Transaction Trends

Bob Leonard is founder and chief executive officer of iMobile3, the third software company he has built over the past 30 years. iMobile3 recently won the overall prize in the ETA/PayPal Technology Innovation Showcase awards at TRANSACT. Here, Leonard talks to Transaction Trends about his company’s digital marketplace and POS platform, offers advice to other fintech companies, and more.

Describe iMobile3’s products/services and where you got the idea for development.

iMobile3 develops white label POS and digital marketing solutions for payment providers and merchant acquirers. You will not see the iMobile3 brand anywhere in the market because we embrace our role as a true behind-the-scenes solutions provider for our partners.

Our marketplace is an app store of business solutions that can be made available to merchants through the payment provider’s merchant portal. We got the idea for development of our marketplace after years of experience working with payment providers in the industry. We saw a tremendous need for these providers to be able to offer a branded, single sign-on portal to their merchants that not only expands their offering with tools like social media and other digital marketing functionality, but also consolidates all of their product offerings under one roof. By giving their merchants a consistent, branded experience from just one portal, payment providers will solve their two most pressing challenges: increasing merchant engagement and ultimately reducing merchant attrition.

What’s been the biggest challenge since launch?

The biggest challenge has been getting merchants initially engaged with the marketplace. Merchants are extremely busy and have limited time to check mailboxes, email, answer the phone, etc. It will always be a challenge to quickly demonstrate the value of the marketplace—or any software solution for that matter—to merchants and get them to create an account and log in to the product.

How did you solve that challenge?

We solved the engagement challenge by implementing a robust communication strategy. We developed a number of continuous email marketing campaigns to consistently inform merchants about this new marketplace and explain the value.

We also developed a merchant-facing application that the merchant will be able to download on a mobile device. Once downloaded, the app can send the merchant important push notifications about its business such as charge backs, daily funding events, negative review notifications, and more, to help drive the merchant into the portal. Once this mobile application is integrated into the customer service/help desk of an organization, we see merchant engagement at a whole new level.

What business advice do you have for new startups in fintech?

Never forget about the user experience. As software developers, we can often get lost in loading up our products with new complex features and making them more and more robust. However, we must never forget about the end-users who will be accessing these tools.

Merchants have very limited free time and want their answers and solutions as fast and as simple as possible. That is why we always put our solutions in front of small business owners and employees before hitting the market to ensure they have a seamless user experience with the product and can easily navigate it. Always have the end-user in mind when developing a piece of software.

How will iMobile3 be using t he Tech Innovation Showcase Award prize money?

We will be using the award to reinvest in our software. We have been traveling the country getting feedback from both current and potential partners about what their biggest needs are and what else they would like to see from a solution like our marketplace.

We value this feedback and use it to drive our development cycle. The prize money will go to further enhancing our product and to implement features that our partners need to continue to increase their merchant engagement and reduce attrition.