How to Deliver on Customer Experience in a Digital Payments Era
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Posted by Silvia Mensdorff-Pouilly to Retail Payments, Payments and Industry Trends
Share this:
Don’t Break the Bank – Building for the New Payments Ecosystem.
The foundations of payments systems are scalability, availability, and reliability. Without these, we cannot layer additional functionality onto the core services. This is crucial in the New Payments Ecosystem, where the customer expects seamless, fast, and effective payments integrated into the buying experience, not to mention the ability to make a payment anytime, anywhere—that it “just happens”, securely. The customer sees the value in the overall experience; how quick and easy is it to buy those sunglasses, pay that bill, or tap into the train? And in a rapidly diversifying payments ecosystem, the latest question is; how easy is it for me to manage all my payments?
The Internet of Paying Things
Developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and PSD2’s request to pay mean that managing ongoing authorisations for Payment Service Providers or ‘things’ to action payments on your behalf is fast becoming reality for the consumer. This expansion of the initiation of a payment is now a significant driver for payments players to deliver an enhanced end-user payment experience. 87% of global retail banks cite reducing payment friction as “the most important product-level priority,” with an even higher percentage of banks in Asia (90%) focusing in on this strategy.
It’s not just about enabling those new payment or messaging types; it’s about preparing for the inevitable digital payments explosion. In an IoT era, there will be more payment-enabled devices, and more of those devices will be making micro payments. These two factors combined will serve to boost non-cash payment volumes even further. Payments providers need to be able to scale to the Internet of Paying Things.
Customer Experience Without Compromise
But how can we achieve an end-user payment experience worthy of the New Payments Ecosystem without breaking the proverbial bank at its foundations? A large part of the answer lies in augmenting existing infrastructure; investing and preparing your business for the new fast, open ecosystem without compromising on those foundations, or security. Banks say improving infrastructures (93%), and security (88%) are key drivers behind their additional payments investment. It’s critical to understand that scalability, availability and reliability, and security underpin every new payments experience. As the industry looks to develop new services to delight customers, it cannot disappoint on the basics.
Don’t break the Bank, Don’t Break the Payments Chain!
To learn more about #SleepAtNightability watch our new video now featured on our new payments ecosystem webpage.
Related Blog Posts
Beyond Borders: Navigating the Challenges of eCommerce Expansion
eCommerce continues to flourish, with impressive growth figures year after year. In 2018, global online sales reached almost $3 trillion, and are expected to hit $4 trillion by the end of 2020.
Despite eCommerce taking an increasing slice of the retail pie (which could now be as high as 15 percent according to recent figures), it is increasingly challenging, with competition and cost pressures creating significant issues for merchants of all sizes.
Payments and Fraud: The Paradox Twins
Digital commerce through web and mobile is where merchants predominantly experience shopper growth today. This has become a hugely important domain for their focus. It offers a means for international growth, new market penetration and a way to engage with shopper-hungry Millennials in their culture. Merchants frequently adopt a Digital-First, eCommerce-First or Mobile-First strategy to ensure full corporate buy-in to this strategy.
Open Payments Systems for Merchants: Don't Close Down Your Options
Remember “Open Systems”?
It was a big industry nom du jour in the 80s and 90s. Every IT system had to be open and therefore flexible and future-proof. Nobody can argue with the logic behind this; making systems easy to integrate with other systems, ensuring vendors could cooperate with one another; creating agility to improve time to market and drive down costs.
Knowing New Customers – And How Shared Data Helps in Fighting Fraud
As the eCommerce industry continues its rapid growth, the lines between physical and digital shopping are becoming increasingly blurred. These changes are creating a number of challenges for merchants, not least around customer visibility and fraud prevention.
Why Non-Functional Requirements Should be a Few of Your Favorite Things
It’s not unusual for me to be questioned by retailers as to why some payment solutions are priced differently or more expensively than others – in fact, it would be unusual not to be asked those questions when dealing daily with procurement and finance teams of major multi-national multi-channel merchants!
Adding a Global Payments Layer for Future Growth
Digitization has changed the payments industry completely and irrevocably. Cash payments are in full retreat, as more people pay digitally – with more than 1.6 billion people now shopping online. The digital customer expects an extremely fast and convenient payment experience, with high security standards, and immediate availability of payments information.
Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays Tell Cash, “You’re Out!”
As a lifelong baseball fan and former resident of Tampa, Florida, I had the pleasure of spending a summer night or three at Tropicana Field, watching my beloved New York Yankees take on the hometown Tampa Bay Rays. And as a fan of cheap tickets, air conditioning in the Florida summer and plenty of great seats, I always enjoyed the “The Trop” despite its poor reputation.
Let’s Get Phygital: eCommerce Is Coming To A Store Near You
While payments vendors continue to pitch and strategize with a focus on omnichannel, the omnichannel story has already moved on.
Make no mistake – omnichannel remains important and the best vendors have solutions that provide a single cloud payments service capable of delivering a single view of the customer across stores and digital channels. And the best retailers utilize these solutions to deliver efficient cross-channel shopping experiences. Meanwhile, many other retailers get by (though seldom rise to the top) with a siloed approach.
Around The World: Taking Stock of Global eCommerce in 2019
As I head to #NRF2019 in New York City next week, I’m excited to see how some of the biggest retailers and merchants see the industry evolving over the coming year. What trends they think are going to shape 2019, and which of 2018’s buzzwords can be put to bed.
Fraudsters Don’t Wait for Peak, So Neither Should You: 2019 Fraud Strategy Starts Now!
In existence for barely two decades, eCommerce has transformed not only the way we shop, but also how retailers plan and execute their marketing strategies around the peak shopping season. Now that we’re deep into this period, retailers will have prepared for changes in buyer behaviors, relaxed their strategies to be within the limits of manageable review rate, and most important of all, put strategies in place for increased fraud attempts.