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What We Do

Q&A with CEO Chip Kahn, Describing What IP Commerce Does
Taken from an interview with PYMNTS.com

In one sentence, what do you do?

IP Commerce provides the first cloud-computing platform for commerce; our Managed Commerce Services Platform enables payment providers and new entrants to become solution providers by enabling new workflows, services and processes on-demand.

What problem do you solve for and for whom?

The legacy payment systems were not designed to support payment convergence or support application development, so we provide our service infrastructure & application delivery framework to payment service providers so they can:

First, enable Commerce Workflows in Software applications

  • Industry Average: 56 weeks
  • With IP Commerce: 5.2 weeks

The benefit of that is a greater Percentage of Successful Integrations (that get to market and become profitable)

  • Industry Average success rate: <40%
  • With IP Commerce the success rate is: >80%

Resulting in Time to Break Even on Integration

  • Where the Industry Average is: 48 months
  • While with IP Commerce its under 5 months

In summary, our Managed Commerce Services Platform reduces the cost, time and complexity of deploying commerce-enabled applications and provides positive feedback loops and economies of scale to partners.  Whether developing a payment application, or addressing the needs of a community of Software Companies as a payment service provider, we provide a comprehensive approach and workflow to integration, promotion, customer acquisition, and customer activation. 

What makes you different than anyone else in this space?  

We enable real innovation securely. What makes us different is what we enable that is different. For example today, application developers have built the following on our platform:

  • TV Set-top devices for purchasing content and goods with a digital wallet
  • Highly integrated management solutions for single practice healthcare and for large hospitals
  • SMS text-based subscription payments for parking
  • Non-profit donation management
  • Unattended payments at kiosks
  • Smart phone payment enablement
  • New eCommerce workflows for social networks
  • Electronic payment enablement of invoices for small businesses out of MS Word and so on.

All of these commerce enabled app's are then made available in our marketplaces, which is an "appstore" for our partners.

So in summary, application developers can focus on the value-add & differentiation of their product versus the arduous and time consuming work of creating an underlying service infrastructure.  And we do this by partnering with existing payment providers to help them create their own vibrant ecosystem by eliminating all the friction.

What was the feedback received from your last investor or client discussion?

I think consistently, IP Commerce partners recognize the benefit of leveraging our Platform as a method of solving immediate market pain while positioning themselves for the future.

Provide 50 words or less that would get someone like Warren Buffett to listen to your pitch.

Every business takes and makes payments, or they aren't in business for long! The big opportunity is to displace paper checks and cash which would create an incremental service fee opportunity of $8B annually to the payments value chain in the US alone.  But to do this, the payment infrastructure in the US needs an upgrade - certainly the "last mile" does. And that's not a trivial task but one we at IP Commerce are doing.  And we are working with over 60% of the market today to do that.  From an IP Commerce perspective, our platform approach creates a nice economic moat that other major multi-sided businesses have scaled from.  Businesses like Microsoft.

What is the one word that most of the people you talk to about your product or service use to describe it?  

Magic.

Why are you "what's next" in payments?

Through our end-to-end workflow we help some of the largest players in payments accelerate revenue, capture incremental revenue, reduce ongoing operating expenses, differentiate and reduce attrition.  Those are all things that are pretty important to these major payments companies.

And we are best in class at exposing payments to developers, and there is sort of this inevitable march of payments moving into software in a ubiquitous manner and we are positioning to be the operating system for that.