help out merchants during the time of their need. But since then, we've heard amazing customer feedback, because it was much needed during these times and we wanted to make sure we were there for them.”

While integrating payments can help create new revenue streams for platforms and marketplaces, Lightspeed’s success is a reminder that real longevity comes from putting users first. When payments decisions are user-centric, growth is a happy by-product.

“If we don't get the experience right, if we don't listen to our merchants on exactly what they want and how, it wouldn't matter in the end,” says Jona. “The revenue will follow if the customers are happy.”