Pitney Bowes Looks to Get In on Mobile Payments Market

You’ve got to give businesses credit; virtually no one out there isn’t taking the mobile payments market seriously anymore, and plenty are looking for ways to get in.

Even some unexpected new options are cropping up and giving the consumer plenty of choices, and Pitney Bowes is one of the latest—and least expected—firms to step into the fray.

Pitney Bowes was generally known as a solutions provider for shipping and e-commerce, so it’s not too far off the mark to see it branch out into payments processing as a means to further close the loop and give itself a part of every part of online shopping: offering goods for sale, shipping goods to customers, and now, paying for those goods.

The new offering is a payments engine that operates on a cloud basis, making itself more readily available to users.

It’s part of the SendPro office shipping solution, and with all these tools together, Pitney Bowes can offer a means to help with the particularly difficult cross-border shipping market.

It’s long been a difficult proposition to get goods from one country to another, and with this, it might be a little bit easier to get those goods out.

Given that Pitney Bowes lost about six percent of its mailing business’ revenue in the fourth quarter of 2015 as compared to the previous year—though still a healthy $477 million total—it was clear the company would be interested in a way to shore up its fading fortunes.

Throw in growth in its e-commerce business—11 percent against the same time last year to reach $215 million—and expansion in the online market might be just the way to do it.

The move is a smart one for Pitney Bowes, especially given the circumstances of its revenue profile.

With lower shipping values and better e-commerce values, supporting the online side of things should benefit by providing extra support in a growth market.

That’s just taking advantage of a gaining market, and Pitney Bowes should be able to realize some exciting new revenue growth as a result.

Making moves that take advantage of a market in flux is smart business, and it’s good to see that Pitney Bowes was sufficiently astute to make the jump.

This should be good news for the company, and we’ll find out how good fairly soon.