Modern businesses of all sizes constantly seek tech-driven solutions that offer proven methods for better managing cash flow. That, in turn, gives them the ability to better address important areas such as timely vendor payments and building employee loyalty. Addressing issues related to cash flow is the primary focus for Priority, which offers payment and banking solutions to its clients.
Priority CEO Thomas Priore, who co-founded the company in 2005 and became CEO in 2018, said this commitment to using innovative technology to solve business challenges is what’s driven the company’s success. Priority recently experienced its best financial quarter in company history. The firm’s organic growth is at 19%, while bottom-line growth is at 26%.
“We’ve had this vision for payments and banking converging,” Thomas Priore said. “We’ve taken a leadership position in executing that reality for our customers. We are now a payments and banking fintech with a very elegant set of financial tools for businesses of all sizes. We have treasury and banking solutions, vendor management and large enterprise software to manage an entire ecosystem of commerce.”
Priority offers solutions for small to medium-size businesses through its MX Merchant suite of services. The company also provides services to improve B2B payments, such as the CPX accounts payable system. Priority’s solutions for enterprise payments and banking include Passport, which allows businesses to collect, store, lend, and send money on a single native platform.
Priore said these and other services offered by Priority have their genesis in an understanding that providing automated payments solutions is just the beginning of what his fintech company can do. “The business environment has evolved to a demand for commerce solutions,” he said.
Increasing the Velocity of Money
Thomas Priore often refers to cash acceleration or the velocity of money, which is a metric used in economics to measure how quickly money changes hands in an economy. It’s a measurement that reflects the efficiency of economic transactions. At a national level, a higher velocity of money indicates a robust and active economy. A lower velocity of money is often associated with economic contractions and recessions.
For individual businesses, a high velocity of money indicates an efficiency in financial transactions that allows for better cash flow management. That opens up the door to growth and expansion, among other opportunities. Priority specializes in making both business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions more efficient.
Thomas Priore said leaders at every type and size of business want to see “money pick up velocity” in relation to how they receive, store, and send cash.
“And that ‘sending’ could be paying employees efficiently — which in turn affects their experience working for you — or your key suppliers or anyone else in that ecosystem,” Priore noted. “And that’s the expectation now of a modern service provider in payments: that the provider is equipped in the nuances of banking.”
Cash acceleration opens the door to a number of benefits for businesses, he said. “As a business owner, the faster I get my money, the better decisions I can make in managing my business.”
He added that Priority is “creating an environment where, when I authorize payments, I’m going to get visibility into the cash flow coming to my business that same day. And better yet, if I could utilize that buying power on that same day, I may be able to pay my vendors early, which generates early pay discounts.”
Better Cash Flow Management Also Can Help Build Employee Loyalty
Another advantage of better cash flow management is that it can lead to higher employee loyalty, Thomas Priore said. He used the example of a company running a 500-location franchise restaurant.
“A lot of my employees, they may be underbanked, they may be living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “Imagine if, because I’ve got my batches the same day, I know exactly how much was generated in tips and I could direct those tips into an account that a server is using to buy their groceries, to take their kids to the movies, to sustain their life. Well, that’s going to engender loyalty.”
That can prove key to success in the restaurant industry, where the rate of employee turnover is nearly 80% By paying employees faster, “you’re going to be hard-pressed to find employees looking to leave,” Priore said. “Those are the things that we’re trying to impact.”
Priority Offers Solutions Through Three Types of Products
These benefits outlined by Thomas Priore show that his company has moved far beyond what payments companies offered in the past. In discussing the multiple products Priority offers, he said they’re organized into three main categories.
The first, acquiring products, includes card and digital payment acceptance, such as Plastiq. The second is banking solutions through Passport, which has both consumer and commercial applications. The third is payables, including SMB payment systems and accounts payable for larger enterprises.
“It’s the combination of those three products that help us work with businesses of all sizes to accelerate cash flow and optimize working capital,” Thomas Priore said. “And it is an a la carte menu. We have people who work with us on payables and are going live for acquiring. There are folks that work on acquiring and are just being introduced to banking and payables.
“The nice thing is having that full menu. We are a single relationship that these folks can go to and get a financial tool set to manage their business that complements the other tools they already have in place.”
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