Many barter exchanges face the ongoing challenge of prospecting, and adding new members to their exchange each month in order to consistently provide existing members with new trade opportunities.

There are various ways to portray your exchange to prospects, and you may find that a paradigm shift in your presentation could minimize the challenge and objections, or eliminate prospects not understanding what a barter exchange is and how it can help their business.

Perhaps you have been positioning your business as a barter exchange where member companies can trade their products and services with each other to reduce cash requirements for purchasing. Or maybe, you are marketing your exchange as a way to increase sales by getting new business from new customers that wouldn’t have ordinarily purchased from a business.

There’s over 15 billion credit and debit cards (branded with Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express) in circulation, which are used by businesses and consumers worldwide to pay for their purchases, and for merchants to receive an instant approval or decline decision.

Merchants understand getting paid with credit and debit cards. So why wouldn’t you relate your exchange to a payment system just like MasterCard. Except with your payment system, when cardholders receive their statement at the beginning of each month, they don’t send cash to pay for their purchases. They pay for their purchases with their own product or service.

Your Trade Card branded with your exchange’s logo could be the credit card of the future that can be enabled to process trade transactions, reward programs, loyalty programs, consumer discount programs and so much more, so that transactions can be processed in real time using VB app enabled merchant terminals or mobile phones.

The Trade Card is quick, it’s easy, and it parallels the way people pay for purchases in the cash world. With the open loop smart contract powered Trade Card, there’s no need for members to change merchant accounts or processors, there is no terminal, no software upload, and no staff training is required. The Trade Card is used just like a credit or debit card to pay for purchases with trade (or cash) anywhere Visa is accepted in over 200 countries.

When trade becomes as easy as the current and future payment processing platforms in the cash world, exchanges, transactions and participating businesses will flourish.