A lot of vendors are talking about payment processing services. Sage wants to fulfill the promise of the business it got into when it acquired Verus. Intuit wants to give its payment processing services better penetration of its accounting installed base.

And Microsoft is expanding the Payment Services, the Internet-based payment processing connection for its Dynamics ERP. At first, I wanted to talk of this as a battleground. But it may just be that payment processing becomes a part of the core product. Very soon, not offering payment processing as part of an accounting line will be little different than not offering an accounts receivable module. At its Summit user conference, one reason for the urgency was spelled out by Sue Swenson, CEO of Sage North America, which is that payment processing customers "tend to stay with us longer."  The often-abused word "sticky" comes to mind. I'm not a software developer, obviously, but part of me has always thought that the data captured at a point of sale is the same used for payment processing and for accounting. The numbers just get put into different buckets. However, for this year, payment processing is not the revenue producer vendors had hoped because of the drop in credit-card spending. Sage said its Payments Division reported a 15 percent increase in merchants served, but lower volume per merchant dropped revenue by 4 percent. Intuit had similar results with CEO Brad Smith reporting that the company gained merchants, but lost volume. Smith said the credit card business is poised for strong growth once the economy rebounds.