Paying suppliers and getting paid are two different problems
The client sells to small and medium businesses, and needed to know how they actually manage money moving in and money moving out.
Those are not one behaviour. The client wanted its decision makers segmented by whether they only pay suppliers, only receive customer payments, or do both.
Cash flow management is where those arrangements meet, and it is also where a provider is kept or dropped. That is what made the question worth asking properly.
We asked operators in four markets the ones who choose the provider
Respondents were small business owners, finance managers and operations managers across the UK, the US, South Africa and Colombia.
The bar was hands on authority. Mid level operators with 3 to 8 years in role, each with direct decision making authority over payment provider selection.
Large enterprise finance staff, freelancers and payment industry insiders were excluded. Qualitative research is only as good as the seat the respondent sits in, and none of those three sit in the one that matters here.
What each of them gave was first hand. The payment methods they use, how they choose a provider, how sensitive they are to cost, and how often and how much they move.
Where the relationship is open to change
The research mapped SMB payment behaviour across provider preferences, the pain points behind them, and the triggers that make a business switch.
It also mapped what differs market to market, including the opportunities in send money and receive money integration.
Business payments look like one category from the outside. Read by segment and by market, they resolve into several.
The result is a four market fact base. The client uses it to sharpen product positioning and to set go to market priorities against the SMB segments it targets in each market.
