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How to Be a Payments Trailblazer – The Seven Habits of Highly Innovative Organizations

1. Enterprise-Wide Innovation

Those organizations at the top of their game have a strong central function tasked with driving innovation. This does not mean that it is limited to a single innovation team, but it does signify that digital transformation is well resourced, managed and executed.

2. Empowerment of Employees

Trailblazers are more likely to foster a culture of innovation at both the individual and team level throughout that enterprise-wide vision. Creative inputs are sourced from across the business to collaboratively shape new product and service ideas.

3. Technology Literacy

There’s a difference between being tech-led, and understanding how to take advantage of new and emerging technologies that enable your innovation strategy. Trailblazers prioritize technologies that allow them to ‘fail fast’ and ‘fail forward’ to support an agile innovation culture and develop a competitive edge.

4. Productization Prioritization

Every organization wants to bring new products and services to market, but the degree to which they are successful and how they drive this success is a key differentiator for Trailblazers. Leaders in innovation articulate the importance of delivery to market, and internally reward high-performance in this area.

5. Training for Transformation

Industry leaders understand the (potentially untapped) value of their human resources and reorganize to release it. This means training every employee to support new product and service development, whatever their role. In a well-oiled innovation machine, every cog has a part to play.

6. Comprehensive Cloud Plans

Trailblazers have a clearly articulated cloud strategy, particularly around public cloud and leveraging it for payments. This includes capitalizing on new cloud technologies, including containerization and microservices. They want to be first movers—not fast followers—reaping the rewards of public cloud.

7. Customer Centric Agility

Agile work processes are not a new phenomenon, but the level of flexibility that organizations have developed via their agile aspirations is the difference between trailblazing and lagging. Agility across technology and team mindsets is crucial to the ability to pivot in line with rapidly evolving customer demands and deliver ahead of the competition.

Vice President, Segment and Solution Marketing

As Vice President, Merchant Segment & Solution Marketing, Michael has responsibility for developing and executing strategic product launch activities for the Merchant Payments solutions which include omni-channel, eCommerce and fraud prevention capabilities for retailers, telcos, hospitality, gaming, travel and other merchant verticals.  In this role, he drives thought leadership content, develops solution messaging, supports ACI sales and solution consulting teams and facilitates market awareness of ACI’s products and strategies. Michael covers topics ranging from retailer payments, omni-payment and omni-channel strategies for retailers, as well as point-of-sale, mobile, online/eCommerce and emerging payments types. His coverage of payments risk management topics including enterprise fraud prevention and fraud detection including card, card-not-present fraud, merchant, online banking, mobile and merchant fraud as well as AML and various. Additional he covers mobile topics like mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile wallets, and mCommerce.