Strategy Solutions
Growth in digital payments doesn’t begin with technology — it begins with understanding the human and market dynamics that technology must serve.
Reigniting Merchant Growth through Structured Commercial Diagnosis in Digital Payments
Challenge
Harmonic Strategy partnered with a global payments leader’s internal consulting division to explore strategies for deepening merchant engagement with its digital products portfolio. The engagement focused on identifying growth constraints through a structured diagnostic process — combining customer analytics, market frameworks, and pricing insights to enhance merchant adoption, loyalty, and profitability.
The digital payments ecosystem is experiencing unprecedented change, with rapid technological innovation, intensifying competition, and evolving merchant expectations. Despite strong product functionality and brand reputation, the client’s merchant adoption and utilization of digital solutions had plateaued.
Key challenges identified included:
Incomplete understanding of merchant pain points and product usage drivers.
Limited visibility into why some merchants disengaged or failed to scale product usage.
Competitive pressures from agile fintechs offering more tailored user experiences.
Internal gaps between product design, pricing strategy, and customer journey execution.
Unclear alignment between regional market conditions and product feature sets.
The client needed a structured, data-driven method to understand merchant behavior, identify friction points, and prioritize actionable improvements across product, pricing, and go-to-market execution.
Solution
Harmonic Strategy applied a systematic diagnostic and commercial analysis framework to surface growth levers and inform a new merchant engagement strategy.
Customer Intelligence via Pre-Work Surveys: Designed tailored surveys for both existing and former merchants to uncover user experience drivers, pain points, and root causes of disengagement. Applied the 5 Whys method to isolate core behavioural factors and differentiate sentiment between current and lost customers.
Demand–Supply Diagnostic using the CCC Model: Evaluated Customers (Demand), Competition (Supply), and Company (Internal Capabilities) to map the microeconomic structure of the market. Segmented merchants and competitors to uncover under-served niches.
Overlayed TREM Framework (Technology, Regulation, ESG, Market Dynamics): Mapped external forces shaping the payments landscape and stress-tested the client’s readiness to adapt.
Applied 7P Commercial Levers Framework:
Product: Evaluated feature adequacy, UX/UI gaps, and opportunities for differentiation.
Price: Benchmarked competitive pricing, assessed price elasticity, and identified repricing opportunities.
Place: Reviewed geographic presence and market saturation to evaluate international expansion opportunities.
Promotion: Assessed marketing reach, alliance potential, and customer referral utilization.
People: Examined customer-facing team capability, training needs, and cultural alignment.
Process: Evaluated friction in onboarding and transaction flows; assessed technology alternatives.
Physical Evidence: Recommended tangible visibility enhancements through events, pop-ups, and digital showcases.
This diagnostic sequence provided a structured commercial view of where adoption was stalling — and how to harmonize strategy, pricing, and customer experience into one coherent growth model.
Key Deliverables
Merchant Experience Diagnostic Report consolidating survey, segmentation, and sentiment findings.
End-to-End Growth Framework integrating the CCC, TREM, and 7Ps models.
Competitive Pricing and Elasticity Assessment with repricing recommendations.
Prioritized Opportunity Map highlighting high-potential merchant segments and regions.
Organizational Enablement Plan outlining people, process, and technology interventions.
Customer Benefits
When implemented, the Harmonic framework enabled the payments firm to:
Reignite merchant growth through targeted product and pricing enhancements.
Deepen understanding of merchant behavior and decision triggers.
Strengthen internal alignment between product, marketing, and commercial functions.
Improve conversion and retention through data-driven segmentation and value propositions.
Accelerate growth in key domestic and international markets through optimized go-to-market execution.