Bringing it all Together

It’s been a little while since we’ve written a blog post, it was last year in fact. So, we are well overdue for story time.

Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and let’s get started.

Today, we want to fill you in on some of the details that we’ve been working on over the past year. Weaving together the tapestry of some of the individual updates that we’ve sent out, bringing all of the pieces together into one cohesive story.

While individually, all of the pieces are big news, where it really gets interesting is when you take a step or ten back and look at the big picture. It’s the proverbial missing the forest for the trees.

What we spent 2018 doing was slowly and steadily weaving our way into the traditional payment infrastructure. We’ve done this with very little fanfare. And for good reason. We didn’t want to divulge too much of our strategy until we had the key puzzle pieces in place.

Well lucky for you, they are now in place.

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of how we have accomplished this.

(If you need a refresher on the payments space and our place in it, this is the place to go https://blog.net-cents.com/2018/12/06/all-aboard-final-call-next-stop-the-future/)

Let’s start with terminal and POS integrations. In order for cryptocurrency to gain traction in the traditional (read not online) retail space, we needed to be able to support payments in their traditional methods. We’ve gone about doing this in several ways. Firstly, we have iOS and Android apps that turn any tablet or smartphone into a terminal.

Et Voila, you think that we could be done there, but no.

We want to truly offer a system that caters to merchants and makes accepting cryptocurrency seamless for them. That means that accepting crypto how they accept credit card payments and give users a method of paying that they are familiar with.

This is through integrating into their existing terminal and POS systems. Through our agreement with SoftPoint, we are integrated into twelve POS systems and 7 smart terminals. This is on top of the terminals that we are directly integrated with and continue to integrate with.

Retail environment. Check.

You might ask yourself, what about online shoppers. It’s a massive area of retail growth.

Not to worry, we’ve got merchants covered here as well. We have integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and our hosted payment solution, giving merchants the complete ability to customize our solution for their unique individual needs. We’re continuing to work on rolling out more shopping cart plugins. Keep your eyes open for updates as they come.

Ok, so you might be saying to yourself that we’ve got retail and online covered. Storytime over. Not so quick, there is still a lot more to this story.

How about global distribution and coverage? We are currently working on this and are very close to rolling out merchant support in 57 countries around the globe with 33 fiat currencies. What does this mean? It means that a merchant in India can sell an item in Rupees, accept Bitcoin (or any of our Instant Settlement currencies), and get paid out in Rupees the next day using the NetCents merchant gateway. This example is true for any of the 57 countries that we will support.

Global coverage. Check.

Now that we’ve covered retail and online sales and global coverage. What’s next? How about making it easier for merchants and partners to integrate.

Well, we’ve done a few things to cover this.

Firstly, we moved to a cloud-based SaaS platform for faster onboarding, faster integrations, and faster white labelling. What does this mean exactly? Well, every time we announce a new White Label agreement or ISO agreement, we can get them up and running faster. We are no longer talking months or weeks, we are talking business days.

This also allows us to scale the platform both vertically and horizontally so that the platform can keep up with the growing demand and usage.

We’ve gone one step further with this though. We’ve also developed a robust set of API’s for our partners and merchants to allow them to completely customize the NetCents platform. We have API’s for our merchant gateway, terminal/POS, hosted payments, and Asset Management System. These API’s allow for seamless integration into traditional payment companies and legacy systems.

Yes, we are backwards compatible.

This next section will likely be very new to you. We’ve rolled out our Asset Management System.

Say what?

I know. We haven’t really told you about this yet. So now is our chance to fill you in. Our Asset Management System was designed for adding cryptocurrency functionality into existing platforms including banks, financial institutions, money service businesses, loyalty rewards programs, and prepaid cards, as well as commission management and payouts.

When we looked at growth and what was the fastest way to get to one million merchants, we knew that it wouldn’t be by signing up a million merchants individually. That there was a faster and easier way to get there. This is through our Partner Programs.

This strategy is slightly slower to revenue but significantly faster to profitability. Think hockey stick over slow steady growth. With the technology pieces in place, this was the last missing piece of our puzzle.

Getting the word out there and promoting cryptocurrency directly to merchants. Through a channel that has an existing relationship and a level of trust involved that you can’t get by picking up the phone. Trust and confidence that comes with years of working together and building a solid business relationship.

The initial results of this have been extremely successful.

Since August, we have signed 18 partner agreements. What does this mean exactly? Well, we now have a sales force of hundreds promoting NetCents to 100’s of ISO’s and hundreds of thousands of merchants in their network.

Key take away.

Integration into the source is the fastest way to get to mass adoption, revenue, and profitability.

Instead of following the PayPal model, which in the end was successful, but took 10 years to gain real traction, we are taking a different route.

Let’s face it, ISO’s are the gatekeeper to the payment space and are the only way to sign merchants at any significant rate. Even if you are Amazon or Costco, you don’t deal with Visa or MasterCard directly. You deal with an ISO, gateway or processor. And now, we work with them all.

That covers merchants, but we haven’t forgotten users either. Personally, I think that we left the best for last. Our credit card program. We all know that even with our signed agreements, merchant adoption won’t happen overnight.

Given this, what’s the best way allow people to spend their cryptocurrency now?

Well the NetCents credit card, obviously. Unlike other prepaid crypto cards on the market, our is tied directly into users’ wallets, which means that they will never need to load funds onto the card in advance spending their crypto. The brilliant part, the merchant thinks that they are accepting Visa while our users are spending crypto.

While this is massive news, this isn’t where the majority of the value will lay for NetCents and the mass adoption of cryptocurrency.

With the data that we collect through the card program, we will be able to approach merchants directly, with hard numbers and facts on how much they actually sold to cryptocurrency sales and how much they could save by accepting cryptocurrency directly. This is the data that is missing in the market today. It doesn’t exist anywhere. Yet.

Now that’s game-changing.

Right now, we are positioning and gaining market share. When this takes hold. We will be so embedded within the payment space that it will no longer be a choice of who to use, but rather we become the default.

While many investors and pundits focus on the flavour of the week, we are slowly and quietly taking over the mechanisms that provide this option for merchants. Owning the space before anyone realizes it.