Innovating in Payment Technology: Plimus CEO Hagai Tal (Part 7)

Sramana: Essentially Plimus offers a complete solution for smaller businesses, and in return small companies are going to pay a slightly higher transaction rate. Is that correct?

Hagai Tal: Yes. When they become a larger company, they can then evaluate if they are able to accomplish all of the same things we do more efficiently. As they grow in size, the rate that we charge will drop unless they have new demands. At times, when companies grow they come back with new requirements that require additional development by Plimus, such as a connection to their CRM. In most cases those fees will remain the same because of the extra features we do for them.

We treat our clients as a partnership. We do not charge them a fee for work. We make it easy for them to get it, and by convenience it is harder to leave us. We look at it as a revenue share. We want to make it unattractive financially to leave us. Our tools should be key to helping the grow their business.

Sramana: That is an obvious beneficial relationship. You need them to grow so your revenue base will also grow.

Hagai Tal: Exactly. When someone on my team asks me to charge a business $100,000 to complete an integration, they find that I am always against it.

Sramana: How can you assess the potential growth ability of your client companies? If 90% of them start out with less than $100,000 in annual transactions, do you have a sense of how many will wind up with $1 million or $5 million in transactions?

Hagai Tal: I have a lot of data on those trends. If someone has a good product and a good business model, and they leverage the new business models in the payment business, in time they will do very well. When we see those clients, we will sacrifice and help them get there and grow their business faster.

Sramana: How do you help them grow their business faster?

Hagai Tal: We give them knowledge of what other people do. For example, if they are going to allow someone to use their product for 14 days on a trial basis, what should the purchase price be? Should they use coupons? Should they do marketing campaigns? We can take them to different parts of our platform and do the matching for them. We do the business development aspects for their business.

Sramana: In the 1M/1M program we deal with small companies trying to grow to $1 million in revenue. We see a lot of these companies making the same mistakes over and over again. We have created a virtual incubator to help companies get through this phase.

Hagai Tal: That is the key. We are in a position where we see a lot of businesses and understand their business models. We know from past experiences that certain businesses can either succeed or fail based on strategic decisions they make. We try to intervene and make it possible for those businesses to succeed. We really work hard to create a partnership with our clients because if they are successful, we will be successful as well.

Sramana: Great, this has been a great story. Best of luck going forward.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Innovating in Payment Technology: Plimus CEO Hagai Tal
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