Perspective

The global payments industry is experiencing fundamental shifts, driven by the emergence of new market entrants and heightened expectations for a seamless customer experience.   Recent innovations in B2B and B2C commerce have raised the bar for frictionless payments across retail, commercial, and corporate institutions.   Integrated payment hubs are increasingly being used to optimize the customer experience and deliver intelligent least cost routing for payment transactions.  Corporate customers expect full transparency to their payments at each step along the value chain from source to target.  Financial institutions are striving for Internet speed payment processing.   Retail customers expect one- to two-click payments across any device.  

These new industry capabilities are creating fundamental new changes to existing business and technical operating models for payment services.   Institutions who deliver to these new global payment expectations are successfully protecting their highly valuable customer interaction models, and reaping the benefit of additional business growth and profitability.   Institutions who do not, risk becoming low value commodity purveyors in a re-intermediated payments marketplace in which new market entrants insert themselves between the customer and their traditional financial partner.

Key Success Secrets

New technology capabilities are providing established financial institutions with creative new ways to serve their customer and protect and extend their valuable client relationships.   New white-label payment services also offer an interesting alternative for established institutions to extend their sales and service channels and deliver a more streamlined digital payment platform.   As always, a solid business and technical strategic plan should be in place to ensure focus on new payment capabilities which either drive new revenue, increase margin, or improve customer retention.