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Black Friday: The payments aftermath


Johannesburg, 03 Dec 2019
Douglas Gillan, Nomad CEO
Douglas Gillan, Nomad CEO

The dust has settled, the transactions have been banked, consumer desires are mostly satisfied, and retailers can start rallying themselves to get the tills ringing again for the rest of the holiday shopping frenzy. The 2019 Black Friday weekend was most certainly a success with many retailers again recording record sales.

With in-store purchases still outpacing online purchases, and at a time when consumers rely so heavily on technology to make even the most basic of purchases, payment system reliability and uptime is absolutely crucial for bricks and mortar retailers.

Being proactive before Black Friday, and beyond…

High-volume events such as this are when the mettle of a retail payments’ solution, the depth of skills of the people behind scenes, and the strength of its network infrastructure are truly tested.

Nomad Information Systems, a payments service provider that offers market-proven card payment and value-added services solutions for retailers across SA anticipated major transactional spikes in its systems well ahead of time.

With an increased number of new high-profile retailers placing their trust in Nomad over the past year, their card-holder shoppers were able to enjoy a fast, reliable payments experience in store, that handled everything that Black Friday 2019 threw at it.

“With ever-increasing card processing volumes over Black Friday and the festive season, it would be prudent for retailers to select a payments solution that can handle those volumes every day, no matter what the time of the year,” says Douglas Gillan, Nomad CEO.

By 9am on Friday morning, Nomad had already seen a spike in volumes of over 200% above the average number of transactions per hour, although the system capacity was operating at well under 30% throughout the day.

The role of the ecosystem

Nomad retailers’ success over the Black Friday period would not be possible without the ability to have eyes focused on the whole payments ecosystem. Offering its own credit card devices, the payments software and an attitude towards e-security in-store, Nomad’s line of sight starts at the point where the cardholder inserts or taps their card and extends all the way through Nomad’s entire payments system and onto the retailers' chosen acquiring bank with no reliance on third parties.

The Nomad ecosystem drastically reduces points of failure and removes inefficiencies that retailers tend to experience from multiple service providers, with an all-encompassing end-to-end payments solution that provides retailers with total peace of mind.

Nomad takes care of it all…

A payments system for every day of the year

Nomad has listened to the needs of its customers over the past few years and has taken an analytic and rigorous bottom-up approach to re-threading its own business processes and upscaling its systems with total customer centricity at front of mind. At every avenue, retailer pain points were considered and executed, and this is evident in the Black Friday 2019 outcome.

Preparing for the next one

On reflection, retailers may be able to pinpoint what is broken in their current payments infrastructure, and consider where the barriers to efficiency lie in their in-store payments system that may have resulted in lost sales, and start gearing in preparation for the festive season, and again for Black Friday 2020. 

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