ISV Talks
ISV Talks
How Red Maple Delivers True Payment Processor Choice for Dynamics ERP
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In this episode of ISV Talks, Carol Livingston from Dynamics Connections interviews John Pleau from Red Maple, a long time Microsoft focused ISV that delivers flexible payment solutions for Dynamics 365. John shares Red Maple’s twenty year history of working exclusively in the Microsoft ecosystem and explains why their approach stands out. Red Maple gives merchants and partners full freedom to choose their payment processor rather than being locked into a single provider.
John walks through Red Maple’s embedded payment solution for Business Central and highlights the features customers value most. These include support for multiple processors, international currencies, SEPA and GDPR requirements, surcharging with InterPayments, and advanced cost saving tools like Level 2, Level 3, and CEDP processing. He explains how these capabilities can reduce interchange fees and create instant ROI for customers.
The conversation also covers tokenization, fraud prevention, authorization workflows for backorders and partial shipments, in person payments without a full POS system, Click to Pay, and Red Maple’s customer payment portal called Clever Division. John also notes that Red Maple supports ACH and offers a commissions management product used by many customers.
John shares trends he is seeing in the market, including strong growth in Business Central, increased demand for processor choice, and interest in new technologies like Apple Tap to Pay on iPhone and real time payments. He also mentions that more companies are moving from NetSuite and Acumatica to Business Central and appreciate Red Maple’s flexibility.
The episode closes with the key theme driving customers to Red Maple. Merchants want freedom, choice, and cost savings. Red Maple’s processor agnostic approach gives them exactly that. www.redmaple.com
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_01Well, welcome to this episode of ISV Talks. I'm Carol Livingston of Dynamics Connections and your host of ISV Talks. And on this episode, I'm excited to have John Plow from Red Maple. Welcome, John.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Carol. Good to see you again.
SPEAKER_01Good to see you. Do you want to introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you've been with the company?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Yeah. John Plow. I have been with Red Maple for now two and a half years or so. And I've actually worked with Red Maple for over 15 years in different partnerships. When I worked with companies like Cayenne, Ingenico, and Blue Snap. So I had we had partnerships with Red Maple. I'm excited to say I'm here for the last two and a half years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Great. Well, thank you. Tell us a
Red Maple And The BC Shift
SPEAKER_01little bit about Red Maple. How did the company start? Maybe give a company overview.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So Red Maple has been doing Microsoft only ERP for 20 plus years. So of course now we're with FNO and BC, and we also do CE, etc. But all we do is Microsoft. We don't do anything other, no other ERPs, no Net Suites, no Oracles, no nothing. So we are a Microsoft shop. And yeah, 20 plus years, lots of different customers, literally from the smaller BC doing maybe, I don't know, 100,000 a month to companies literally doing over a billion a year in sales. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Okay. Well, great. Um, I think you're kind of newer to the BC part of the Microsoft space, so right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we are. We we started three years ago to really get into BC. I came in two and a half years ago. F and up continues to to there's just a lot of great things going there. But the truth is BC is growing even faster. It just seems like a lot of merchants are making the move to BC. Yeah. So we are, we are, yeah, it's been a it's been a real good run with BC, and we're just excited about where it is and where it's going
Embedded Payments With Processor Choice
SPEAKER_00for sure.
SPEAKER_01Great. Yeah well tell us kind of give us the basic description. What is your solutions? What do we have for dynamics and what are your unique features?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we have an embedded payment solution for Microsoft BC, and we are a little bit different in that we are not tied in to a processor, to a payment processor, though we have strategic partnerships with other companies. We really aren't tied in, and we've always allowed the merchant or the VAR to say, I want you to talk to this payment processor. We're not we're not locking anybody in. That way we give VARs and also merchants choice, because a lot of times we'll have a VAR call and say, Hey, I'm switching from nav to BC, and they don't have a solution for name the Elevon or some payment processor. Do you support that? And we say, absolutely. So we can support many, many different processors. So that's one of the main things. And then we also, and with the multiple processor support, we also can do things like international. So we support Europe, we support Australia, we support Canada, we can take Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Euros, GBP, you name it. We can support international. And we're at what I'm seeing is just me, but it seems like BC, they're growing and their customers are getting larger and larger. And the requirements are now we're getting customers saying, hey, can you support Europe? And so we're seeing that part of it as well. Yeah, so that's that's one of it. And then of course, with that, we support things like SEPA, FAST, GDPR, all the requirements that you have internationally. So that's all part of it as well. Yeah. And the other things that we have built into our product are things like surcharging. So we have partnered with a company called Interpayments, and to be honest, a large bank asked us to do this, and we're glad we did. But it basically indemnifies the merchant for if they're gonna do surcharging. Think of like Avalara for taxes, interpayments, interpayments for surcharging. So that, and I'm gonna make this up in New Jersey, they can only charge 2% max for surcharging, but in Montana, you can go the full 3% and all those different things. So interpayments takes care of that for you, and it just makes our solution that much more powerful. And we're literally had a big demo today, and that was the big question is what about thing? How do you support it? And so that that seems to really help our sales, to be honest, because companies are looking for being indemnified, they don't want to get fined if they charge the wrong amount and those type of things. We support the features that that save merchants and merchants' money, which help pay bars and pay us, is that things like level two, level three, and now CEDP with visa. Yeah, so I mean, we're all we support all of that, and the truth is if if they're not doing level two, level three, C EDP, you can save up to one and a half percent by doing what we all know is money in the pocket. Yeah, you're talking, if not thousands of dollars, tens of thousands
Surcharging Rules And Level 2 Savings
SPEAKER_00of dollars of savings.
SPEAKER_01Maybe just for those that don't know level two or level three processing. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so it's business to business cards, and basically we're filling out a lot more information, address, all these things that that Visa MasterCard want to know that it's a much more secure transaction. And by doing that, they will lower the interchange on those cards. So they're saving a considerable money by taking and most media.
SPEAKER_01So just includes include more detail on that trans that credit card transaction, you get a lower rate. That's pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_00Okay, this we can lower our rate.
SPEAKER_01That's authentic.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. So I mean that I always say that helps pay for BC, that helps pay for integration, that pays for licensing. If you can come back and say, hey, we're working with name the product, we're working with Fortis, and Fortis came back and said, Hey, we're gonna save you eleven hundred dollars a month on your what you're currently paying. It's like, okay, that adds up real quick, and that really does help the sale where you don't really have to sell that much when they know that the savings right there. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, instant ROI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly.
Tokenization Fraud Tools And Shipping Auth
SPEAKER_00We do uh Carol things like course tokenization of credit cards. So it's actually the credit card number is never stored in the uh Microsoft D365. So we do the tokenization with the processor, of course, and that gives you a tokenized reference number for your future transactions. It helps with all the PCI DSS compliance, PCI 4.0, all of that. So we never see the credit card. I mean, they're not gonna, we're never storing any credit card information, it just makes it much, much more secure. Yeah, so that that is another thing we do a lot is tokenization, and it does depend on the processor. So some processors and with that, you can talk about fraud as well. So some processors will have a fraud solution built in and we'll like for cybersource, they have a fraud solution that we're integrated with. So that also comes with it as well. So we just we just continue to try to enhance the product, make it that much better. And when we we really do thrive on when someone says, Hey, do you support this? And then once we start hearing that once or twice, that this is becomes something within our company. Like, hey, this is something we really have to get our arms around. The other thing that we've done, and we really cut our teeth in FNO because this is a big deal, but now it's in BC, is that we the we do things like automatically authorize orders when they're shipped. So it really does help for things like long back orders when that happens. That's so you actually bill when the order is actually shipped, partial shipments. So if you're only shipping half that day, we're gonna we'll hit the first half, but we'll wait until the second half goes and then we'll hit that as well. We also allow businesses to authorize for overages. It's great for shipping charges not known at the time of order. So we will allow that to happen and other charges that you want to throw on there as well. So there's some things that we built into the product that I think it just makes it much, much better for some B2B customers for sure.
In Person Payments Links Portal ACH
SPEAKER_01What about in-person transactions? Do you have that as well?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we do. We actually do have in-person transactions, so in-store payments. It's more of a non-traditional POS, is what I'm going to say. So it's not a full-blown retail POS that you'd see at Best Buy or something, but it does tie into sales orders and sales invoices. So you have a payment terminal at the stand and they tap dip or swipe and they take the payment and it automatically goes into BC. A lot of people don't want the full-blown POS for that. It's like, man, they're charging me a thousand bucks a month just to have the full blown POS. And this is just a very simple way to integrate in-store payments into BC. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Nice. That's a great option.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that that that seems to work. We do have business-to-business and business consumer customers. We have a customer portal that allows for like click to pay, send out a link. So you're never taking a phone call and go give me your phone number. You literally say, Hey, what's your email? Here's a click. They enter their in their email address and they never see it. Yeah. So you can send those out very easily. You can send them to if you're at a if you're at a trade show and you want to use that, you can do that as well without having a payment terminal. And yeah. So some of that.
SPEAKER_01That's a good idea. Yeah. So they're taking an order at a trade show booth and they're like, well, just send me a link and I'll pay with my credit card, and they can go off, do that, come back, yeah, and finish the transaction. That's that's really smart. I I never thought of that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's so yeah, with click to pay, it's essentially a secure payment link that's attached to an invoice. So the system generates a unique payment link in Dynamics 365. The link sent to the customer via email, they can make the payment there. The customer clicks the link and they can make it complete the payment right away. So it's very simple. You're not getting cards out in the clear, all of that as well. With that, we have a customer payment portal that is a full-blown solution that allows the customer to view all their invoices, they can store payment methods, they can manage cards and bank accounts if they want to do ACH as well. So that's one thing I didn't mention earlier. We support ACH as well. So not just cards. No, we are yeah, so definitely ACH and credit cards. And if you're in Europe, CEPA, etc. Yeah, so it supports the customer portal. It's called Clever Division. So if you're on our website and we'll talk a little bit about that, you look for clever division, it'll say customer portal, but that's our full-blown solution that a lot of customers are using. I would say, I would say eight out of 10 customers that go with us are using our customer portal.
SPEAKER_01Oh okay, that's interesting. Yeah, that many, huh? Wow. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we other other solutions, and we'll keep talking about BC, but we do things, yeah. We do BC, we do FNO, which is now FNSCM, we do C E and we also have a commissions product that a lot of customers use, believe it or not. So we have several anything Microsoft, we usually have something that we can offer in the payments realm for sure. If you have a sales team and you're paying them commissions, and they let's say they know that, hey, if I sell, and then just making this up, if I sell in the state of Oregon, I know I'm gonna make 10% commission. If I sell in the state of Washington, I'm gonna get 4% commission. So it manages all the commissions. After one year, you go from 10% on that licensing quote down to 8%, you're gonna sell pay your salespeople. So it's just a full-blown commissions product that a lot of people don't want to have to manage. They usually have like a huge Excel solution and they're just like, I we can't do this anymore. Yeah, I mean, that's I'll just throw it out there. It's not something that that we're out. Uh honestly, we don't promote it that much, but we have a lot of customers doing it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, customers, yeah, need that. So all
Industries Roadmap And Tap To Pay
SPEAKER_01right. Well, so you already talked about what products are compatible with. So you is there any industries that you find that you tend to work with or specialize in?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so really the ones that we hit the most, we do do retail, but it's mostly manufacturing distribution. So mostly B2B, though we do do B2C. We also do field service companies that want to take payments in the field. So that's something that we're seeing more of. E-commerce fulfillment, where you have a lot of merchants or businesses that are in that world as well. So that's kind of our our bread and butter with BC, is is that some of the some of the new things that are coming out that are pretty exciting is I don't know if you've heard, but Apple's called Tap to Pay on iPhone. And it's basically now my iPhone here, I can actually make a payment if if I'm in a booth or something, you or if I'm a field service person, you have an Apple phone, they can actually just use their phone to accept the payment. So you think of them not having to take a mobile and Genico payment terminal with them everywhere they go. We're working with a very, very large customer right now that was going to be buying hundreds, if not thousands, of payment terminals. And they're like, okay, with this Apple tap to pay, it's worth for us to have each person. If we got one register, we got this many people out in the field. Let's get them an iPhone and they can take payment. We don't have to manage uh 400 in Genico or Pax or name the payment terminal. We can now just use iPhones to make payments.
SPEAKER_01So they're pretty clunky. Like when you get it on airlines, I'll be really happy about that. Yeah, that'll that will be always the big terminal thing, and then we'll take a credit card.
SPEAKER_00So I I honestly I think you're gonna start seeing that because it is, it's just there's it makes so much sense to do that.
SPEAKER_01It makes sense, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's one of the one of the things that's we're coming down the pike that we're working on with specific processor. Also real-time payments or is coming down RTP. That's something that we're looking at. And then that the things that we have seen that that discontinued to challenges that we see are companies really, I mentioned they really do want more choices. We see people leaving now, like I said, they'll leave nav and they'll be with a certain processor, and they're going, oh, we're going to BC. We want to use the same processor. And they're finding out, oh no, you can't. And the the only solution out there is you have to go to a different processor. So that is something that we're seeing quite a bit of is that that customers really want that flexibility. They also want ACH if they're taking credit cards and you ask them, they're yeah, we're doing ACH, but we're doing it through our bank. And like, okay, well, we can channel that all through BC and very simply. And now you have one report, one, but it's so much easier to reconcile. So we're starting to see quite a bit of that. A lot of customers already do that, but you are seeing people, and I I continue to hear that. No, no, no, we're good. We have a solution with our bank. Like, okay, well, that's that's fine, but you might want to integrate that and make life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not integrated, it's just the bank. Don't go over here and yeah, exactly. Yeah, the integration is them doing the double entry. Other things you're looking to introduce? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, what well what operational challenges are you able to solve and help customers with?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, just things as simple as combining credit cards and ACH. A lot of them are just one-in-credit cards. And then you mentioned surcharging, and they're like, Yeah, I would love to do that. You can do that. And so that is becoming a norm in the business-to-business world. So we can offer that and also addemnify them. So we're starting to see that pop up quite a bit. We see a lot of customers that are using credit cards as well in BC, or they're moving to BC, and you ask them, we talk about ACH, and they're like, Oh, yeah, we do a half of our business is ACH, and we do it through our bank. And we're like, Okay, well, you could solidify that all within BC, and now you have one report and you got credit cards and ACH together. So we're seeing that. Yeah. And probably to end, I I am seeing on a great note is that we're starting to see companies leaving. Yeah, of course, you always have the QuickBooks people coming to BC, but now we're starting to see Acumenica people, we're starting to see Net Suite companies that are running on Net Suite ERP. And it's awesome to say, hey, we got you completely covered, and they and they'll bring up all these different scenarios that we we usually can match, or even be a little bit better. Yeah.
Flexibility Trend Demos And Contact Info
SPEAKER_00And one of the things I'll end with this, that if we work with a bar, we always, of course, work closely with the bar. We talk to them way beforehand. We have a questionnaire that we send out to them for them to fill out, or the merchant, or both. And then we know exactly what to talk about. Because our goal is to get in front of the customer with the bar. Because once that happens, we never do a PowerPoint. We always are live. So we do live BC demos. When they say, hey, show us ACH, show us how do you handle long shipping of times and all these things, we can literally go in and show them that. So when we do demos, it's usually it's not a hard sell. It's usually by the time you're done, they're like, okay, this looks what we're looking for. What's it gonna take to get pricing? Let's see, let us know. So it very seldom does someone say, Oh, that's not really what we're looking for. I think they'll they'll be very happy with what they hear. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's great.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So, John, just kind of in conclusion, is there one trend that you're seeing that's driving customers and partners to come talk to you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it comes down, a lot of it really does come down to the fact that we do not dictate where you have to do your processing. We have merchants coming to us saying, I'm looking at this payment solution, but it only goes to the processor that owns that payment solution. We have strategic partnerships. I'm not saying we don't, but we truly do not dictate to the merchant where they're gonna go for payments. So if they go, we say, hey, here's three different payment solutions that we offer, and they go to those three processors and go, okay, here they'll ask for their last three month statements, they'll get them, they'll come back and they'll say, Hey, with this other processor, I'm gonna save 600 bucks a month just off the top. So we see that quite a bit, and that seems to really help the merchant and hopefully the bar as well, because now you're not losing because you are stuck with one certain solution.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would say that that seems to be a kind of a theme that we we're always addressing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, great. Well, thank you, John, for joining us on ISV Talks today. It was really a pleasure to have you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this was fun. I've enjoyed it, and it's good to know that I'm talking to a Pacific Northwesterner together. This is this is good.
SPEAKER_01Right. We both have the web feed and live in the the green northwest, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, we do.
SPEAKER_01Oh, well, thank you, John. And this is John's contact information. John, do you want to review your contact info?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Yeah, so please reach out to me if you have any questions. I would love to chat. My email is jplo at redmaple.com, so it's spelled jp is and paul l-e a u at red maple, just as it sounds.com. And then the website is very simple, www.redmaple.com. Uh, we have a lot of Canadian companies that really want that domain, and we are not giving it up. So yeah, that's a simple one.
SPEAKER_01Don't give it up. Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you, our audience, on the next ISV talks video. So we'll see you again soon, friends. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, girl. Take care.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Bye bye.