A payments partnership that made 400+ storefronts visible
Digital payments across a franchise network were invisible to head office. I established a partnership with a national payments provider and drove 400+ deployments in six months, putting nationwide transaction monitoring in place.
Role — IT Manager
- Deployments completed
- 400+Deployments completed
- To nationwide coverage
- 6 monthsTo nationwide coverage
- Transaction monitoring established
- NationalTransaction monitoring established
The problem
Once stores were on centralised point of sale, a gap became obvious: the money.
In a franchise network where each store handles its own payment acceptance, head office sees what stores report, not what customers actually paid. Digital payments in particular tend to accumulate across whatever apps and QR codes individual owners have signed up for. There is no single view, no consistent reconciliation, and no way to tell a healthy store from one where the numbers have quietly drifted.
Approach
Rather than mandating a payment method store by store, the work was done as a partnership at the brand level — negotiating directly with the payments provider so that the network as a whole moved together.
That framing matters. A partnership gives franchisees a reason to adopt: better commercial terms than they would get individually, and a support path that runs through head office rather than through a call centre. It converts a compliance exercise into an offer.
Outcome
More than 400 deployments were completed within six months, establishing nationwide monitoring of digital transactions across the network.
The strategic result was visibility. Digital payment flow across the entire brand became observable from one place — which is the precondition for reconciliation, for spotting anomalies, and for treating the network’s revenue as a single dataset rather than several hundred separate ones.
It is also a good example of a pattern that recurs throughout this work: the technical deployment was routine; the leverage came from structuring the commercial relationship correctly first.