How OLS Payments Simplified the Payment Settlement Process for a Major Fast-food Chain

With the highly competitive nature of the fast-food industry, business leaders must focus on process improvement and more precise ways to control and cut costs. As hungry consumers have gravitated to the ease of online food ordering, mobile ordering represents significant potential in generating additional revenue for fast-food chains and increasing complexity risk. Technology and payments leaders know that the electronic payment settlement process is complex, expensive, and burdensome to manage and scale.

Managing these complex payment systems is often frustrating, and the costs of disjointed applications, data security management, and scale can quickly add up to hit the business’ bottom line. OLS Payments simplified the payment settlement process for a major fast-food chain by developing a cost-effective plan tailored to facilitate the payment settlements process, providing them with a flexible solution that offers increased visibility and is cost-effective.

How can we simplify the payment settlement process?
Developed through years of helping our partners overcome complex electronic processing challenges, OLS Payments has built a settlement and funding solution that can handle nearly any disbursement and fee assessment scenario. OLS can manage the disbursement of funds, assess associated fees, and access the reporting data needed without increasing the burden on your already taxed payments resources.

Fast-food Restaurants Face Complexity in the Settlement Process

While in-app payments provide an opportunity for fast-food restaurants, payment settlement processing can be a costly business expense, particularly if the online order is placed through a third party. Depending on the integration with the third-party provider, multiple payment transactions may make up a single customer order, which increases the processing fees and affects the restaurant’s bottom line. Restaurant operators likely bear the initial brunt of these fees in lower profit margins and then determine what part of the costs can or should be passed on to consumers.

Allowing customers to order through the restaurant or a third-party app is essential to attract new customers and generate more revenue. The complexity of navigating orders placed on both the restaurant app and third-party apps can result in fragmented and challenging system management. In addition, since customers almost exclusively pay through credit cards with online ordering, transaction fees are incurred at various system stages, which must factor in as a critical cost component.

The complexity of transaction processing is exacerbated because franchisee environments can add several layers of intricacy to the payment settlement process. With funds for multiple franchisees aggregated into a single ACH sent daily to the restaurant’s corporate bank account, those funds must be adequately accounted for and sent to each operator’s bank account.

Delivering a Simplified Payment Settlement Process

Although OLS is known for transaction processing, our services can be supplemented with a tailored settlement process. Facing the two-pronged challenge of acquiring funds from transactions handled through third-party service providers and disbursing that money to franchisees, OLS helped a major fast-food chain lower costs by reducing interchange fees and fees overall. OLS can simplify and streamline payment processing by unifying various systems, including reconciliation, settlement, and reporting, under one flexible and efficient solution as a payments orchestration provider.

This settlement process can:

1. Utilize the OLS Payments processing systems
2. Process Settlement files from the Corporation
3. Process Settlement files from Third-Parties

OLS settled varied payments into a fully-integrated solution where all the money would go to the leading corporate bank account. The settlement process would then orchestrate payments from the corporate account to hundreds of franchisee bank accounts. The flexible nature of the OLS settlement service allows the use of any bank and nearly any combination of funding banks settling to almost any number of receiving banks.

In addition, this settlement solution provided the following functions:

• Web Portal
• Daily Processing
• Daily Settlement – ACH processing with various banks
• Daily and Monthly Reporting
• Reporting by any tier of the company structure, including organization, merchant, and store levels

Simplify Your Payment Settlement Process

Combining the simplicity and flexibility of open source APIs and the customizability of settlement, OLS Payments can provide fast-food restaurants with a fully configurable, cost-effective solution to securely manage the complexity of connecting to third-party service providers. Its robust settlement features can handle complex scenarios, including franchisee funds disbursement and fee assessments. Contact us today to learn how OLS Payments can help you simplify your payment settlements process.

Key Takeaways

• Payment processing can be a costly business expense for fast-food restaurants, particularly if the online order is placed through a third party.
• Technology and payments leaders know that electronic payment processing is complex, expensive, and burdensome to manage and scale.
• The complexity of transaction processing is exacerbated because franchisee environments can add several layers of intricacy to the payment settlement process.
• OLS Payments can provide fast-food restaurants with a fully-configurable, cost-effective solution to securely manage the complexity of connecting to third-party service providers.